Maslin Watch: Would You Buy
A Used Car From This Book Critic?

"It's All True has more mileage on its odometer than the usual Hollywood novel."

Now, I know what Maslin's trying to get at with this metaphor--that David Freeman's novel has literary quality, ooh la la--but when you're looking to buy a used car--and let's face it, the "Hollywood novel" is pretty much a used car of a genre at this point--don't you want one with as little mileage on the odometer as you can get? And, yes, bashing Hollywood novels is a pretty easy rhetorical device; if you doubt me, just read her followup description: "not so much a Hollywood novel as a real novel that happens to be parked there." As opposed to the tri-state area where the "real novel" is traditionally set, you mean?

"The ripples of regret and wry wisdom running through this story go beyond the borders of the screenwriting world," she continues, and even I'm not sure what that has to do with anything, but I think it means Freeman makes his screenwriting protagonist emblematic of the universal human condition or something like that. From there, she goes into the usual cobbling together of synopsis and sound bite, and we're never quite told what makes Freeman's book so much better than any other Hollywood novel, unless she meant its nostalgic tone, which she claims has "more equanimity than despair and... a welcome element of self-knowledge." That doesn't strike me as all that inherently impressive. Oh, the prose sampled in the review reads well enough, and it's easy to see why Maslin would think it's better than Jackie Collins, but I reserve doubts as to whether it would hold up against Budd Schulberg, Gavin Lambert, or Bruce Wagner (and you might have your own names to insert here as well) until I've read it all.

Digging around, I found an article Freeman wrote back in 2001 in which he outlines the genre's parameters, pointing out its richness in ways that profoundly elude Maslin. It appeared in the Writers Guild house organ along with an essay by Lambert; both of them, interestingly, mention You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up, a Richard Hallas novel which sounds like it really ought to come back into print again.

Of course, a Maslin review isn't quite complete without a glaring omission, and in this case, it's an explanation of the title: It's All True was the title of a never-finished docudramatic anthology Orson Welles was making for RKO down in Brazil until the studio pulled the plug and typecast him in the industry as a money waster. Some might say his directing career never fully recovered from the blows...but then, that wouldn't be looking at the situation with more equanimity than despair.