The classic book that shaped two generations’ view of the movie business and introduced the archetypal Hollywood player Sammy Glick. He’s got a machete mouth and a genius for double-cross. As Budd Shulberg—author of the screenplay On the Waterfront —follows Sammy’s relentless upward progress, he creates a virtuoso study in character that manages to be hilariously appalling yet deeply compassionate. “Sammy Glick remains at the top of the Hollywood sleaze heap, a hustler nonpareil…. What Makes Sammy Run? Is still the quintessential novel about “the all-American heel.’” – Moredcai Richler, GQ

"A shocking account of how Harvey Weinstein rose to become one of the most iconic figures in the world of movies, how he used that position to feed his monstrous sexual appetites, and how it all came crashing down, from the author who has covered the Hollywood power game for the New Yorker for three decades. Twenty years ago, Ken Auletta wrote one of the iconic New Yorker profiles for which he is famous, of the Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, then at the height of his powers. The profile created waves for exposing how volatile, even violent, Weinstein was to his employees and collaborators. But there was a much darker story that was just out of reach: rumors had long swirled that Weinstein was a sexual predator, but no one was willing to go on the record, and in the end he and the magazine concluded they couldn't close the case. But the story always nagged at him, and many years later, he was able to share his reporting notes and all that he knew with Ronan Farrow, and to cheer him along with Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey as they broke their pioneering stories and wrote their bestselling books. But the story continued to nag at him. Farrow, Twohey, and Kantor did a brilliant job exposing the trail of assaults and their cover-up, but the larger questions remained: what explained Weinstein's monstrousness? Even more importantly, how and why was it never checked? How does a man run the day to day operations of a company with hundreds of employees and revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars and at the same time live a shadow life of sexual predation without ever being caught, for years and years? How much is this a story about Harvey Weinstein, and how much is this a story about Hollywood and power? To answer that question fully, Ken Auletta has spent the past three years constructing a full reckoning with a career in film that has no parallel in Hollywood's history in its combination of extraordinary business and creative success and a personal brutality and viciousness that left a trail of ruined lives in its wake. How did one thing relate to the other? Hollywood Ending is an unflinching examination of Weinstein's life and career in full. Not simply a prosecutor's litany of crimes, it embeds them in the context of his overall business, his failures but also his outsized successes. To understand how he could behave as he did, we have to understand the power he wielded. Iconic film stars, Miramax employees and board members, old friends and family, even the person who knew him best, Harvey's brother Bob, all talked to Auletta at length. The result is not simply the portrait of a predator, it is a portrait of the power that allowed Weinstein to operate with such impunity for so many years, the spider web in which his victims found themselves trapped. To understand Weinstein's web is to understand how many other spider webs no doubt still remain."--

In this unprecedented, all-encompassing, and thoroughly entertaining account of the movie business, acclaimed writer Edward Jay Epstein reveals the real magic behind moviemaking: how the studios make their money. Epstein shows that in Hollywood, the only art that matters is the art of the deal: Major films turn huge profits not from the movies themselves but through myriad other enterprises, from video-game spin-offs and soundtracks to fast-food tie-ins, and even theme-park rides. The studios may compete for stars and Oscars, but their corporate parents view wth one another in less glamorous markets such as cable, home video, and pay-TV. Money, though, is only a small part of the Hollywood story; the social and political milieus–power, prestige, and status–tell the rest. Alongside its remarkable financial revelations and incisive profiles of the pioneers who helped build Hollywood, The Big Picture is filled with eye-opening insider stories. If you are interested in Hollywood today and the complex and fascinating way it has evolved in order to survive, you haven’ t seen the big picture until you’ve read The Big Picture .

"A fascinating history."-- Time Out New York The acclaimed producer of such classic films as Chariots of Fire and The Killing Fields , and the only European ever to head a major Hollywood studio, former Columbia Pictures chief David Puttnam has written a fascinating behind-the-scenes history of the movie business and of the unique and frequently unholy alliance between commerce and art that underpins it. Puttnam's story moves from the early days of cinema and the rivalry between Edison and the Lumiere brothers, through the rise of the studio system, and up to the present day, with European filmmakers and politicians struggling to protect their industry and even their cultural identity from a triumphant and all-devouring Hollywood. In the process he introduces a host of colorful characters: from Goldwyn and Zanuck to Eisner and Ovitz. Movies and Money is a groundbreaking book that will change our understanding of the movie business. "Excellent.... A book so well written that it can easily be read at a single sitting."-- San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner "Puttnam has a dry sense of humor, and most of his book is jammed with astonishing anecdotes and seething portraits of the personalities of film history."-- Newsday

Ian Halperin is no stranger to undercover investigations. He posed as a model in 2001 to expose the fashion industry, his resulting in the expos� Shut Up and Smile . In Hollywood Undercover , he gives us a unique and scandalous glimpse behind the scenes of the movie business. This time he poses as an aspiring actor and soon finds himself with an agent, a job offer (admittedly in a hardcore porn film) and ultimately a part in The Aviator , directed by Martin Scorcese. In the interim, he is surprised to uncover anti-Semitism in Hollywood; infiltrates the Church of Scientology, whose celebrity stable includes Tom Cruise and John Travolta; and meets numerous A-listers, including Brad Pitt, Barbra Streisand, and Leonardo DiCaprio, who give him the inside track on what life in Hollywood is really like.

In the spring of 1937, Brooklyn’s Daniel Fuchs, twenty-seven years old and already the author of three remarkable novels (now collected as The Brooklyn Novels), came to Hollywood to bang out a treatment of one of his short stories. His thirteen-week contract turned into a permanent residence―and a lifelong love affair with the movie business. Fuchs worked with the best: Warner and M-G-M and RKO, Wilder and Huston and Joe Pasternak, Raft and Cagney and Doris Day. He spent his days crafting screenplays, but off the lot he continued to write prose, mainly stories for Collier’s and The New Yorker and non-fiction “Letters from Hollywood” for Commentary. The Golden West collects, for the first time, the best of Fuch’s writings about studio life, from a novice screenwriter’s anxious first impressions to a fifty-year veteran’s mellow memoirs. Fuchs may have loved Hollywood, but he saw life as it is, gold and tinsel both, and described it without falling into easy sentiment or condescending laughter.