Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother: Memoirs of a Neurotic Filmmaker

by Barry Sonnenfeld

Film and television director Barry Sonnenfeld's outrageous and hilarious memoir traces his idiosyncratic upbringing in New York City, his breaking into film as a cinematographer with the Coen brothers, and his unexpected career as the director behind such huge film franchises as The Addams Family and Men in Black, and beloved work like Get Shorty, Pushing Daises, and A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Barry Sonnenfeld's philosophy is, "Regret the Past. Fear the Present. Dread the Future." Told in his unmistakable voice, Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother is a laugh-out-loud memoir about coming of age. Constantly threatened with suicide by his over-protective mother, disillusioned by the father he worshiped, and abused by a demonic relative, Sonnenfeld somehow went on to become one of Hollywood's most successful producers and directors.

Written with poignant insight and real-life irony, the book follows Sonnenfeld from childhood as a French horn player through graduate film school at NYU, where he developed his talent for cinematography. His first job after graduating was shooting nine feature length pornos in nine days. From that humble entrée, he went on to form a friendship with the Coen Brothers, launching his career shooting their first three films.

Though Sonnenfeld had no ambition to direct, Scott Rudin convinced him to be the director of The Addams Family. It was a successful career move. He went on to direct many more films and television shows. Will Smith once joked that he wanted to take Sonnenfeld to Philadelphia public schools and say, "If this guy could end up as a successful film director on big budget films, anyone can." This book is a fascinating and hilarious roadmap for anyone who thinks they can't succeed in life because of a rough beginning.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography, Film, Humor, Audiobook, Biography Memoir

368 pages, Hardcover

First published March 10, 2020

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

FUNNIEST BOOK I'VE READ IN YEARS. Lots of laugh out loud moments that will make you look like a crazy person while you read it on the bus or in a burger joint. My life got noticeably more boring the moment I finished reading it. You don't have to be a film fan to enjoy it--it's more akin to Woody Allen's Radio Days or Christmas Story in that's mostly about a seriously messed up family and how Sonnenfeld tried his hardest to escape it and all the hilarious encounters he survived attempting to do so (seriously, he survived a plane crash!) I've already got this penciled in as my favorite book of 2020.

[da AL · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Call yourself what you want, be what you want, and don't blame your parents." If anyone else wrote this, I'd call that a pat answer. Coming for Barry, who masterfully describes his wretched upbringing without rancor, these are generous words of wisdom. The humor in his writing comes from his unflinching bravery to call a spade a spade and move through, then forward. Your honesty, Barry, is much appreciated.

[Bob Schnell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Barry Sonnenfeld has been the cinematographer or director of many popular and critically acclaimed films. He also writes an entertaining autobiography. He is a hopeless neurotic and has many issues, some are absolutely cringe-worthy while many are incredibly funny. There is a TMI chapter on making porno films and a lot more vomiting than is healthy. Overall, an enjoyable read but not quite on par with other, better Hollywood autobiographies.

[Justin Decloux · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the rare showbiz memoirs where the stuff with the famous people was not as interesting as the hellish stories of being a kid. The chapter about shooting porn is an all-timer.

[Brendan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I listened to the audiobook and loved it. Barry Sonnenfeld is so compassionate and honest about his terrible childhood. I could listen to a kajillion stories about his time with the Coen brothers.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been a big Barry Sonnenfeld fan since ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES. (The first one was a nice try, but didn't quite click for me.) His quirky Directing style and outlook on life fits perfectly with me. BARRY SONNENFELD, CALL YOUR MOTHER: MEMOIRS OF A NEUROTIC FILMMAKER goes a long way towards explaining how he came to be so quirky, and the tales he tells from his chilfdhood are both hysterically funny and deeply disturbing. Raised by people who had no business having a child, young Barry Sonnenfeld grew up neglected by his philandering Father and depressed, vaguely suicidal Mother, often being left to the depredations of his Mother's pedophile Cousin Mike, who lived with the family, and would often molest children in full view of other adult family members, who shrugged it off with a "That's just Mike..." attitude.

