Film School

October 1, 2011
Sporting a cover illustration reminiscent of Boris Vallejo's muscular, heroic, fantasy-novel jacket art, this lively memoir chronicles the author's adventures as a film-school student. Boman wasn't your typical USC film buff; he was in his late thirties, a jobless journalist with three kids, faced not only with taking on an exciting (and scary) new challenge but also with finding some common ground with his fellow students. As he leads us through his film-school years, Boman also looks back on his earlier lifehis years as a newspaper reporter and his time caring for his wife (who was diagnosed with cancer in 2001). The book is a mixture of film-school hijinks and serious memoir, and we come to empathize with the author and to hope that he will find some success at the end of the road. And he did, in a way: he created a television series, Three Rivers, that aired on CBS (but was soon canceled). An unusual and unexpectedly moving memoir and a revealing look at the life of a would-be moviemaker.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)