THE BATTLE OF BRAZIL
A book review by Craig Good
Copyright 1987 Craig Good
I know it's out of the ordinary to have a book review in this newsgroup. THE BATTLE OF BRAZIL, Jack Mathews's book about Terry Gilliam's struggle with Hollywood to release his film, is an extraordinary book. It chronicles in frightening detail what it is like to deal with the big studio system and how, just this once, the Director won.
Life imitated art when Gilliam's masterpiece of fantasy and dehumanizing bureaucracy fell into the fell clutches of a lawyer cum studio exec, Sid Sheinberg (Hint: It was Sheinberg's idea to replace the symphonic Jerry Goldsmith score for LEGEND with syntho-pop Tangerine Dream music). There it sat at Universal, perhaps the most Orwellian, overgrown, Big Hollywood Studio of them all, and they didn't know what to do with it.
What they tried (and almost succeeded) to do with it was turn BRAZIL into a confused, bland, happy-ending romantic comedy. One of the best features of the book is a complete, annotated script. Many of the notes explain what changes were made for the Universal version. Chilling. Absolutely chilling. Illustrative are a few of the alternate titles sent by Universal to Gilliam (who figured they must have a drawer of unused movie titles somewhere). I'm not making these up, and they're all at least this bad:
If Osmosis, Who Are You?
What a Future!
The Ball Bearing Electro Memory Circuit Buster
Lords of the Files
Explanada Fortunata Is Not My Real Name
Disconnected Parties
Day Dreams and Night Tripper
Nude Descending Bathroom Scale
This Escalator Doesn't Stop At Your Station
Blank/Blank
The Girl in the House on the Truck That's on Fire
Gnu Yak, Gnu Yak, and Other Bestial Places
This constitutes the best evidence I've ever seen for rampant drug abuse in Hollywood. Film buffs and people who appreciate Gilliam's brilliant vision will devour THE BATTLE OF BRAZIL with a passion. And it even has a happy ending.
--Craig
...{ucbvax,pyramid,sun}!pixar!good
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