The author suffers from Adjective Thesaurus Disease (I actually laughed out loud when he referred to Arnold Schwarzenegger as "the muscular spinmeister") and it seems like most of the details are taken from press accounts of the various disasters referenced (as opposed to The Studio or The Devil's Candy which had primary sources), but the sheer appeal of schadenfreude for hubristic Hollywood egomaniacs kept me reading through to the end. ( )

There’s a certain satisfaction to watching the best-laid plans of self-important people dissolve into messy chaos. If there wasn’t, there’d be a lot fewer movie scenes involving pie fights at fancy-dress banquets or dogs running amuck at snooty garden parties. Even if you like that kind of thing, though, a little of it goes a long way. A movie consisting of nothing but pie fights would get boring fast. Fiasco -- a series of stories about big-budget Hollywood films that went disastrously awry, losing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in the process – is, basically, that movie. The first chapter is fascinating, the second interesting, the third diverting . . . and then they all start to feel the same.

Part of the problem is the way that Parish chooses his stories. All kinds of Hollywood movies fail, and they fail for all kinds of reasons, but – as he outlines in his introduction – he’s interested in big-budget pictures that went off the rails. All of his case studies, therefore, tend to involve similar kinds of failures: egotistical stars, finicky directors, producers who can’t say no, executives whose reach exceeds their grasp. The details change, but the underlying patterns don’t, and so repetition sets in. Films that failed because of artistic overreach (David Lynch’s Dune), a fatal misreading of the zeitgeist (Blake Edwards’ Darling Lili), or egregious executive meddling (Terry Gilliam’s almost anything) don’t make the cut.

Parish’s narrative “voice” makes matters worse: His insistence on referring to his subjects by their first names makes the whole enterprise read like a gossip column or tell-all memoir, rather than a history – even an informal one – of troubled Hollywood productions. It’s an annoying, distracting choice, and – given that most of the people he’s implying first-name closeness to are being portrayed as egotistical jerks or clueless buffoons – a baffling one. ( )