The episodic stories that Sonnenfeld relates about his childhood are laugh-out-loud funny, as are the stories that spring from his involvement in movies such as THE ADDAMS FAMILY, GET SHORTY, and MEN IN BLACK. If I had one quibble with this book, and its a small one, it would be the way that the book tends to drift off on unrelated tangents when talking about his experiences with "difficult" people, especially towards the end of the book. Sonnenfeld has no trouble relating how insane Producer Scott Rudin could be on the sets of the ADDAMS films, or how nasty and dismissive Penny Marshall was while shooting BIG, but Sonnenfeld seems to have a lot to say about Robin Williams, who surely must have been incredibly annoying to be around all day every day in real life, but holds it back, as he does with the notoriously nasty Tommy Lee Jones. Sonnenfeld starts to relate a conversation with Jones where he informs him that he is basically being removed from the third MEN IN BLACK film, but goes off on a tangent after two sentences and never finishes the story. On the whole, I'd say that Sonnenfeld glosses over his movie career so quickly that he he probably has enough funny stories and inside information to fill a whole other book, which I hope is the case. (Interesting tidbit for the easily offended: The advance reading copy that I was provided has a VERY graphic photo of a behind-the-scenes moment from an adult movie that Sonnenfeld shot early in his career. While it did provide a great laugh once I noticed it, I was surprised to find it in such a mainstream book. But, if you're easily offended, this maybe isn't the book for you anyway.)

Hilarious and unflinchingly honest, Sonnenfeld killed it with this book, and I would love to read more from him about his bizarre life and incredible career.

The publisher provided a review copy.

[Jeffrey]

I read this entirely on the strength of Adam's review. I had never heard of Barry Sonnenfeld. I kinda enjoyed Men in Black, and I like the Coen Brothers as much as the next guy. But true to Adam's review, the book is hilarious. It is basically like listening to a very long, increasingly incredible episode of This American Life.

[Roxanne]

If you enjoy memoirs as much as I do and grew up in the 60’s and 70’s, you’ll love Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother: Memoirs of a Neurotic Filmmaker. Barry’s hilarious upbringing will have you reminiscing about gas ovens your mother had to light, bad tv dinners, and self-involved parents who thought children should be seen and not heard.

And if you’re also a movie buff, you’ll be tickled pink at reading juicy tidbits from the movie Big, with everyone’s actor/darling Tom Hanks, as well as obscure Hollywood meetings with the likes of Warren Beatty and John Travolta. Not to mention his beginnings as the Coen Brothers cinematographer on Blood Simple and Raising Arizona.

[Julie]

This book made me snort with laughter. It wasn't pretty, but the best laughs aren't.

[Marti · Rating 3 out of 5]

I never really heard of this guy and I don't really care about most of his movies enough to want to read "behind the scenes" stuff. However, there were some funny stories contained in here and I kind of learned a little about cinematography.

His brief foray into the world of porno movies is definitely -- I don't want to say a "highlight" -- but so revolting, it is a must-read for anyone who thinks it would be a lucrative job, as long as you are behind the camera and not in front of it. The incidents took place in the late 70's during the height of New York City's sleaze-era (which is another thing I liked).

There are stories about near-miss, plane crashes and car crashes (it seems to happen a lot to him because he was always desperately afraid of flying. One time a pilot plugged a hole in the first class compartment with a dinner plate).

Then there are stories about his family, which are probably the best part. It's sort of like when Howard Stern goes on about his parents, except his sound much more neurotic. And his mother liked to cook family meals in the broiler. She always put tin foil over the pan so she wouldn't have to clean up. When the smell of the resulting grease fire wafted up to the second floor, the food was done.

On top of that, Sonnenfeld's mother's cousin, who crashed on the family's sofa for about ten years, was a notorious child molester. Nuff said.

