ince this book is a biography, my usual rating system categories don't apply.  If I read biographies regularly I would surely come up with half a dozen useful categories to rate it in. But since I don't, bear with me as I modify my usual technique.

Peter Jackson, From Splatter Prince to Lord of the Rings, an Unauthorized Biography, Ian Pryor
Writing Quality/Flow: 6/7
Interesting Anecdotes: 7
Sufficient Detail: 8
Fun Factor: 5
Page Turner: 5
Re-readability: 7
Overall: 6.5

There wasn't anything bad about this biography of Peter Jackson, but it wasn't anything brilliant. It was thorough, and focused on what I wanted it to focus on. Not too much about his childhood; just some info about how his parents came to NZ, how they met, and how PJ grew up with a movie camera forever in his hand. With that stuff quickly out of the way it leaped into his adult life and his film career, and there it did an excellent job covering every movie in great detail, often with firsthand reports since the author knew PJ even back then and was on all of his early movie sets. The behind the scenes info about how PJ's earliest movies were made, how they got funding and struggled to be released, how they were received, what sort of business they did, etc, was all excellent.

The book isn't prying or tabloid in nature; it's almost all about PJ's work and public face, his movies, etc. There's almost nothing about his private life as an adult, and the greatest failing of the book is that you don't get to know him any better after reading it than you did going in. It's a great resource for information about his movies and how he made them, but if you want to know more about Peter Jackson the man, you're not find it here. (Since I really don't care about him as a person but do care about his movies, I didn't consider this a drawback.)

The only real drawback was that the book went to print just after The Two Towers was released, so there is very little background info about that film, nothing at all about Return of the King, and since the author had a falling out with the very thin-skinned and prickly PJ, he didn't have any recent interviews or behind the scenes access to the LotR production. I learned far more about the making of LotR from the DVD documentaries, though there were a few tidbits in the last chapter of the book that I didn't already know. I hope there's a second edition of the book with some more behind the scenes info and stories, since I found the stories about PJ's earlier movies fascinating, especially since they had lots of financial details and information about the business aspect of things. I'd love to hear stories about just how manic the LotR anticipation was around the world, how much money it funneled back to NZ and the people who created it, how the NZ film industry and WETA are doing since LotR, etc. 

And I suppose I'd also like to read a PJ biography that had actual inside info, more of his state of mind while making the LotR movies and his earlier films, more stories about the gory details of things, etc. Stuff that's not all in the DVD commentary tracks, ideally. Ian Pryor's bio of PJ is more interesting when PJ is struggling and scratching along, barely able to afford enough film to keep going another week, and that's largely because there's far more behind the scenes information.

I can't recommend buying this book, but it's certainly worth checking out from the library. It has made me much more curious about PJ's early stuff, Meet the Feebles, Heavenly Creatures, and Dead Alive (and not the heavily censored US version either) and it was a good read, a chapter at a time, mostly in the bathroom. Good read for the movie info, not for PJ info, and since it's a biography, I suppose I have to let my score reflect that. For what I wanted from the book, it was fine, and excellent at covering the early days of his career. Since what you want from a PJ bio may be very different than what I wanted, your appreciation of this book may be very different as well.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.