Oreck is a producer of films, commercials, and videos. An Academy Award nominee for the 1984 short film Tales of Meeting and Parting
, she entered the music video industry that same year. Steering her company, O Pictures, from 1984 to 2000, she made hundreds of videos with minor and major music makers, including Mick Jagger, Sting, Madonna, Prince, and Chris Isaak. Looking back, she covers her career in a breakneck, word-juggling style as she introduces the reader to such respected video directors as Herb Ritts and Mary Lambert: “With her blonde, baby-fine locks and cornflower blue eyes, Mary was a hipster ultrafemme from Arkansas with a yielding, buttered grits accent that allowed others to view her as a wide-eyed doe while she ran them down with a ten-ton truck.” Amid such multilayered metaphors, she tosses off occasional funny lines as she recalls talent tantrums, budget constraints, daily disasters, and production problems while intercutting her own personal peaks, such as having a child at age 16. Switching between past and present tenses, Oreck succeeds in documenting the milestone merger of music/film history in this entertaining memoir. (May 18)
