Pursuing Hollywood

This is an important work; it troubles our usual understandings of texts, authors, and the pursuit of celebrities, fame and recognition in the postmodern media culture. The seductions and obsessions that accompany the pursuit of self in this messy world are brilliantly exposed by Kohn. -- Norman Denzin
Nate Kohn?s odyssey begins with a Muslim money changer in Johannesberg named Shorty, who hands him two suitcases containing a fortune in black market currency to pay the Zulu extras on an epic Kohn is producing named Zulu Dawn. Why, Kohn wonders, are the bills held together by rusty paper clips? His journey leads him thirty years later to a brilliant screenplay by a black college student named Hadjii, born in the deep South, who taught himself to write by doing hypothetical episodes of Seinfeld. Kohn produces Hadjii?s screenplay, Somebodies, which costs only $35,000 but is accepted as one of 118 official entries at Sundance, out of 3100 submissions. To be accepted as an official entry at Sundance is the most important thing that can happen to a low-budget independent film. Kohn in this remarkable book combines memoir and polemic, the campus and the sweaty real world. He begins and ends as a working producer, raising cash, making deals, persuading, negotiating, improvising. In betweenis another life as a university professor (Associate Director of the Peabody Awards, no less) who becomes seduced by Theory, even though he knows from his own experience how irrelevant Theory is to the jumble of hopes, compromises, scant glamour and endle -- Roger Ebert
Insider/outsider, refugee/chronicler, and theorist/practioner. Kohn is all these and more. Few film scholars really know anything about the industry itself. Fewer still discuss their textual analyses in terms of the often bizarre discourses within which this industry conducts itself. Kohn's book shatters the illusion of 'cinema' and forages beneath the beguiling surface to expose contradictions, manipulations of capital, obfuscations and his own personal frustrations. In so doing his analysis reconnects Subject with Object. The result is entertaining, fascinating, and indicates a loss of innocence. This is a totally original approach to film and communication studies. It will be understood by academics and practitioners alike. All should read it. -- Keyan Tomaselli, University of Natal, South Africa
Nate Kohn’s odyssey begins with a Muslim money changer in Johannesberg named Shorty, who hands him two suitcases containing a fortune in black market currency to pay the Zulu extras on an epic Kohn is producing named Zulu Dawn. Why, Kohn wonders, are the bills held together by rusty paper clips? His journey leads him thirty years later to a brilliant screenplay by a black college student named Hadjii, born in the deep South, who taught himself to write by doing hypothetical episodes of Seinfeld. Kohn produces Hadjii’s screenplay, Somebodies, which costs only $35,000 but is accepted as one of 118 official entries at Sundance, out of 3100 submissions. To be accepted as an official entry at Sundance is the most important thing that can happen to a low-budget independent film. Kohn in this remarkable book combines memoir and polemic, the campus and the sweaty real world. He begins and ends as a working producer, raising cash, making deals, persuading, negotiating, improvising. In between is another life as a university professor (Associate Director of the Peabody Awards, no less) who becomes seduced by Theory, even though he knows from his own experience how irrelevant Theory is to the jumble of hopes, compromises, scant glamour and endless drudgery out of which real movies somehow stumble. Pursuing Hollywood is one of the few books about the movies that says something new and useful, expressed with poetry and wisdom. -- Roger Ebert