Boffo!: How I Learned to Love the Blockbuster and Fear the Bomb

Bart, editor-in-chief of Variety (PW's sister magazine) and former studio exec, smartly places 100 years of movies, plays, musicals and TV shows within their pop-culture context, while also illuminating their ongoing cultural effects. For example, when explaining the surprise Broadway megahit Cats, he also points to the concurrent blockbusters of ET and Michael Jackson's Thriller-both of which spread beyond their original art forms to become popular ""phenomena."" Around this time, he writes, ""pop culture had been transmogrified into a multinational, multicultural, all-engulfing monster mega-industry."" But it's his behind-the-scenes details that shine-one of the best chapters retells the near-miss negotiations involved in making The Godfather (as remembered by Puzo, Coppola and studio exec Robert Evans) While some of his observations are not new, the breadth of his knowledge and size of his Rolodex are undeniably impressive. The book is organized into 27 chapters roughly arranged in reverse chronology-starting with the likes of Batman (1989) and CSI (2000) and ending with The Birth of a Nation (1915)-and include a seemingly random list of box-office hits. But then again, as Bart tells it, creating a blockbuster itself is random: ""the underlying reality about blockbusters is this: With few exceptions, they weren't conceived of as blockbusters.""