The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale

Sportswriter Bamberger's frothy though unconvincing account of the tentative making of Shyamalan's latest film, Lady in the Water, won't make a lasting contribution to film history but may appeal to diehard fans of the moviemaker who hit it big with The Sixth Sense. Bamberger meets his fellow Philadelphian Shyamalan and his wife, Bhavna, at a party in 2004, and becomes intrigued with how this Indian- British immigrant came up with the idea that allowed him to persuade all the right people to make his first movie, at age 28, which grossed $1 billion worldwide and earned six Oscar nominations. Bamberger explores the themes of faith and heresy that run through Shyamalan's movies, including Unbreakable, Signs, The Village, and the little-seen coming-of-age dramedy Wide Awake, and reveals Shyamalan's latest inspiration, his original fable about a sea nymph. Essentially, Bamberger follows the secretive moviemaker around and tries to get a sense of his thoughts: ""Night was trying to write this ambitious, crazy, inspired screenplay, and a lot of the time he had no idea what he was doing."" A soup-to-nuts account of the making of the movie evolves with plenty of flashy names from coast to coast, but the whole isn't all that nourishing.