What a wonderfully old-fashioned idea-----give someone a dead-tree, non-digital book for Christmas (or at least something not sold at Sharper Image). Here are some ideas from film-critic Richard Roeper.

DO YOU KNOW WHO "WILLARD" IS? (LOL)

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December 10, 2000 CHICAGO SUN TIMES

BY RICHARD ROEPER

In a gift-giving world of baubles and trinkets that will break or tarnish or find a dusty home in the back of a closet, of gourmet coffee packages and fancy-wrapped chocolates that will be consumed and forgotten, the presentation of a book from friend to friend carries more weight than ever.

A book is a lifesaver on a long cross-country flight. A book gets tucked into the oversized canvas bag on the cruise ship. A book is carefully laid on the nightstand and waits there as the last treat of the day for the conscious mind to gobble down.

Each of the following titles is connected to the world of pop culture; each found a place on my bookshelves in 2000. If you're thinking about a book for yourself or someone on your list this holiday season, here's hoping you might find something worthwhile in this mini-library.

Which Lie Did I Tell? More Adventures in the Screen Trade, by William Goldman (Pantheon Books, 384 pp., $26.95). Goldman is a novelist and screenwriter with the badges and bruises to back up his theories about Hollywood. (The most famous Goldmanism is, "Nobody knows anything.") His screenplays for "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "All the President's Men" won Academy Awards, and he has either created or adapted lasting works such as "Misery," "The Princess Bride" and "Marathon Man."

You might notice, though, that the aforementioned films are from 10, 20, 30 years ago: ancient history. Goldman's literate, dialogue-driven, thoughtfully paced work doesn't rule the day in the era of loud garbage such as "Charlie's Angels" or the more cutting-edge work of the Kevin Smiths and the M. Night Shyamalans. But Goldman's been through some tepid periods before (the early 1980s also weren't kind to him) and he knows how to fight through--write, write, write. His 1983 work Adventures in the Screen Trade is considered a classic of the genre, and to say that Which Lie Did I Tell? is about three-quarters as good is to say it's one of the best books about the film business of the last decade.

Off Camera: Private Thoughts Made Public, by Ted Koppel (Borzoi/Knopf, 320 pp., $25). Koppel lets his hair down (so to speak) in a surprisingly loose and candid media diary filled with the personal opinions he usually withholds when he's conducting interviews and reporting the straight news on "Nightline." Because the book is done in diary form, we get Koppel's view of things as they're happening, as when he reacts to the first reports about President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky by calling the president a "horny philanderer" who, in Koppel's view, had all the tools to become a great president but settled for being merely average. Koppel also talks about his disdain for the media's tendency to over-cover celebrity tragedies such as the deaths of Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy Jr. in favor of serious foreign policy stories--but we expect that. More delightful are the offhand remarks, as when Koppel attends a heavyweight championship fight, notes the presence of Keith Richards and opines, "[He] looks as though one more joint or Budweiser would finish him off once and for all," or the family anecdotes, e.g. Koppel, relating a dinner table conversation about developments on "ER," made it sound as if everyone was talking about real people with real medical and romantic problems.

American Rhapsody, by Joe Eszterhas (Knopf, 432 pp., $25.95). Eszterhas looks and comports himself like an extra in "Braveheart" who's been hurtled forward in time to the 21st century, and he writes like a GHB-addicted butcher with a master's degree, whether he's hammering out controversial screenplays such as "Basic Instinct" and "Jade" or whipping up this bizarre, disturbing and insanely amusing cocktail that's equal parts fact, fiction and twisted fantasy. Eszterhas the Hollywood warrior tells stories about Sharon Stone and Farrah Fawcett that would make a cruiserweight boxer blush, while Eszterhas the experimental Mailer-wannabe tackles the Clinton-Lewinsky affair and other political tempests by delving into imagined first-person accounts from Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, Al Gore and "Willard," who is--well, remember those Reader's Digest essays about various organs in human body, e.g. "I Am Joe's Spleen" and "I Am Joe's Kidney"? Willard is Bill Clinton's defining organ, let's just leave it at that.

Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip, by Jeannette Walls (Morrow/Avon, 384 pp., $25). Walls is a savvy scoopmeister for MSNBC, and she's got some fresh tattletale stuff here, but the real value in this well-written and solidly researched tome is the extensive time line of the evolution of the gossip industry over the last half-century, from Confidential magazine to the coverage of Princess Diana's death. Whether you happily munch on celebrity items like popcorn taken with a huge shaker of salt or you scream with Munchian anguish over our national obsession with boldface names, there's no denying that gossip rules center stage in the U.S. media. Of course, rumor mongering and celebrity-driven storytelling have been around forever--no doubt some of the first cave drawings contained unfounded innuendos about Og's relationship with Ooga--but as Walls points out, restraint prevailed as late as 1977, when Elvis Presley died, and the CBS Evening News didn't even lead with the story that night, while it rated only a small item in the "Star Tracks" column of People magazine. Today, of course, a story like that would interrupt regularly scheduled programming and prompt a statement from the White House.