[Noah Goats · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've enjoyed Sonnenfeld's work over the years; his humor and his visual style both appeal to me. He began his career as a cinematographer with the Coen Brothers (they hired him because he had a camera), and went on to direct some very good films of his own, including the classic, Get Shorty. If you know his work, this memoir is about what you would expect from him. It's funny in a self-deprecating way, sometimes dark, sometimes a bit creepy, but always interesting.

This book would have been worth it for the chapters on the making of Get Shorty alone. I love that film and have seen it a dozen times, and this gave reading those chapters almost a cliffhanger quality for me. I desperately want to see that movie get made, so the story keeps me on the edge of my seat. This is weird when you consider the fact that of course I know Get Shorty was made. It was a lot of fun to learn that Danny DeVito was originally going to play Chili Palmer, and that the part was also offered to both Warren Beatty (who was kind of a jerk in the way he rejected it) and Dustin Hoffman.

Sonnenfeld also focuses on his parents, who were difficult to live with. His mom had a habit of threatening to kill herself when she didn't get her way. The parts of the memoir that deal with his parents are just as interesting as the rest.

I have to admit that I didn't get very far into the chapter about his time making porn. I don't think I'm a prude, but it was gross and I didn't want to see that particular sausage get made. I also skipped the chapter at the end about his experience of sexual abuse as a child. I probably should have read it to educate myself on how those guys operate, but I just couldn't. So consider this a review of the whole book except those two chapters.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Never have I laughed so hard at the beginning of a book and then been equally blown away by the emotional impact of the ending. Sonnenfeld thanks his wife in the acknowledgments for believing he could write a book when he was unsure and it's hard to believe he ever doubted himself. This book is absolutely exquisite: wildly entertaining, gut-wrenching, hilarious, and so beautifully constructed that upon finishing I returned to the beginning to admire just how perfectly it all came together. I initially wanted to read the book because I was interested in Sonnenfeld's work as a cinematographer for the Coen brothers, but his Hollywood stories pale in comparison to the absurd relationship he had with his parents. [Except for that one chapter about his work on an adult film that is so detailed it had me both gagging in disgust and laughter. Don't let this chapter be a dealbreaker--skip if you must.] Sonnenfeld's deliberate reading is comedically sublime. This book will go on my shelf of all-time favorites.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Funny, bawdy, and disarmingly sincere. There's a lot of darkness in this, particularly Barry's childhood, but he speaks about it directly without feeling sorry for himself and somehow finding the humor in it if only from the absurdism of the situations. One of those books that you get a little sad when you finish because you were enjoying it that much.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn’t familiar with Barry Sonnenfeld before hearing him interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air a few months ago, but it turns out I’ve seen a few of the movies on which he’s served as cinematographer or director, and he was so entertaining on the radio that I had mentally added his forthcoming book to my reading list.

Barry himself narrates the audiobook, and hearing his voice adds so much to the stories he tells of growing up in NYC the only child of neglectful parents, graduating from NYU film school, and working on blockbuster Hollywood films. His experiences are by turns hilarious and horrifying, and for all his professed neuroses, I thought “Bah” comes off as a genuinely wise, warm and well-adjusted survivor, someone you might like to know.

[Helen Lemus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have to caution the squeamish that there is a chapter describing a particularly harrowing experience of his after he graduated from film school. He took a job as a cameraman for a pornography producer. It was not recommended reading for high school students.

Yet, he approached the difficult and tragic moments of his life with candor and humor. Then, he included many descriptions of people in the film industry that were hilarious, but never mean spirited.

It was a lively read, but did not always follow a chronological order. Loved it.

[Elizabeth Majka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow has this guy had a life. A great audiobook to delve into. And a great listen for popular film buffs. It's an honest memoir about growing up with not-so-great parents who are beloved by the outside community, and the fight to become a successful adult in a career that can turn an already neurotic person into an absolute wreck. Highly recommend.

[Carmen · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has been at least 20 years...

