Review: 'Jaws 2: The Making of the Hollywood Sequel' by Louis R. Pisano and Michael A. Smith

Jaws 2: The Making of the Hollywood Sequel by Louis R. Pisano and Michael A. Smith
BearManor Media (September 2015)
362 pages; $34.95 hardcover/$23.02 paperback/$9.95 e-book
Reviewed by Blu Gilliand

Jaws2As sequels go, Jaws 2 had one of the hardest acts to follow in cinema history: Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, which stands today as one of the most revered movies of all time, a near-perfect blend of casting, acting and visual storytelling that wears its 40-years-and-counting quite well.

Likewise, Louis A. Pisano and Michael A. Smith’s book, Jaws 2: The Making of the Hollywood Sequel, has a big mountain to climb. Spielberg’s classic has spawned a couple of excellent making-of books: The Jaws Log, a bird’s-eye-view recounting of the film’s production from Jaws screenwriter Carl Gottlieb; and Jaws: Memories from Martha’s Vineyard, Jim Beller and Matt Taylor’s lushly illustrated, exhaustively researched account of the filming as told by the residents of the small New England island Spielberg and company took over.Continue Reading

Horror Drive-In: The Book is Usually Better

HorrorDrive-In-web

The Book is Usually Better

You hear it all the time: The book is always better than the movie adaptation. Oddly, I mostly hear it from non-readers. They wearily repeat the mantra they’ve heard from tiresome readers like us. “I know, I know, the book is always better.”

But is it? The source novel of any adaptation is certainly much, much, better in most instances. Nearly all of them, in fact.Continue Reading