Mark, of Mark and Amy, wrote a beautiful review of Preview Harvey. Here it is:
A love letter to preview nuts
Reviewed in the United States on February 14, 2024
Society pushes some people out of frame. They’re bullied or ignored because they’re different, because they color outside the lines. Some just disappear, never to be heard from again. Others, through sheer force of will, refuse to be marginalized. They push themselves into a corner of the spotlight and become part of the bigger picture.
Harvey Minton, the titular character in “Preview Harvey,” Bruce Kimmel’s 23rd novel, loves motion pictures . . . particularly when he can see them before anyone else during a Major Studio Preview. For three decades, attending these previews was Harvey’s life. In the movie palaces of Hollywood, Harvey was treated like a king. Jerry Lewis crowned him Preview Harvey and Blake Edwards considered him a good luck charm.
Harvey’s opinions on movies were so valued by studio execs that Paramount even sent a car to take him to San Luis Obispo for an advance screening of “Chinatown.” It was a good movie, he would tell producer Bob Evans after the preview was over, but the music just didn’t fit. Evans thanked him, shook his hand and, within days, had scrapped the music and brought in Jerry Goldsmith to create a new score. Such was the power of a self-proclaimed turtle who lived with his mother, ate Swiss cheese sandwiches with mustard, drove a ’53 Plymouth and longed to marry Tuesday Weld.
Kimmel’s sweet tale, told almost completely in Harvey’s repetitive, rapid-fire yakky cadence, is a love letter to film, to the golden age of Major Studio Previews, to the “preview nuts” like Harvey who loved them, and to the power of being a square peg in a theater full of round holes.
The world would be a better place if there was room on the red carpet for everyone, even a 5-foot-3 motormouth like Harvey.
