In When Hollywood Had a King, the distinguished journalist Connie Bruck tells the sweeping story of MCA and its brilliant leader, a man who transformed the entertainment industry— businessman, politician, tactician, and visionary Lew Wasserman. The Music Corporation of America was founded in Chicago in 1924 by Dr. Jules Stein, an ophthalmologist with a gift for booking bands. Twelve years later, Stein moved his operations west to Beverly Hills and hired Lew Wasserman. From his meager beginnings as a movie-theater usher in Cleveland, Wasserman ultimately ascended to the post of president of MCA, and the company became the most powerful force in Hollywood, regarded with a mixture of fear and awe. In his signature black suit and black knit tie, Was-serman took Hollywood by storm. He shifted the balance of power from the studios—which had seven-year contractual strangleholds on the stars—to the talent, who became profit partners. When an antitrust suit forced MCA’s evolution from talent agency to film- and television-production company, it was Wasserman who parlayed the control of a wide variety of entertainment and media products into a new type of Hollywood power base. There was only Washington left to conquer, and conquer it Wasserman did, quietly brokering alliances with Democratic and Republican administrations alike. That Wasserman’s reach extended from the underworld to the White House only added to his mystique. Among his friends were Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa, mob lawyer Sidney Korshak, and gangster Moe Dalitz—along with Presidents Johnson, Clinton, and especially Reagan, who enjoyed a particularly close and mutually beneficial relationship with Wasserman. He was equally intimate with Hollywood royalty, from Bette Davis and Jimmy Stewart to Steven Spielberg, who began his career at MCA and once described Wasserman’s eyeglasses as looking like two giant movie screens. The history of MCA is really the history of a revolution. Lew Wasserman ushered in the Hollywood we know today. He is the link between the old-school moguls with their ironclad studio contracts and the new industry defined by multimedia conglomerates, power agents, multimillionaire actors, and profit sharing. In the hands of Connie Bruck, the story of Lew Wasserman’s rise to power takes on an almost Shakespearean scope. When Hollywood Had a King reveals the industry’s greatest untold story: how a stealthy, enterprising power broker became, for a time, Tinseltown’s absolute monarch.

In When Hollywood Had a King, the distinguished journalist Connie Bruck tells the sweeping story of MCA and its brilliant leader, a man who transformed the entertainment industry— businessman, politician, tactician, and visionary Lew Wasserman. The Music Corporation of America was founded in Chicago in 1924 by Dr. Jules Stein, an ophthalmologist with a gift for booking bands. Twelve years later, Stein moved his operations west to Beverly Hills and hired Lew Wasserman. From his meager beginnings as a movie-theater usher in Cleveland, Wasserman ultimately ascended to the post of president of MCA, and the company became the most powerful force in Hollywood, regarded with a mixture of fear and awe. In his signature black suit and black knit tie, Was-serman took Hollywood by storm. He shifted the balance of power from the studios—which had seven-year contractual strangleholds on the stars—to the talent, who became profit partners. When an antitrust suit forced MCA’s evolution from talent agency to film- and television-production company, it was Wasserman who parlayed the control of a wide variety of entertainment and media products into a new type of Hollywood power base. There was only Washington left to conquer, and conquer it Wasserman did, quietly brokering alliances with Democratic and Republican administrations alike. That Wasserman’s reach extended from the underworld to the White House only added to his mystique. Among his friends were Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa, mob lawyer Sidney Korshak, and gangster Moe Dalitz—along with Presidents Johnson, Clinton, and especially Reagan, who enjoyed a particularly close and mutually beneficial relationship with Wasserman. He was equally intimate with Hollywood royalty, from Bette Davis and Jimmy Stewart to Steven Spielberg, who began his career at MCA and once described Wasserman’s eyeglasses as looking like two giant movie screens. The history of MCA is really the history of a revolution. Lew Wasserman ushered in the Hollywood we know today. He is the link between the old-school moguls with their ironclad studio contracts and the new industry defined by multimedia conglomerates, power agents, multimillionaire actors, and profit sharing. In the hands of Connie Bruck, the story of Lew Wasserman’s rise to power takes on an almost Shakespearean scope. When Hollywood Had a King reveals the industry’s greatest untold story: how a stealthy, enterprising power broker became, for a time, Tinseltown’s absolute monarch.

Tony Magistrale explores many of the movie versions of Stephen King's works and provides important insights into both the films and the fiction on which they are based.

Ever wonder why so many B actors wind up as A-grade politicians? Or how the casting couch worked? Acclaimed author Kathleen Sharp traces the influence of show business through the lives of its first power couple. Edie and Lew Wasserman built the world’s largest talent agency, MCA, created the multibillion-dollar Universal Studios, and helped shape Washington, DC. Starting from MCA’s birth in gangland Chicago, Lew represented stars such as Jimmy Stewart and Marilyn Monroe; pioneered TV with Leave It to Beaver and Miami Vice; spawned the blockbuster movie model with Psycho and Jaws; and developed a mega–theme park. His savvy wife, Edie, was the daughter of a mob attorney, the queen of A-list parties, and Lew’s secret agent who boosted their status. Yet, the couple was attacked by rivals, federal prosecutors, and their own protégés. Even so, over the course of seven decades they managed to vanquish their enemies and parlay their influence far beyond Sunset Strip into governors’ mansions, Senate chambers, and the White House. At the end, Edie and Lew became diplomats, kingmakers, and philanthropists, who elevated the fortunes of middle-class workers and California itself. Based on some four hundred interviews, this book features Janet Leigh, Clark Gable, Grace Kelly, John Belushi, Jean Stein, and Steven Spielberg along with the Kennedys, the Johnsons, the Reagans, and the Clintons. It’s a fascinating read about how two kids from Cleveland created the largest entertainment conglomerate in the world and wound up ruling twentieth-century America.