...since I literally cackled and howled out loud while reading, almost non-stop. Seriously. This is the funniest s**t I’ve ever read. And has the added bonus of being true. Well done, Ba.

[Tami · Rating 4 out of 5]

A 4.5, for humor and interesting stores about the Hollywood films and their actors that Sonnenfeld has worked with. A .5 deduction for too explicit information from his short career as a still photographer on porn films. While it was part of his life and some aspects of that chapter were very funny overall it was sickening. Really, when you get to that chapter skip ahead 🤮

Warning: This book will be triggering for any survivor of sexual abuse so, be warned. It is discussed in a few places so skipping a particular chapter isn’t possible to miss those explicit descriptions.

This is, however, wildly funny. Sonnenfeld reads the book with the most deadpan delivery without much vocal inflection and it only adds to the humor. Maybe this is just how he sounds, which here, is brilliant.

The stories of his terrible parents are also crazy and funny (but they were utterly and truly, horrible parents, so that’s just a crime).

I do love a gifted story teller and Barry tells some amazing ones: surviving a plane crash in LA, surviving a mugging in NYC, and his mother, Kelly, sending him a message at Madison Square Gardens are just a few.

[Dakota Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother could give the traditional sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll memoir a run for its money in terms of insane stories - and that without much by way of drugs or rock'n'roll. Barry's neurotic mother and distracted father raised a deeply neurotic child with a seemingly photographic memory for potent details (which explain his cinematography skills).

Barry's stories range from intriguing insider tales to harrowing memories of a child molester uncle. There's also the deeply, deeply upsetting story of his week working in porn. (Deeply upsetting but also riveting.) The insider tales are both fascinating for their movie-making details (you learn a lot about shot choice and struggling with the studio system) and the fact that Barry consistently rags on everyone, even people he likes. It's great fun!

Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother is an outstanding read for those interested in the industry and for those purely interested in an outrageous life. I flew this audiobook and could have listened to Ba' for a hundred more hours.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this book based on a review. I thought it would be a funny memoir but was really a story about a quirky, Jewish boy growing up in NYC as an only child to dysfunctional parents. He becomes a somewhat famous movie cameraman and director. Some of his stories were interesting but for the most part just odd and quirky. The writer assumes the lay person knows the film industry jargon. Disappointed the book wasn’t more humorous.

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This may be the hardest I’ve ever laughed while reading. Sonnenfeld combines many compelling parts of his life: a psychological portrait of his mother who likely had borderline personality disorder, interesting and hilarious anecdotes about stars like Will Smith, the Coen brothers and infamous producer Scott Rudin, and best of all, a behind the scenes of his time in porn that made me howl with laughter. Please read this!

[Sara Vee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I won't lie, I originally wanted to read this because I had to know about the pornos Barry was the cinematographer for a long with the wild tales front hat experience.

This man has nine lives to say the least and some of the funniest and most horrific tales. I learned so much about this man's childhood and got so many BTS photos and stories that I never knew I needed.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked that it didn’t get bogged down in his childhood and skipped around a lot. Trying to keep up with the names was more confusing than it should have been.

[Betsy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hilarious biography!

