Best Possible Place, Worst Possible Time: True Stories from a Career in Hollywood

Sonnenfeld follows Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother with another entertaining glimpse at his decades-long career as a film director and cinematographer. In short, punchy chapters—which largely avoid the uneven stabs at pathos that plagued his previous memoir—Sonnenfeld covers encounters with celebrities from Michael Jackson to a prepolitical Donald Trump and pulls back the curtain on his best-known movies, including The Addams Family and Men in Black. Especially captivating is the section on the 1987 dark comedy Raising Arizona, in which Sonnenfeld goes deep on his frugal camerawork and recalls a mother “react[ing] in horror when she saw her toddler take his first steps” during a casting call for babies who were only supposed to crawl. While the prevailing tone is buoyant and gossipy, Sonnenfeld is quick to acknowledge his missteps—he freely admits that 1999’s Wild Wild West “wasn’t a good movie”—and includes some lurid peeks at the darker side of Hollywood, including a mob-connected actor threatening murder over a casting decision. The result is an illuminating, sometimes hilarious look at how the Tinseltown sausage gets made. Movie buffs will be in heaven. Agent: David Granger, Aevitas Creative Management. (Oct.)