Winner of the 2003 Trillium Book Award "Stories are wondrous things," award-winning author and scholar Thomas King declares in his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures. "And they are dangerous." Beginning with a traditional Native oral story, King weaves his way through literature and history, religion and politics, popular culture and social protest, gracefully elucidating North America's relationship with its Native peoples. Native culture has deep ties to storytelling, and yet no other North American culture has been the subject of more erroneous stories. The Indian of fact, as King says, bears little resemblance to the literary Indian, the dying Indian, the construct so powerfully and often destructively projected by White North America. With keen perception and wit, King illustrates that stories are the key to, and only hope for, human understanding. He compels us to listen well.

Once you've won a car on a game show, been an actor, owned a phone sex company, been infected with HIV, slept with a movie icon and developed a drug addiction, you've pretty much done the Hollywood thing. In this true, first-person account of the 1980's, Los Angeles transforms an all-American boy from an actor in commercials plugging fast food to a gay phone line worker pushing fast sex. King experiences firsthand nearly every gay social milestone of an astonishing decade-drug use, the phone sex trade, the onset of AIDS, Rock Hudson, assisted suicide, anonymous encounters, the early development of AIDS organizations and activism, Magic Johnson's announcement-and shares his experiences with disarming humor and startling candor. AIDS eventually converts King's plunge into sex and drugs to an increasing awareness of mortality-and a renewed search for meaning.

What is "New Hollywood"? The "art" cinema of the Hollywood "Renaissance" or the corporate controlled blockbuster? The introverted world of Travis Bickle or the action heroics of Indiana Jones, Buzz Lightyear, and Maximus the Gladiator? Innovative departures from the "classical" Hollywood style or superficial glitz, special effects, and borrowings from MTV? Wholesale change or important continuities with Hollywood's past? The answer suggested by Geoff King in New Hollywood Cinema is all of these and more. He examines New Hollywood from three main perspectives: film style, industry, and the social-historical context. Each is considered in its own right, sometimes resulting in different ways of defining New Hollywood. But one of the book's central arguments is that a combination of these approaches is needed if we are to understand the latest incarnations of the cinema that continues to dominate the global market. King looks at the Hollywood "Renaissance" from the late 1960s to the late 1970s, industrial factors shaping the construction of the corporate blockbuster, the role of auteur directors, genre and stardom in New Hollywood, narrative and spectacle in the contemporary blockbuster, and the relationship between production for the big and small screens. Case studies considered include Taxi Driver, Godzilla, and Gladiator, tracing the roots of New Hollywood from the 1950s to the start of the twenty-first century.

“The definitive history of the studio” created by the larger-than-life team of Spielberg, Geffen, and Katzenberg (Los Angeles Times). For sixty years, since the birth of United Artists, the studio landscape was unchanged. Then came Hollywood’s Circus Maximus—created by director Steven Spielberg, billionaire David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who gave the world The Lion King—an entertainment empire called DreamWorks. Now Nicole LaPorte, who covered the company for Variety, goes behind the hype to reveal for the first time the delicious truth of what happened. Readers will feel they are part of the creative calamities of moviemaking as LaPorte’s fly-on-the-wall detail shows us Hollywood’s bizarre rules of business. We see the clashes between the often-otherworldly Spielberg’s troops and Katzenberg’s warriors, the debacles and disasters, but also the Oscar-winning triumphs, including Saving Private Ryan. We watch as the studio burns through billions of dollars, its rich owners get richer, and everybody else suffers. LaPorte displays Geffen, seducing investors like Microsoft’s Paul Allen, showing his steel against CAA’s Michael Ovitz, and staging fireworks during negotiations with Paramount and Disney. Here is a blockbuster behind-the-scenes Hollywood story—up close, glamorous, and gritty.

A novel of exhilarating range, magical realism, and history—a dazzling retelling of Liberia’s formation Wayétu Moore’s powerful debut novel, She Would Be King, reimagines the dramatic story of Liberia’s early years through three unforgettable characters who share an uncommon bond. Gbessa, exiled from the West African village of Lai, is starved, bitten by a viper, and left for dead, but still she survives. June Dey, raised on a plantation in Virginia, hides his unusual strength until a confrontation with the overseer forces him to flee. Norman Aragon, the child of a white British colonizer and a Maroon slave from Jamaica, can fade from sight when the earth calls him. When the three meet in the settlement of Monrovia, their gifts help them salvage the tense relationship between the African American settlers and the indigenous tribes, as a new nation forms around them. Moore’s intermingling of history and magical realism finds voice not just in these three characters but also in the fleeting spirit of the wind, who embodies an ancient wisdom. “If she was not a woman,” the wind says of Gbessa, “she would be king.” In this vibrant story of the African diaspora, Moore, a talented storyteller and a daring writer, illuminates with radiant and exacting prose the tumultuous roots of a country inextricably bound to the United States. She Would Be King is a novel of profound depth set against a vast canvas and a transcendent debut from a major new author.