Bilge Ebiri has read Michael Bamberger‘s “The Man Who Heard Voices”, which everyone knows as the M. Night Shyamalan book in which the famed director bashes Disney (i.e., production prexy Nina Jacobson in particular) for not loving his Lady in the Water script enough. “I don’t understand why the critical world seems so eager to pounce on a guy who’s actually taking some artistic risks at a point in his career when he could coast pretty easily,” Ebiri says. “Lady isn’t opening for three weeks, and here’s Slate ‘s Kim Masters…positively gloating that the film has bad buzz (never mind the fact that it isn’t true — ‘buzz’ is simply what the writer wants to believe). And that’s just the stuff that’s been published. You should hear my fellow critics rubbing their palms, waiting to pounce on this thing.” Bamberger’s book is the focus of much of the venom. “There’s been a lot of nonsense published that the book is Shyamalan ‘lashing out’ at Disney execs,” Ebiri notes. “First of all, anyone who publishes that tripe has not read this book….certainly not all the way. (A recent Observer article was particularly stupid, Ebiri says, since it suggested that the break-up with Disney is the book’s ‘culmination’ when it’s actually in one of the opening chapters.) I can’t say too much about the book — I read it for a review in another publication and it would be wrong of me to trump it with this post — but, despite the fact that Bamberger’s subject is an all-access portrait of M. Night at work, it’s simply false to label this some kind of tell-all revenge piece. Indeed, as he continues working on his film in the book, Shyamalan actually admits that the Disney execs were right — that the script they read did, in fact, need much more work. Which, incidentally, he gave it. And Bamberger even gets to interview Jacobson to get her side of the story.”