Blood, Sweat & Chrome audiobook

Extremely niche book that fit my interests perfectly. Loved the way this was written; it was like reading a documentary script. The amount of interviews the author conducted and then how he managed to compile this into a very readable, engaging, well-structured book is admirable. I'd love it if he did more books like this about other movies! If you like behind the scenes style documentaries, the Mad Max franchise, or just learning about filmmaking in general and seeing how a movie, as unique and intense as this one, is made from start to finish, I'd highly recommend this.

"The backstory of the movie is something that campaigns usually struggle to make sound interesting and exciting and dramatic, but in the case of Fury Road, you didn't have to stretch very far." - Awards columnist Scott Feinberg**Content**Feinberg isn't wrong - the history of this movie, from conception to release, is absolutely batshit insane. When you see quotes from cast and crew going, 'I'm shocked no one died,' they're NOT being dramatic. So no, you don't have to stretch very far in any direction to find a wild anecdote. But you have to give Buchanan credit for the way he strings together an absolutely masterful narrative. TO BE CLEAR: I love Fury Road, but I wouldn't consider myself a huge fanatic. It's been a while since my last re-watch! That being said... this book got me excited about the story again. It made me want to go watch the movie with my friends so I could be that annoying person that pauses every ten seconds to point out all the little facts I learned. It's not just the big near-death stunts or character decisions that Buchanan gets you with either - reading about the War Boys' cult-like induction workshops was just as interesting as reading about the camera crew's battle against weather and strange camera angles.**Format**After reading the first few pages I thought, "Damn, I want to watch a documentary about this movie." A couple pages later I realized, "Hang on, that's pretty much what Buchanan has done here." You can literally see the interviews playing out. This book captures one of the best aspects of oral history (imo): the diversity of lived experience and memory. He doesn't shy away from tackling controversies or clashes between the crew, but while the narrative stays objective and offers multiple points of view, I also feel like it doesn't let anyone off the hook for bad behavior (Chapter 24, for example, addresses the tensions between the film's leads, Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron.)This book is a testament to Buchanan's skill as an interviewer/storyteller.**Accessibility**Finally, with non-fiction books, I like to comment on accessibility: is this a book anyone could pick up, or would it be more enjoyable for someone with someone with a certain level of interest/understanding in the topic. I can confidently say that you don't need to have seen all the Mad Max movies or have a deep interest in filmmaking for this book to draw you in. It touches on every aspect of production, explaining trade politics, stakes, and background where necessary. Honestly, I think it's possible that people who haven't even seen the movie could enjoy this book (though I do recommend watching the movie. Seriously, go watch it now). **Rating**Usually I reserve my five-star reviews for books that absolutely shake my world and change my life. I wouldn't necessarily say that was Blood, Sweat & Chrome. But I've gotta say: When I was reading this book, I couldn't put it down, and when I wasn't reading this book, I was thinking about reading it. Do yourself a favor and give it some attention. 5/5Thank you Netgalley for the chance to read an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

If you like Mad Max: Fury Road, you should read this book. If you are interested in the process of creating art, and filmmaking, you should read this book! If you like a little tea (but not so much that it drowns you) with your behind the scenes info, read this book! It's really good!Also, it is fairly mind-blowing the amount of work and perseverance that went into the creation of the movie. It's a miracle (or several) that it even got made. It's several miracles and more that people did not die while filming.This is actually an oral history, a format I love, so you get to hear directly from everyone involved in making Fury Road, from director George Miller and the actors (lots of both Charlize and Tom) to the writers, the people who made all those insane vehicles, the set designers, tons of people. Not a bit of it wasn't interesting. Something else cool about this book is that because the movie took so long to be made (almost twenty years), we also get a sort of working biography of George Miller and insight into his other films, as well. I loved hearing about Babe the most. It made me feel guilty that I still haven't seen Babe 2: Pig in the City. The man has an incredibly creative and varied filmic output when you stop to think about it.Which reminds me, did anyone see Three Thousand Years of Longing? It looked so interesting but I so rarely go to the theater anymore, for obvious reasons.

