My Indecision Is Final: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Goldcrest Films, the Independent Studio That Challenged Hollywood

by Jake Eberts, Terry Illott

Reveals the inner workings of the film business and exposes the mismanagement, egotism, and greed that brought down Goldcrest Films

Genres: Nonfiction, Film

678 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1990

Reviews

[Richard Findlay]

A 'must read' for any budding film maker

[Nick]

Well, I tried with this one; I made it over a hundred pages without giving up, but bowed to the inevitable put this down to read another Warhammer 40000 novel. In brief, this book suffers from the same problem as The Secret History of MI6: all the most interesting stuff is left out in favor of page after page of turgid organizational detail. In this case we get tons of ink spent going over the boardroom moves and financing deals of putting a picture together, which is interesting for a little bit, but by the time we get to the exhaustive details of setting up four separate credit pools for the company to draw on, I had checked out. It's a shame; Goldcrest was part of some great movies, but The Killing Fields gets maybe three total pages, while there's at least five pages about how the company that owns Goldcrest Films is set up as a personal trust of the so and so family. This book is practically unreadable; there's a good story in here somewhere, but it's buried deep. Might be good to read when you're having trouble going to sleep.