Out of print for more than 30 years, now available for the first time as an eBook, this is the controversial story of John Wooden's first 25 years and first 8 NCAA Championships as UCLA Head Basketball Coach. This is the only book that gives a true picture of the character of John Wooden and the influence of his assistant, Jerry Norman, whose contributions Wooden  ignored and tried to bury.

Compiled with more than 40 hours of interviews with Coach Wooden, learn about the man behind the coach. The players tell their stories in their own words.

Click the book to read the first chapter and for ordering information. Also available on Kindle.

The Disaster Artist (7/10)

by Tony Medley

Runtime 104 minutes.

R

As you sit in the theater you can’t help but wonder who in the world would write a ridiculous story like this. These characters, especially the lead, Tommy Wiseau (James Franco), are so off-the-wall they are cartoonish. So throughout the movie you think how much time you’re wasting watching this nonsense. But then at the end you find out that every bit of it is true and they prove it with film clips of the real people doing what you’ve just seen actors doing in the film.

The fact that it all happened less than 20 years ago and that most of it happened within just a few blocks of where I live makes it all the more astonishing to me. Directed by Franco and based on Greg Sestero’s best-selling book ("The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made") of the making of the film The Room (2003) from a script by Scott Neustadter and Michael H Weber and Sestero and Tom Bissell, Wiseau is a strange, bizarre person who wants to make a movie, even though he has no talent and no connections.

Even so he partners with his newfound friend, Greg (Dave Franco), moves to Hollywood and using his own money, which seems to come from a bottomless pit, sets out to make Tommy’s film. The result is a serio-comic film filled with one scene after another of bizarre events and characters, one of whom is Sandy, a script supervisor, played by Seth Rogen. Rogen is a friend of Franco’s; his role is minor. He’s there to show that there was one person involved in the production who knew what he was doing, although it didn’t help much. As far as I know, this character is fictional.

Howard Hughes really got his start in Los Angeles when his parents died leaving him a fortune, so he moved to Hollywood at age 25, and, with no experience, started making films.

Be advised that Wiseau is/was no Howard Hughes. But Franco gives a good performance as his weird character, intending the movie as “an industry-insider story told through outsiders in the vein of ‘Ed Wood,’ a movie I love.” When I saw the end of the movie, I realized that I enjoyed it more than I thought I had. The additional few scenes shown after fade-out are pretty amazing and eye-opening. In fact it was those scenes that raised my rating considerably.