[Terri Frank · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny book with two not so funny chapters. You’ll know which ones when you get to them.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having for some months now been working at a wonderful and perhaps sort of hip independent book store (though in pandemic times my primary responsibility has quickly become the delivery of books and very often jigsaw puzzles to patrons isolated in nominal quarantine), I found myself in possession of the uncorrected advanced reading proof of BARRY SONNENFELD, CALL YOUR MOTHER when the store’s manager set aside a copy for me a little while back. My manager certainly knows that my academic background was in film studies (I have a master’s degree in the field) and that I also currently work as a film programmer, though I am certain that she also knows that my tastes run toward the rarified or even maybe the positively highfalutin; I am far more likely to monologue, provoked or not, on the subject of Jean-Luc Godard or Robert Bresson than I am on matters relating to this or that Will Smith vehicle. That being said, she was right to think of me, I was very much interested in having a gander at BARRY SONNENFELD, CALL YOUR MOTHER, even if I did not previously know it was slated for imminent release and if it’s hardly the sort of thing I normally read. What sort of thing is it? Well, strictly speaking, it is a show business memoir, as I would imagine is self-evident, but one suffused with no small amount of irreverence and delivered with its author’s patented gregarious geniality. I have in fact at times, snob or not, been taken with Barry Sonnenfeld’s work. Certainly as the neophyte cinematographer who lit and largely camera-operated the first three Coen Brothers features, he maintained something of a legendary status for me when I was young, those three films, milestones in American independent cinema, dear to me whilst growing up. I also liked or at least partially admired some of the films he directed in the 1990s, perhaps especially THE ADDAMS FAMILY (1991) and ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES (1993), both of which I would argue remain unusually strong. Part of what consolidated Sonnenfeld’s notoriety—and no doubt aided in his upward industry mobility—was the commonly held sentiment that he is an amusing and eccentric guy with idiosyncratic people skills and a gift for the self-deprecating yarn. As a teenager I was aware of his brief pre-Coen Brothers comic misadventure in the adult film word and the fact that he was a regular, sought-after guest on David Letterman’s late-night talk show. The first fragment of BARRY SONNENFELD, CALL YOUR MOTHER that Sonnenfeld actually wrote—which he says he did many years before embarking on the memoir and at the time merely as a lark—was the standalone “An Actress Short, A Cum Shot Behind,” which appears in the uncorrected proof as the nineteenth chapter, and tells the outrageous and extremely messy story of how he, co-owner of a 16mm camera and recent graduate of the NYU Graduate Film program, found himself conscripted in efforts to shoot nine feature length pornos in nine days for Dick Masters of Mr. Mustard Productions. Behold, as Sonnenfeld distills much of the grisly business he has just detailed exhaustively into a precise and exquisitely calibrated piece of sublime deadpan: “Sadly, all the vomiting and pooping had put us behind schedule.” Many who comment on BARRY SONNENFELD, CALL YOUR MOTHER have and will continue to frame matters principally in terms of its hilarity, which is indeed its most pronounced characteristic as well as its principal selling point. Sonnenfeld has insinuated elsewhere that the book could be said to represent standup comedy by other means. Not necessarily one to laugh out loud when reading with anything approaching regularity, I not only did so regularly whilst reading Sonnenfeld’s memoir, but by page 25 had already found myself in near hysterics twice. Firstly, there is the vignette from which the book takes its title, involving a nonplussed Jimi Hendrix and a PA announcement at Madison Square Garden. Hysterics, or nearly hysterics, sobbing with laughter: such was I. Shortly thereafter, in the third chapter, “Depression Central,” we have a remarkable portrait of dysfunctional home-life much of which pivots around cooking, some of it almost ruthless, all of it brilliant, involving Swanson TV dinners and frozen potato dumplings and grease fires, father and son as “combination sous chefs and volunteer firemen,” the whole routine so charged in its buildup such that when Sonnenfeld says of his mother Kelly’s aluminum-infused Jewish holiday brisket that it was “like burnt ends at a BBQ joint but with a higher chance of giving you Alzheimer’s,” I once again found myself doubled over, teary-eyed, and laughing so hard it started to hurt. The rest of the book continues on in a fairly uniform vein, and two other choice bits from the film industry years likewise found me howling, the execution both