What Just Happened?: Bitter Hollywood Tales From the Front Line (2012)

Art Linson puts a film freak exactly where he or she wants to be: in the Fox screening room during the studio brass' horrified first look at Fight Club. "In the second hour," the producer writes in What Just Happened?: Bitter Hollywood Tales From the Front Line (Bloomsbury, $24.95), "I began to notice that some of the women, and a couple of the men, would occasionally jerk their heads backward, a sudden ticlike movement, as if they were trying to avoid a collision." That perverse career pinnacle is the high point of this chic, slim exercise in Tinseltown self-loathing, but in spilling the dirt on the films he has made — including the Ethan Hawke Great Expectations, the air-traffic-control comedy Pushing Tin, and The Edge (a.k.a. "the bear movie") — Linson gives readers a glimpse into a bizarro world where "it's good" is the absolute worst thing you can say about a movie. A-