Review by Booklist Review
Abel Ferrara is one of the most interesting film directors currently making films. He's made independent movies, studio productions, and hardcore pornography (his first film was a 1976 movie with a title best left unspecified here). His neo-noir filmmaking style is often imitated, although never duplicated; he makes movies his way, and he doesn't do it for the money, leading to some of his movies becoming classics or cult favorites (e.g. King of New York, 1990). Ferrara's new autobiography, Scene, is brutally honest--it's almost painful to read some of the passages in the book because he's exploring such painful times in his life--and absolutely impossible to put down. His personal life was tumultuous, although it's relatively peaceful now; if Ferrara had made a movie about a filmmaker with substance abuse who frequently seemed to be one or two steps away from some sort of life-ending catastrophe, it would probably feel pretty much like how this book feels. It's the kind of "celebrity memoir" we rarely see: one that shows its author in an unvarnished light, holding nothing back. A remarkable life story, brilliantly told.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this raw debut account, filmmaker Ferrara takes stock of his directing career and his struggles with addiction. The book opens in 1974, when a 23-year-old Ferrara stopped driving garbage trucks and secured financing for his first movie with a loan from New York City mob boss Matty "the Horse" Ianniello. That same scrappy energy suffuses the rest of the narrative, especially sections detailing the production of Ferrara's biggest successes, including 1990's King of New York and 1992's Bad Lieutenant. Flashes of humor appear in these sections, too: Ferrara memorably recalls Harvey Keitel dumping the script of Bad Lieutenant in the garbage after reading five pages before he eventually agreed to play the lead. Such anecdotes lighten an otherwise grim chronicle, which spends significant time on Ferrara's "drinking and drugging"--including a "serious crack habit" in the early '90s, followed by years of heroin abuse before he got clean in the late aughts--which he acknowledges "ruined" his second daughter's childhood. Frank and unflinching without curdling into cynicism ("The life force you come into the world with can be flipped from the bad back to the good, refocused and nurtured"), this offers a fascinating window into a storied career. Admirers of Ferrara's films will be rapt. (Oct.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The cult-classic filmmaker recounts a life growing up on the mean streets. New York--born Ferrara might have been a foot soldier for the mob, but "a wise guy is a killer, a made man, and you had to be 100 percent Italian to be in that club." Scratch Ferrara, whose mother was Irish. His all-Italian father, however, was a wheeler-dealer, an occasional bar owner but "mostly a bookmaker, and it's a good business unless you start being your own customer." Perpetually broke, the old man funded Ferrara's first movie, a porno timed just right for the mid-'70s seedy Times Square market--except it didn't make much of a stir. (Years later Ferrara discovered the truth behind the financing, and suffice it to say that the old man always worked an angle.) ThenTexas Chainsaw Massacre came along, and Ferrara noticed that "by the second weekend there were twice as many people there as week one." Voilà: The next film was a blood-soaked horror flick. More generic films followed until Ferrara hit his stride, first directing an Elmore Leonard adaptation, thenKing of New York with the emblematic, supremely weird Christopher Walken. Ferrara is perhaps best known for his filmBad Lieutenant, originally written for Walken in the title role, fortuitously filled by Harvey Keitel. A confessional accompanies his account of the film's origins and fortunes: "By the time we were makingBad Lieutenant I had a serious crack habit," Ferrara writes, and in time he came to be addicted to many other substances, including heroin, of which he says, "If you never tried it, don't….If there is nothing else you take from this book, take that." Point taken, but there are plenty of other lessons here on how films are made and financed, how they come and go, and how no one knows how they'll fare once they get to the screen. A candid portrait of a tarnished moment in film's last golden age. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