times playing a more crucial role than the humour in and of itself of the matters reminisced upon: one involving Joel Coen and Sonnenfeld burying Ethan Coen in the backyard of Sonnenfeld’s “starter home” in East Hampton in order to shoot some pickup stuff for BLOOD SIMPLE, another relating to the idiotic perfidy of Hollywood studio brass and getting much mileage out of Paramount suit Gary Lucchesi “with tears in his beautiful blue eyes.” Sonnenfeld's humour is everywhere a product of his sensibility and the foibles thereof. He represents a certain type, and he plays it up: the neurotic New York Jewish schlemiel with mother issues...with more than a little of the good-natured headstrong durability of Saul Bellow’s Augie March. Sonnenfeld presents an especially telling snapshot in his book’s Foreword: “Larry David—no slouch when it comes to neurosis—and I once had a shouting match, past Barry Diller and Donald J. Trump, across the power breakfast room at Loews Regency Hotel in New York City, arguing about who is more neurotic.” Cheryl Hines, who played David’s wife on CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM, tellingly, and to Sonnenfeld’s great satisfaction, would eventually concede, during an appearance on LATE NIGHT WITH DAVID LETTERMAN, that Sonnenfeld is in fact the most neurotic person she has ever met. Neurosis, like so many hangups, tends to start at home, which is of course where much early brain development occurs, and much of his memoir finds Sonnenfeld engaging in conspicuously pugnacious manner the spectre(s) of his parents, mother Irene “Kelly” Sonnenfeld and father Nathan J. “Sonny” Sonnenfeld. From his father, Barry learned the glad-handing of the salesman, from his mother, a woman with a wet cloth perpetually draped over her face, fear and trembling. “My father, although a consumer of sixteen ounces of sour cream a night, was a healthy man.” A lifelong womanizer, Sonny would marry one of his mistresses, an ex-Vegas showgirl he would brag once had sex with Sinatra, days after Kelly’s death, and in his final years, a man in his nineties, lived with “the multi Tony nominated lighting designer Jennifer Tipton.” “My father had surely sold NBC many of the lights and dimmer equipment for Studio 8H, since at one point in his career, he was the top theatrical lighting salesmen (sic) in New York, which seems paradoxical considering how often we had no electricity.” When, as an adult, men in his father's line of work would tell Barry that they had loved Sonny, Barry would caustically remark that he supposed someone had to. His ire toward his mother was even more pronounced, and constitutes a key through-line of CALL YOUR MOTHER. Even when she was still alive, Barry would torment his mother by claiming he wished she was dead in newspaper features and on talk show appearances. Kelly would complain to him that she was “decimated” by such things, he retorting that “decimated” is surely the wrong word. Whenever she would tell him that she loved him, obviously fishing for reciprocity, Barry would simply say that he knew she did. A large part of the animus directed at his parents is due to the repeated molestations Barry experienced at the hands of his mother’s cousin Mike (Cousin Mike the Child Molester or CM the CM), a truly heinous man sinister photos of whom appear in the book and who molested a great many children during the years he stayed with his cousin and her family in apartment 5J at 635 West 174th Street in Washington Heights, the residence where Barry spent the first twenty years of his life. Many children fell pray to Mike, whose misconduct was hardly concealed, and at least one childhood friend has made public the fact that the abuse destroyed his life. When Barry confronted his parents years later, both Kitty and Sonny independently downplayed the abuse, confessing that they were aware of it but that child molestation did not have the “stigma” back then that it does today. It is hardly a satisfactory deflection, and doubtlessly many readers will be sympathetic to Sonnenfeld insofar as concerns his often exasperated treatment of his mother and father. Part of Sonnenfeld’s resilience manifests itself in the form of a playful treatment of subject matter that is at times tremendously dark. His propensity for wrath seems less a mercenary campaign of vengeance than a somewhat perverse survival tactic. Not only does his past—the matter of all that which he had no choice but to endure and then attempt to transcend—manifest itself is neuroses which he has no difficulty understanding cause him to resemble his mother more than he would probably like, it might also inform the deliberating sciatica that has contributed to a stiffness of posture making intelligible his undefeated streak as a leg wrestler (defeating the likes of Usher, Neil Patrick Harris, and Kelly Ripa), but which may also indicate, as has been suggested to him by celebrity friends and medical professionals alike, that he is dealing with unresolved “unconscious narcissistic rage.” It is