(Incidentally, the now privacy-loving Caroline Kennedy crashed Presley's funeral and wrote an account of it for the New York Daily News. If you're as fascinated by that kind of anecdotal information as I am, get Dish.)

The O'Reilly Factor: The Good, the Bad and the Completely Ridiculous in American Life, by Bill O'Reilly (Broadway, 224 pp., $23). Full disclosure: I've been a guest via satellite and in the studio on Bill O'Reilly's show at least a half-dozen times, and the exchanges are always lively and fair. I've never walked away from the experience feeling as if I've been screwed because I wasn't given the chance to outline my views or respond fully to O'Reilly's dart-sharp questioning. So yeah, I like the guy as a TV personality--but we're hardly political kin on most issues, and I'm not paid for my appearances, and if I didn't like his book I'd tell you. But the truth is that I found The O'Reilly Factor in book form to be as enjoyable as O'Reilly's no-nonsense program, which regularly outpoints Larry King's gabfest in the ratings. With his usual unapologetic candor, O'Reilly tears into Jesse Jackson, yuppies who drive SUVs and show biz stars ("you wouldn't want to hang around many celebrities unless you find self-absorption and childish impulses fascinating") with equal zest.

Where Did I Go Right? by Bernie Brillstein (Little, Brown and Company, 374 pp., $24.95). Brillstein's career as a manager-producer-handler of big-time talent began in the William Morris mailroom in 1955. Nearly a half-century later, he entered semiretirement after writing this occasionally sentimental but mostly acerbic memoir about his adventures with Lorne Michaels and the original cast members of "Saturday Night Live," actors such as Brad Pitt and Nicolas Cage, and Jim Henson of "Muppets" fame, who comes across as one of the few real geniuses in Hollywood who also managed to maintain his decency and dignity. Having essentially handed over the reigns of the Brillstein-Grey Agency to his younger partner, Brillstein doesn't mind taking a Zippo lighter and a kerosene-soaked rag to many of his personal bridges, as when he relates how Richard Dreyfuss fired him after Brillstein helped resurrect his career or when he writes about Garry Shandling, who sued Brillstein-Grey for $100 million (the case was settled out of court). The account of John Belushi's death is harrowing, pathetic and sad--but Brillstein's been around too many blocks to label Belushi's story a cautionary tale. A generation later, Chris Farley tried to match Belushi's legacy on and offstage, and he succeeded, all the way to the grave.

The Drudge Manifesto, by Matt Drudge (New American Library, 247 pp., $22.95). Matt Drudge is fun. He wears that stupid fedora and he's mostly a regurgitating Internet Xeroxer living off the pickings of scoops by real reporters, but he's not the threat to journalism that some of my more sanctimonious peers would have you believe. (In fact, Drudge is almost old school compared to some of his new compadres on the Net.) Sure, Drudge can be irresponsible and hurtful--just ask Sidney Blumenthal--and more conventional reporters may scourge him as a boil in need of a lancing, but how many of them are regular visitors to his Web site?

But I was somewhat disappointed by The Drudge Manifesto, a thin effort padded by binding-stuffers such as blank pages separating the topics; endless reprints of fan e-mails; a long transcript of a Drudge appearance at the National Press Club; verbatim reprints of exchanges on his canceled TV show, and even several pages of poetry if you can believe it.

Granted, the reruns are fused with staccato energry, and the original material will keep you turning the pages, e.g., Drudge's poem about an anchorwoman's rise and fall, but given the fact that Drudge seems to spend about 20 hours a day chained to his computer, I expected more beef. (Drudge's co-writer is Julia Phillips, the producer who authored the notorious Hollywood tell-all book You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again. The fact that she's ghosting a book with Matt Drudge seems to indicate that Phillips was a prophet; at best, she's now nibbling at the far reaches of the entertainment buffet.)

Is That a Gun In Your Pocket? Women's Experiences of Power in Hollywood, by Rachel Abramowitz (Random House, 400 pp., $26.95). Premiere magazine scribe Abramowitz opens her book with the 1997 funeral of Dawn Steel, the famously driven and abrasive executive who tried to prove she was the equal of any man by trampling on the hearts and souls of anyone who dared stand in her way--not to mention those who were actually on her side but had somehow incurred her wrath. It is of course a tragedy that the woman died at 51--she was a mother, after all--but Abramowitz's unblinking portrayal of Steel made me feel grateful that I know few if any people who are like her. Horribly unpleasant is horribly unpleasant, whether you're a misogynistic creep in a $3,000 suit or a trash-talking gal with big, beautiful hair.

Other female pioneers in the industry, from studio chief Sherry Lansing to agent Sue Mengers to actress-producer Jodie Foster to hyphenate deluxe Barbra Streisand, come across as being a bit more human, though they all have their cringe-inducing moments. Abramowitz gained extraordinary access to just about everyone profiled in her book, and they often tell their stories with blunt wit.

