Author: Jon M. Chu, Jeremy McCarter
# of Pages: 289 (hardback)
Genre: Non-fiction, Autobiography
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
Synopsis: Long before he directed Wicked, In The Heights, or the groundbreaking film Crazy Rich Asians, Jon M. Chu was a movie-obsessed first-generation Chinese American, helping at his parents’ Chinese restaurant in Silicon Valley and forever facing the cultural identity crisis endemic to children of immigrants. Growing up on the cutting edge of twenty-first-century technology gave Chu the tools he needed to make his mark at USC film school, and to be discovered by Steven Spielberg, but he soon found himself struggling to understand who he was. In this book, for the first time, Chu turns the lens on his own life and work, telling the universal story of questioning what it means when your dreams collide with your circumstances, and showing how it’s possible to succeed even when the world changes beyond all recognition. With striking candor and unrivaled insights, Chu offers a firsthand account of the collision of Silicon Valley and Hollywood—what it’s been like to watch his old world shatter and reshape his new one. Ultimately, Viewfinder is about reckoning with your own story, becoming your most creative self, and finding a path all your own.
Review: Jon M. Chu is a great filmmaker. I've some of he's biggest hits such as Crazy Rich Asians and Wicked. He's also not half-bad at speaking - I happened to see a clip from an interview (podcast?) where he talks about some behind-the-scene tidbits such as how his mom's words and Steven Spielberg impacted his career.
In fact, those tidbits were actually the most interesting talking points of this book, his memoir. Already, Chu had these "spoilers" working against him, but it's not a dealbreaker for me. A similar situation happened with Jennette McCurdy's book, but it didn't stop me from being captivated.
However, Chu should stick with his most familiar medium - film. I didn't need to read in the last 100 pages about his parent's lives describe to me as if it were a movie. While his parent's success story could actual stand alone as its own story, the way this section was written actually put me in a readers block, and this book ended up sitting untouched on a table for weeks.
The rest of the story was not bad per se. Many readers likely don't know just how many movies Chu has worked on, so this was a pleasant surprise in the earlier parts of the book before getting his Crazy Rich Asians era. However, I couldn't help but feel like this book was premature - Chu is relatively young and likely has many more movies ahead of him. I couldn't help but think that maybe this should have stayed in the drafts until latter in his life.
Overall, I didn't find this book to be worth reading. It's great that Chu found a role model in Steve Jobs, but the first part of this book felt like a Steve Jobs fan boy's memoir. If you're interested in Chu's story, just watch his interviews.
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