probably a fairly credible diagnosis (if not satisfactorily conclusive), and part of what is so charming about BARRY SONNENFELD, CALL YOUR MOTHER is that if it is in large part testament to narcissistic rage it is never especially unattractive as such…you might even call it sweet. If his parents represent the persistent golem-like bugbears in his life and the constitution of his psyche, the opposite role is played by his wife of (as of 2020) just over thirty years, Susan “Sweetie” Ringo. Barry and Sweetie’s meet cute is characteristically quirky: “My life began the moment I met ‘Sweetie,’ Susan Ringo, my one true love, at an apartment on Central Park West. She was eight months pregnant.” And that’s not the end of it. Sweetie, as it turns out, was at the time the wife of Barry’s idol, the photographer Elliott Erwitt, with whom Barry was about to embark upon a collaboration. This too seems like the stuff of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. Barry Sonnenfeld is not the most dexterous thinker in the world, nor is he likely to suggests he is any kind of literary genius or earthy philosopher. Sweetie comes to represent 'the good' for him in a manner that in uncomplicated and entirely divorced from an interest in personal depth work. Her status as such becomes emblematic of the pedestrian, even slightly lacklustre nature of Sonnenfeld’s cosmology (if you can even call it that). The book exists as a series of vignette-like chapters that do not abide by strict chronological linearity or coherence to an overarching vision, though repetitions and refrains are often incorporated with notable panache. One gets the impression that the last thing Sonnenfeld wants is to be taken seriously, the threat being that this would suggest that he takes himself overly seriously, which is very clearly an impression he would never want to make. An excess of self-regard would not be complimentary to work which is clearly meant to be fun, though also determinedly unflinching. CALL YOUR MOTHER is not an incendiary tell-all. Though he can be almost as merciless to film industry collaborators as he is to his mother (see especially sections focusing on Penny Marshall and Scott Rudin), there is obviously some mindfulness at play regarding restraint, and Sonnenfeld is liable to give credit where credit is due when opportunity presents itself (as in the case of the brilliant editor Dede Allen). Following our memoirist from that small apartment in Washington Heights, on to New York City Music & Art High School in Harlem and the postsecondary studies in the Bronx and then Amherst, then NYU grad school and eventually entertainment industry infamy, we are conscious of being in the hands of a man whose foremost strength has always been the intersection of gadgets and storytelling, a confluence regarding the mastery of which a cinematographer-turned-director probably ought to develop some fluency. The world and the people in it, Sonnenfeld included, ultimately become instrumental, recessed elements is service to a telling. That the world itself has a tendency to lose its organizational coherence or any real imperative to mean beyond a sort of simplified reification of the restorative powers of partnership and fatherhood means that at a certain point we are forced to the realization that really what Sonnenfeld has to offer us is anecdotes, choice bits of ribald reportage from a life he has lived as something of a half-tuned-out passenger. The big picture has been spliced out of the assemblage (the assemblage itself primarily something like a casual ambling happenstance) because Sonnenfeld would be way out of his element on its terms. If you asked him what it all means, I suspect he would answer with a sappy bit of cliché or a joke. That being said, there is a pretty good chance the joke—should he opt to go that route—would be a pretty darn good one...or at the very least one that would be likely to endear him to you.

[Alias Pending · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hilarious. Minus the disturbing stuff about being molested, of course. A warning about the porn chapter, as well, to those who may be sensitive to such things. I thought it was darkly hilarious, though. And over all oddly inspiring. I will now become a film director. Thanks, Ba

[Barry Hammond · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a memoir that's equal parts horrifying, sympathetic, and hilarious, Sonnenfeld recounts his terrible childhood and the path which took him from 16mm freelance cameraman to his work as a cinematographer for the Coen brothers and a director in his own right with films like The Adams Family. A must for film fans. - BH.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hilarious and heartfelt. This was a memoir of constant and frequently disgusting surprises.

[patty · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you thought you had awful parents, hold on. Sonnenfeld may have you beat.

This book is truly outrageous and hilarious as the blurb reads. I’d add Priceless!