My wife and I celebrated our wedding anniversary in 2015 with dinner out and a double-feature. We each picked one movie. She picked PITCH PERFECT 2, and I picked MAD MAX: FURY ROAD. We saw my film first, and while PP2 was a cute, enjoyable film, the experience was dampened a little by my inability to stop thinking about what I had just witnessed a few hours ago. Very rarely do you walk out of a film thinking that you just saw one of the greatest motion pictures ever made....but that was exactly how I felt. Certainly the best ACTION film of all time, but also a gorgeous, well thought out, perfectly made cinematic experience. Did other people feel the same way...? The intervening years have shown me that, yes, a great many filmgoers and critics did feel the same way. The movie, and the stories about the making of the movie, have become legendary. And Kyle Buchanan's new book, BLOOD, SWEAT & CHROME: THE WILD AND TRUE STORY OF MAD MAX: FURY ROAD has come along to set the record straight. First off, I'm a HUGE fan of Mel Gibson, both as an actor and a filmmaker, and I was really devastated when I found out he would not be playing Max again. I was happy to finally get the straight scoop about why he wasn't in the film, as well as how he reacted to the finished product. (On the other hand, this book does confirm that Gibson is nuts.) The two-decade gestation of the film lends to some fascinating stories, and Buchanan's 130+ interviews with cast, crew, and interested parties shed a lot of light on what was a torturous production. The gossip about stars Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron is cleared up and proven to be mostly inaccurate. By all accounts, they are both very difficult people, and their acting and preparation styles were not a good fit, but the clashes, aside from one blow-up, were nowhere near as bad as initially reported. (I found it very disappointing that Theron, after publicly shaming Hardy and getting in his face in front of the cast and crew, saw fit to play the "I'm physically afraid of this mean, violent man!" card....if you're going to go nose-to-nose with a co-worker and scream in his face, don't be surprised if he screams back.) With mastermind George Miller pushing 80, and working on a Furiosa prequel, it makes me sad to think that we'll probably never see Max have another adventure, but, thanks to Kyle Buchanan, we'll always have this incredible document of the making of one of the most exciting films of all time.

4.5 Stars… The hype around this movie from its release was one of those rare cases where you fully expect to be blown away. So as I sat down to watch the movie on opening weekend, I knew it had a 99% on Rotten Tomatoes and was being hailed perhaps the greatest action movie of all time. The last time I remember walking into a movie with this level of expectation was The Dark Knight. Suffice to say, I had my jaw on the floor the entire movie. Repeat viewings have done nothing to alleviate that initial awe. Actually, I gain more respect for it over time. So that leads us to this book. Yes, it’s a great movie, and I remember all the horrible news coming out while filming. Poor test screenings, executives threatening to stop or cancel the movie, stars hating each other’s guts, filming three years before release, way over budget… films with any one of these issues are usually guaranteed to fail, let alone all of them and more. But is there enough story behind this thing to make a full book worth it? The answer is a resounding yes. This movie is an enigma and the story behind it is unbelievable. It took 20 years to make and was cancelled multiple times for every reason imaginable. It was shot in sequence despite this type of movie being the last type of movie you’d want to do that for. Executives at WB halted production on the movie before the opening and ending were filmed. Executives cut their own version of the movie and there was a test screening to determine whose version would get released. There was no script, only thousands of storyboards. George Miller filmed the movie in 3-10 second increments before calling ‘Cut’ (much to the chagrin of actors). Despite 12 hour days, they produced about 24-30 seconds of the final film per day. No one working on the film, maybe besides George Miller, had any idea if the film would be great or horrible. Additionally, there is much more learned here than was ever previously revealed to the public. Hardy and Theron relationship is covered in detail. People who don’t normally receive their proper credit are given their due. Add it all up, this is a must read for fans of the movie or of film in general!

Right off the top: I was a pretty big fan of Fury Road.That being said, I'm an even bigger fan of books that tell the stories of how movies like this were made, and the hundreds of interviews with everyone from Charlize to Tom Hardy and George Miller are compelling, insightful, engaging and surprising. This book does an amazing job telling the oral history of how George Miller worked for twenty years to make the movie he always had in his head, and I was engaged from page one to the end of the book.There are great stories throughout, fascinating anecdotes, and ultimately it made me realize how much of a genius George Miller truly was/is. If you love movies at all and are fascinated with how a movie gets made, read this. If you are a George Miller or Fury Road fan, definitely read this.

Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road by Kyle Buchanan does what it says on the tin. This oral history of the years and years it took to make Mad Max: Fury Road is interesting, comprehensive, and a great read for fans of Mad Max, an movie making in general.I knew that it had taken George Miller a very long time to get Mad Max: Fury Road made, and I knew that the movie had been storyboarded rather than scripted. I hadn’t realized how many years before shooting ever began that the story was fully formed, nor did I realize how true Miller stayed to the images in the storyboards. Even while he was making Babe: Pig in the City, Happy Feet and Happy Feet Two, he and a team were working on Fury Road.I was struck over and over that it took the singlemindedness of so many people to get this movie made. Nothing about it was easy. It was in some form of preproduction for over a decade, the shoot was long, dangerous, and grueling. Even while filming was underway, there was no guarantee the funding wouldn’t be pulled. The studio did pull the plug, leaving the film without a beginning or end. Though I have watched the final product mane times, it was stressful reading about the pressure and uncertainty. The fights with the studio lasted until a few months before the film opened.Sometimes reading the accounts of so many people made it hard to follow the events and the short bursts of text from so many people challenged my ability to keep who did what straight. Where the oral history format really worked was in talking about the relationships between people. The War Boys built a cult. The Wives built a Sisterhood, and Theron and Hardy were sort of on the periphery of those groups without a lot of support.There are a lot of reasons Mad Max: Fury Road is important to me. Purely as a movie, it is a visceral theater experience that I shared several times with friends. Charlize Theron’s Furiosa was the character I’d been waiting for since Sigorney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley in Aliens (1986). My dad’s reaction to the movie (“too many girls”), made me realize he wasn’t capable of having the relationship I would have liked us to have.If you are looking for deep philosophical thoughts about Mad Max, this isn’t that book. I’d actually like to read that book someday, or listen to the podcast. I watched Fury Road right before I started reading Blood, Sweat & Chrome and again while I was writing the review. That’s the most movie watching I’ve done since February 2020. It isn’t a perfect movie, but it is amazing. I don’t know that any other director would have gotten this movie made, and it took the committed insanity of hundreds of people to get it done.I received this as an advance reader copy from NetGalley. My opinions are my own.

