Screen to page: Blood, Sweat & Chrome

The new book about the making of "Mad Max: Fury Road" is a thrilling and exhaustive oral history of Hollywood's longest-gestating and arguably greatest action movie.

We don’t do a lot of book reviews here at the Film Yap, and by ‘not a lot’ I mean I think this is the first one ever. But new horizons and all that.

I remember in 2015 in the run-up to “Mad Max: Fury Road,” many fans of the iconic post-apocalyptic road franchise like me figured there was no way it could capture the twisted essence of the series, which had not seen the screen for 30 years. Not to mention a sequel that replaced star Mel Gibson with Tom Hardy, who was little known at the time of filming.

So I was gobsmacked to discover that it not only equaled the nihilistic cool and gasp-inducing stunts of its pinnacle, “The Road Warrior,” but in fact arguably surpassed it.

The movie did well at the box office and with critics and fans, but it was not a record-breaking hit. In the nearly seven years since its release, though, its reputation has only grown — much like the legend of antihero Max Rockatansky himself.

The movie executed the seemingly impossible trick of repositioning Max as the secondary character in his own movie, which upended the harsh XX-chromosome nature of the franchise into a decidedly feminist fable about women throwing off the yoke of sexual oppression in a male-dominated society, where they’re seen as simply another resource like bullets and “guzoline.”

Director George Miller, who co-wrote the story with Brendan McCarthy and Nick Lathouris, had been working on a fourth Mad Max movie for at least 20 years. In time the story of the production became a legend in of itself, as Miller saw the project fall apart at least twice before finally getting made in an epic shoot lasting the better part of a year in the harshest reaches of the Namibian Desert.

The making of the film is satisfyingly chronicled in “Blood, Sweat and Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road” by Kyle Buchanan, now out from Harper Collins.

Based on hundreds of interviews by Buchanan during the making, prior to release and in the years since, it’s a breathtakingly complete oral history of the movie some have called the greatest action movie in Hollywood history.