BAMBI VS GODZILLA by David Mamet
Simon & Schuster £11.99

The bitter rant disguised as insider counsel is a familiar format in showbiz tomes: think Julia Phillips’s You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again and William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade. Mamet does it more classily than most. Bambi vs Godzilla is a collection of wise and incisive essays, speckled with bile, which takes you through the process from what he sees as dumb pitch to dreary product: “Movie-making is an appallingly simple process. One needs a camera, film and an idea (optional). The business of the movies, similarly, is simple hucksterism: find an attraction, present it as engagingly as possible, take the money and guess again.” How to combat this inanity? Stand up for your ideas, don’t compromise, never lower your brow. The producers may not like you for it, but they will respect you. It feels like advice Mamet himself wishes he’d taken.

THE DEVIL’S GUIDE TO HOLLYWOOD by Joe Eszterhas
Duckworth £12.99

More top tips from Eszterhas, self-styled Satan and the boozy brains behind Basic Instinct. Chapters such as “Don’t Let ’Em Fart at Your Ideas!” (about studio executives), “Is His Heart Full of Shit?” (directors) and “They Want to Kill You, Rape Your Wife, and Eat Your Children!” (critics) combine actual tips with ancient boasts and unconvincing bravado: “I’ve never been nominated for an Oscar,” he admits, “but Jon Bon Jovi asked me to fly to Budapest, Hungary, with him and introduce the band onstage in the Hungarian language.” A trade-off I’m sure all of us would choose. Much of this is padded with Tinseltown folklore presumably compiled by some luckless runner, but some of it is genuinely informative and it’s pleasing that Eszterhas is wise to the limitations of his work: “If you really want to know about the film industry, hide in a bathroom stall in the men’s room of The Grille in Beverley Hills any weekday lunch hour.”

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CECIL B DEMILLE AND THE GOLDEN CALF by Simon Louvish
Aurum £25

“He entered a room like Caesar, with a whole retinue of people,” said Gloria Swanson of her former boss. “Though not yet 40, he seemed ageless, magisterial. He wore his baldness like an expensive hat as if it were out of the question for him to have hair like other men.” No doubt about it: DeMille was some kind of a man. Specifically, a barking-mad megalomaniac who kept a harem of mistresses, a ranch called Paradise and a Filipino to carry his chair everywhere. “He invented the stereotype of the swaggering director,” says Louvish in his enormous biography, “the snapping generalissimo with his megaphone.” And though there’s really no need for a director to act like a dictator, the invention was so compelling it sticks to this day. Louvish explains how in witty, elegant style.

THEATRE WRITINGS by Kenneth Tynan
Nick Hern £20

For something theatrical to chew on this Christmas, it might be worth passing Michael Billington’s dismally comprehensive State of the Nation: British Theatre since 1945 and going back to an infinitely more elegant critic. A clutch of Kenneth Tynan’s reviews are worth more than a hundredweight of almost anyone else’s. This volume, edited by his biographer, stamped with Tom Stoppard’s approval in the foreword, contains all the classics: the Look Back in Anger love-in, the teasing of Laurence Olivier and, most appealingly, the endless savaging of Vivien Leigh. Take this review of her performance in John Gielgud’s 1955 Twelfth Night. “Leigh buries her stock-in-trade, brittle vivacity, beneath a dazzling vocal monotony, unchanging in pace, pitch, tone or emphasis. This Viola does not, as she promises, speak ‘in many sorts of music’; she commands but one sort, a music recognisable to the sheltering wayfarers as that of steady rain on corrugated tin roofing.”

WALT DISNEY by Neil Gabler
Aurum £25

A belated riposte to the backlash that began in 1968 with Richard Schickel’s damning The Disney Version, this cheerleading biography highlights both Uncle Walt’s benevolence and his creativity during the early years. The chapter on making Snow White, with Walt urging on his artists, hammily acting out the story, doodling porn versions of the dwarfs, is a highlight – producer John Hubley dubbed Disney’s Burbank buildings “a marvellous big Renaissance craft hall”. And Gabler deserves praise for maintaining our interest, for 700 pages, in what is, essentially, a pretty cold fish. Walt may have dabbled in witch-hunting, but his top hobby was golf and his favourite meal tinned beans. His private life wasn’t much spicier either. Said his wife Lillian of their romance: “I didn’t have any other dates, and neither did he.”

UNDRESSING EMMANUELLE: A Memoir by Sylvia Kristel
Fourth Estate £14.99

“I would very much like to meet my unconscious,” says Kristel. “I imagine it as a kind of savage beast with scarred scuffed fur, who lives in the dark, grunting and roaring, a lawless being with no respect or liking for me, waiting and primitive.” Sylvia’s conscious is quite a specimen, too. While most of us weren’t noticing – I was only dimly aware she was still alive – the queen of soft porn has matured into a serious fruitcake. This memoir takes us through her early life in her parents’ hideous Utrecht hotel, shacking up with someone called “Uncle” Hans, plus flings with Ian McShane (“his body is like a fruit”) and Warren Beatty. Yet the person she’s most impressed by is the Queen Mum, with whom she felt an unlikely affinity: “Apparently she’s mischievous, curious and drinks spirits on a daily basis.” One hopes the comparisons stop there.

NO WAY HOME by Carlos Acosta
Harper £18.99

Poverty. Bereavement. Divorce. Heartbreak. Schizophrenia. Racism. Grisly injury. Pliés. The rags-to-riches story of twinkle-toed Acosta from the slums of Havana to the top of the bill at Covent Garden would make a cracking melodrama. It’s not bad as an autobiography, either: few stars manage to combine soap and sympathy as successfully as Acosta, fewer still write so liberally about sex without it seeming smutty. While, say, Jordan portraying botched intercourse in a hospital bed would be repellent, Acosta makes it seem just charmingly unguarded. Not that one should underestimate his powers of perception. He writes with great sensitivity about returning to Cuba to find it a tatty shadow of the land he had left. “The scent of ripe fruit, so characteristic of the neighbourhood, had vanished. Now everyone just smelt of old age.”

BESTSELLERS

1 On the Edge by Richard Hammond
(Weidenfeld) 157,570

2 Survivor: My Story – the Next Chapter by Sharon Osbourne
(Sphere) 76,960

3 The Sound of Laughter by Peter Kay
(Century) 71,105

4 Welcome to My World by Coleen McLoughlin
(HarperCollins) 62,925

5 Difficult Second Book by Chris Moyles
(Ebury) 52,370

All bestseller lists prepared by The Bookseller using data supplied by and copyright to Nielsen BookScan taken from the TCM 02/01/07-17/11/07

Available at Sunday Times Books First prices (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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