this was so amazing, made me love Fury Road even more

Outstanding. Just insanely fascinating and entertaining.For a dozen-plus years, I worked in Taipei as a graphic designer and copywriter; and since Taiwan was then such a manufacturing powerhouse (before everything moved to China), I spent a lot of my time writing brochures and doing photo shoots for a variety of production facilities - electronics factories, steel mills, boatyards, chip foundries, furniture, toys...you name it. Anyway, I quickly became absolutely fascinated with learning - and SEEING - just how things were made.Well, that's exactly what this book is - the step-by-step story of how not just any movie, but what has repeatedly been called the "last real action movie" was made, from inception way back in 1987 to its final, extremely painful birth nearly 20 years later. PLUS, it's an oral history - and I love those things, as they have probably the most authentic voices of any non-fiction form. Only negative - and it's a LARGE one - is...no photos? What the heck is up with that??*Anyway...I now not only want to go back and watch "Fury Road" a good 3-4 more times to catch all the details I missed the first go-round, but I also want to go back and watch the earlier Mad Max films again - including the first, which I've somehow never seen. (QUICK UPDATE: Okay, so did just watch the original "Mad Max," and it is seriously NOT GOOD - I've seen better production values and acting on Mystery Science Theatre. But...if George Miller can progress from that to "Fury Road," well, there's hope for all of us!)* You can largely solve that problem, however, by renting or buying the Blu-ray version of "Fury Road," which comes with a bunch of excellent "making of" extras that focus on the visuals missing in the book.AWESOMELY COOL FOOTNOTE: In 2020, guitarist Steve Vai commissioned Ibanez to build him a one-of-a-kind guitar - the Hydra - after seeing "Fury Road" and being blown away by the Doof Warrior's flame shooting double-neck. Here's the result:I mean, just look at that thing. Look at the unique fretting on both the top 12-string and the bottom bass necks; and check out the additional set of vertical harp strings on the far left of the body. This thing is a monster, and so far only one song has been written for it - but you can…no, you really HAVE to…watch the video here, which is certainly one of - if not THE - most impressive displays of WTF?? guitar virtuosity I've ever seen. No flames, though...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46qjD...

“It may seem ludicrous that the reaction to the end of days is to build a V-8 and fill a tin can with shrapnel, but at the moment, it doesn’t seem any stupider than the other options we appear to be coming up with.”Fury Road might be one of the only movies where it almost feels like cheating to claim it’s among your personal best of the past decade. Of course the fuck it is.In what’s perhaps a testament to whatever person I’d later become, “The Road Warrior” aka Mad Max 2 was kept on near-constant repeat in my house throughout my childhood and adolescence, and when my family eagerly gathered to see Fury Road opening weekend, I’ll always remember my dad, —the most through-and-through “no remakes”/“they don’t make ‘em like they used to”-ass motherfucker on earth—, saying as he walked out of the theater: “that might’ve been the most spectacular thing I’ve ever seen”.So, how did this “thing” come to exist?Well, it spent two full decades living entirely in its creator’s head.Most of that time was spent just trying to get the studio to let them shoot.Thousands of storyboards were drawn in lieu of any script whatsoever.A team of Aussie mechanics and “found art” designers were told to make literally anything they wanted.70 makeshift cars and every piece of film equipment was put on a freighter to Namibia without studio permission.The cast and crew lived in the desert for nine months, effectively consuming an entire small African town whole.150 stunt people attended rigorous “group therapy” to be conditioned as a War Boy cult.Tom Hardy drove director George Miller into a depression, he and Charlize Theron openly despising one another.Almost everyone involved thought they were making something totally incomprehensible.Warner Brothers attempted to stop the whole shoot midway, only failing to do so because of a coincidental leadership change.The only reason WB failed to completely hijack the edit with their “best” team of in-house editors is because George Miller arranged one final head-to-head test audience battle with the edit his wife spent three years making.Won six Oscars, somehow no one died, and I’m barely scratching the surface.There will never be a movie like this ever again.