Bad title, though; sounds like it'd be more appropriate for a book about power-hungry MEN in Hollywood.

And finally there's Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life, by Richard Ben Cramer (Simon & Schuster, 546 pp., $28), recommended not just for the painstaking (and often painful to read) reporting about DiMaggio's childhood and baseball career, but for the extended passages about DiMaggio's romance with Marilyn Monroe, which traveled much further than the 10 months of their rocky, hopelessly doomed marriage. It's Cramer's contention that Joe and Marilyn would have married again had she not succumbed to the demons and addictions that plagued her, and maybe so--but it never would have lasted. Not a second time, not a third time, not if they had reunited in golden retirement. Sadly, neither of these icons seemed remotely capable of tapping into the kind of selfless behavior necessary to sustain a lasting, mature, out-of-the-spotlight love.

-- Lars (lars@indy.net), December 11, 2000

Answers

I don't want to hear that Joltin Joe was less than a class act. I absolutely don't want to hear it. Boyhood heroes are sacred.

-- Lars (lars@indy.net), December 11, 2000.

I'm with you, Lars. Can't they just leave things be? Who's going to be harmed by leaving the "dirty laundry" of dead people in the closet?

(I LOVE to mix my metaphors.)

-- Patricia (PatriciaS@lasvegas.com), December 11, 2000.

DiMaggio was a bit of a nutcase. Knew it as a kid. Anyone who insists on being introduced at functions as the greatest living baseball player has major league problems. All appearances were set up contractually to announce him as such. What a jerk!

Gift certificates to book stores are always welcome (hint, hint).

-- Rich (howe9@shentel.net), December 11, 2000.

But that's nothing new, Rich (well, maybe it was at the time).

All I'm saying is that there comes a time when you should leave the memory as is; there's no real need to dredge up a dead person's past when it comes to their personal life (for the most part).

I hate moral dilemmas on Cup of Coffee #1.

-- (PatriciaS@lasvegas.com), December 11, 2000.

Surprisingly, I disagree with you Patricia. I have a peeve about glorification of persons based upon rose-colored memories. Babe Ruth is a prime example. His name is known worldwide 50+ years after his death. The exhibit in Cooperstown dwarfs all others. His contribution towards saving baseball following the 1919 Black Sox scandal is legitimate, in my estimation. I believe he hit more home runs than the entire American League one year! But remember the long ball was not a major strategy during the dead-ball era. Once swinging for the fences became fashionbable, players such as Gehrig, Foxx, Greenberg et al quickly challenged his crown. Also, Yankee Stadium had a 295' porch in right field.

That he was a great pitcher with the Red Sox is not in doubt (and a fact for which he has never been given adequate kudos, IMO).

Most importantly in my mind Ruth played at a time when a significant percentage of players were banned from competing at the major league level.

Most underrated baseball player of all time? Henry Aaron.

Sorry to hijack the thread, Lars.

Fortunately Ty Cobb has not escaped the scrutiny.

-- Rich (howe9@shentel.net), December 11, 2000.

That last line re: Cobb was an incomplete thought which made it's way into the post. Please ignore it.

-- Rich (howe9@shentel.net), December 11, 2000.

I'm not surprised you disagree with me, Rich.....wouldn't be the first time ;-)

But I think you misunderstood -- what possible good can come of dredging up the "romance" of Joe and Marilyn? None of these people were "angels", but really.....at what point does it end?

Bigotry and hatred should always be brought to the forefront; but that wasn't what I was talking about by "personal lives".

-- Patricia (PatriciaS@lasvegas.com), December 11, 2000.

Ooops! Sorry, Patricia. I didn't read the synopsis of ben Cramer's book. I'm not interested in Joe D's love life. That's National Enquirer material as far as I'm concerned.

-- Rich (howe9@shentel.net), December 11, 2000.

Rich--

I'll getcha for this sacrilege. I'm gonna dig deep into Gordie Howe's sordid life and you'll be sorry. Boyhood heroes are not to be disrespected.

-- Lars (lars@indy.net), December 11, 2000.

Sorry Lars. Growing up in NJ, Joe D was little more than Mr. Coffee to me. Remember his hawking of that fabulous kitchen appliance? That was prior to the days when he would charge $100,000 and up for a few hours signing autographs.

I realize his 56 game hitting streak is one of the more impenetrable baseball records. The man only played 12 years. Give Ted Williams back the 5 years he lost to WWII and the police action in Korea and his records would make Joltin' Joe look pretty average. Hehehe.

-- Rich (howe9@shentel.net), December 11, 2000.

BTW, Gordie's dirtiness lay in his on-ice performances. He was a scoundrel bordering on terroristic. Off-ice the man is a saint! A saint I tell ya!

-- Rich (howe9@shentel.net), December 11, 2000.