Adventures Of A Suburban Boy [Hardcover]

British film director Boorman, famed for Deliverance, Excalibur and The General, is a product of WWII. More specifically, he comes out of the semidetached suburbs of WWII London. His memoir-part family history, part film bio-is both tender and restrained. Boorman's emotional life was shaped by his parents' triangulated marriage-his mother was in love with his father's best friend-and his longing to escape the drabness of suburban life. "I vacillated between overweening ambition and despair," he notes. Enamored of broadcasting, he got a job editing news clips for Britain's ITN network in 1955 and became so adept, he was recruited by the BBC, where he rose to produce documentaries. Yet film remained his first love. He got his break in 1965 with Catch Us if You Can. The die was cast: Boorman became a darling of British cinema, eventually seeking recognition in Hollywood. By all accounts, he did not achieve the financial success others did, but he managed, despite occasional setbacks, to fulfill his artistic vision. Why, he asks, are people so drawn to moviemaking? "We are escaping the vague dissatisfactions of safe and comfortable lives. We want to be extended, tested." Boorman pushes the envelope, creating inspired cinema on small budgets, often in dangerous locales. A devoted father, he also discovers the gift of friendship with Lee Marvin and Jon Voight. Not a lurid tell-all, this is an honest appraisal of a life well lived. It begins and ends with Hope and Glory, Boorman's semi-autobiographical film about a boy's suburban childhood, whose critical acclaim proves that the suburbs served him well. 40 b&w photos.
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Adult/High School–This autobiography by the director of films such as Deliverance and Hope and Glory works as a telling celebration of the man's career. The book starts plainly enough with Boorman's childhood in London during the chaos of World War II. When he failed entrance exams for academic schools, his parents struggled to pay for and push him through private school. After spending some time in the military, Boorman gradually moved on to newspapers, documentary films at the BBC, and, finally, Hollywood pictures. Much of the rest of the book is devoted to anecdotes like tromping through swamplands to find the perfect site for Deliverance or dealing with the combating egos of actors in Hell in the Pacific. Boorman treats his successes lightly, using them as examples of how he pulled his projects together. He doesn't shirk from examining his failures. Overall, the book is a frank portrait of a man who, through extreme persistence and hard work, found success in the competitive world of Hollywood films.–Matthew L. Moffett, Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale
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Considering how cerebral and idiosyncratic his films are, it is remarkable that Boorman has sustained a commercial career for nearly four decades, even if much of it has been spent on the periphery of the mainstream, producing an ignominious flop like Exorcist II or Zardoz for every box-office smash like Deliverance or Excalibur. In this memoir, he is as thoughtful and expressive as his films. Beginning with his childhood in London during the Blitz and a wonderfully lyrical account of his family's exodus to a riverside suburb (the stuff of another success, Hope and Glory), he explores both triumphs and travails. Given his innate pessimism, he renders the latter more vividly, from the disastrous location shooting of the aptly named Hell in the Pacific to his foredoomed attempt to work for Disney on Where the Heart Is. Particularly memorable is his account of friendship with intemperate actor Lee Marvin. The traits that distinguish his movies--keen observation; skepticism about the normal; respect, bordering on awe, of nature--are manifest in this engaging, provocative autobiography. Gordon Flagg
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