If you're a die-hard Mad Max fan, curious about the aura surrounding Mad Max: Fury Road, or want a peek behind the Hollywood curtain, I highly recommend you check this out.It's a linear history about the Mad Max franchise and the kindhearted genius who created it told through interview snippets from the crew, cast, journalists, and major Hollywood players who are die-hard fans. As a Fury Road lover who admittedly hasn't seen the previous four films, it was a fascinating, educational read. It clears up some misconceptions (the notorious bad blood between Theron and Hardy was largely because Hardy's deep commitment to method acting strained his relationship with the entire cast and crew. not because Theron was difficult to work with - she was the opposite, actually), intriguing trivia (Eminem was briefly considered to play Max, and the short list also included Jeremy Renner and Armie Hammer!), and insight into the 10+ years that went into pre-production alone.It's a wild ride of a book and a smooth, well organized and enjoyable read. Thank you so much to NetGalley and William Morrow for providing a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review!Publication date: February 22, 2022⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/ 5

As a huge fan of the Mad Max movies, I followed every step of the 15 years of development of this movie hoping it would happen. I admit there were times I never thought we would see it as I am sure most of the people making it felt the same. As someone who reads making of books listens to commentary tracks and understands what goes into making movies I understood how crazy Fury Road is. As a movie, it is an insane updating of Road Warrior. A movie without a script, written in storyboards, and almost all action is not what you think of when you think of a feminist masterpiece but that is part of the magic of Fury Road.Told through quotes Kyle Buchanan didn’t have to do a ton of writing but did a wonderful job of piecing together TONS of interviews with nearly everyone involved with the movie, critics, other directors, and more. That was the hard work. Plus organizing the statements and putting them together. It is an amazing book don’t get me wrong. This is a really impressive book. Fury Road is a movie I already loved deeply, but this makes clear the insane amount of work that went into it, and how unlikely it was. In each stage, development, filming, post-production to the surprise award season. I know this is a short review but non-fiction is not my bread and butter. Blood, Sweat, and Chrome is a must-read for film nerds, those interested in the history of film, the filmmaking process, or just fans of the movie.

I have my doubts about entertainment journalism as a whole, but when it allows this kind of access to a generational work of art, with people willing to share some of the messiest parts of the creative process, it kind of redeems the whole idea. I firmly believe MAD MAX FURY ROAD is one of the greatest films of the last twenty years, and Buchanan does an excellent job in diving into almost every aspect of what made this so exceptional. The details of the Tom Hardy - Charlize Theron feud grabbed most of the headlines (and deservedly so, it’s like watching one of the horrific car crashes in the film unfold), but you’ll also get stories of gearheads, marketing executives, and an army of unhinged creatives chiming in on their myriad contributions to the film. It’s brilliant stuff, and if you occasionally feel like some participants are understandingly holding back in order to still work in the industry, it only serves to contrast how much is revealed elsewhere. I can already tell that I will re-read this book dozens of times, to the point where I will be able to quote passages by memory. If you have a passion for film, you simply must pick this up.

would've loved a bit more craft talk and a little less pontification but holy hell do i need to rewatch the film like asap as possible

I. Love. This. Movie. And reading this book only made me love it more. I already knew that the props were real and there was very limited CGI involved with the making of this movie. I also knew that it went through “production hell,” whatever that meant to me at the time. But this book takes a deeper dive into everything, where it tells all about the cast’s experience, the making of the movie, and the genius that is George Miller. The book reads like a documentary, where each of the three sections are dedicated to pre, during, and post production. Each of the chapters in the production section are dedicated to different actors experiences and the characters they play. It was super super engaging and I couldn’t read it fast enough.This is for movie buffs and mad max fans alike. But it’ll definitely make you want to rewatch fury road, and it does well to convince you of it’s claim: there had never been another movie like this, and there probably never will be.

Shiny! Shiny and chrome!I mean, either you are already way on board with this book, or there is no convincing you. But, if you need convincing, this has interviews with a hundred-odd people who worked on the movie. It reads like a war story, a polemic, a hallucinogenic music festival, and a really wild exit interview. Many fine stories. And it works hard to get to “Why did this work? How did they do it?” The author does a good job, I think, but I also would have read another 300 pages without flinching. On the down side? Maaaybe a little too much canonization of George Miller. It might have been a better book if we saw him more on the edge of failure. Every time it gets close, someone says, “Well George knew what he was doing.” And he did, clearly, but: it might have been a sharper story if we let the in-the-moment doubts hold center a little longer.