Killer Instinct » (REPRINT)

Jane Hamsher is a Hollywood producer currently based at Columbia Pictures.  She and her partner, Don Murphy, have numerous projects set up at the studios.  Their next film, Apt Pupil, based on the Stephen King novella, premieres in 1998.

Fresh out of film school, aspiring producer Jane Hamsher and her partner Don Murphy stumbled onto a screenplay by a geeky filmmaker-wannabe named Quentin Tarantino. For $10,000, Jane and Don optioned Natural Born Killers and set off on a two-year roller coaster ride no classroom could have prepared them for. With an outrageous cast of real-life characters including Oliver Stone, Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey, Jr., and Juliette Lewis—along with a slew of film-crew leeches and behind-the-scenes studio pitbulls—Killer Instinct rivals the most mesmerizing, gut-wrenching movie scenes. A wild joyride like no other, Hamsher's tale provides a fresh, insider's perspective on stardom and the real balance of power in Hollywood.

Publishers Weekly

As fledgling film producers with more ambition than money or clout, Hamsher and her partner Don Murphy, working out of her apartment, optioned a script in 1990 by a then-unknown Quentin Tarantino, a road movie about two serial killers called Natural Born Killers. This memoir follows Hamsher and Murphy as they wheedle, beg, finagle and bully various higher and lower orders of Hollywood life to get the movie made, struggling all the while to keep themselves associated with the project. There are lawsuits, screaming matches, backstabbing, double-crossesbut, most of all, there is Oliver Stone. While Tarantino comes across as a petulant child, Stone appears as a brilliant monster straight out of The Playermanipulative, charming, promiscuous, cruel, substance-abusing and paranoid. In Hamsher's self-serving account, Stone is both the best and worst possible director for the filmedgy and brilliant, but dangerously insecure and terrifying to work for. Hamsher's prose is sometimes clumsy, and her portrait of herself is not as charming as she seems to intendit's never clear if she understands how appalling all this bad behavior, including her own, might be to an outsiderbut her book is never, ever dull. Energetic, sometimes hilarious, often unpleasant, much of this volume is wicked fun, a warts-and-all portrait of moviemaking on the edge that is liable to become necessary reading for ambitious young filmmakers. Photos not seen by PW. (Sept.)