Andy & Bob Zmuda
I finally read the book by Bob Zmuda after deliberately avoiding it for a year or so - I had heard such negative things about it I really didn't think it would be worth reading. However, I broke down and read it and it left me with many questions.
Besides the oft repeated complaints about it - the fact that it was unneccesarily crude and invasive of Andy's privacy, inaccurate in many instances, and that Zmuda claimed credit for Andy's work in some cases - I found a couple of things really odd about this book.
Bob Zmuda is, as he repeatedly reminds us in the book, a writer. Yet this book not only employed a ghost writer but was still one of the most poorly written, just from a technical point of view, bios I've ever read. The best writing came at the end of the book, in the entries that Zmuda said were from his journal - yet those entries were in an entirely different style and voice than the rest of the book. That aside, though, I wondered what effect Zmuda had on Andy's career, negative and positive. He seemed to me to be a bit of a remora, attached to Andy for the financial and other benefits, without giving much back in return. Was Bob a talented comic writer, as Andy apparently felt? Or did he encourage and support Andy in his most destructive and negative tendencies? Andy's family seems to have a real problem with Zmuda, which I assume stems from the book. And I noticed that Bob's accounts of events inevitably focused on the sort of adolescent "we really made a big noise" aspect of things as opposed to the art of the event or the overall affect it might have had on Andy & his career.
Finally, I found Zmuda's analysis of Andy's psychological state extremely bizarre and very erratic. He made pretty outrageous statements, wildly ranging from "he was a regular guy" to "He had multiple personality disorder."
Zmuda is from around 'here' - here being Chicago. I remember, albeit vaguely, the "lion" incident from Lincoln Park Zoo. He seems personable and amusing - but who was he really, to Andy? And what affect overall did he have on him?
Email This To a Friend
Topic Commands
Click to receive email notification of replies 
Click to stop receiving email notification of replies