Rating: - Awesome facts, not-so-great writing.
I give Susan Sackett a lot of credit for doing the research for this book. She had to sit hrough a minimum of five movies for every year since 1939. Imagine! Some of the behind the scenes stuff is great, but her writing gets stale very fast, and you can't help but feel sorry for her having to come up with hundreds of different ways of saying the same things over and over. It's like a guy trying to write movie reviews for every Jackie Chan film out there (in one scene he kicked someone's butt, and then in the next scene he kicked someone else's butt ... zzzz). Still, there is no way you can deny Sackett's pension for details when it comes to such things as a film's box office take, Oscar nominations, and Oscar wins. It's worth the price for that alone. And, it's great to read about movies from long ago, some of which I never heard of (despite being a huge movies fan). The trivia you can cull from this book is priceless. Did you know that 1966's "Hawaii" was the lowest-grossing #1 movie ever, taking in only about $16 million? Things like that kept me interested enough to give Sackett a medium review of three stars.

The Hollywood Reporter Book of Box Office Hits