Five Easy Decades: How Jack Nicholson Became the Biggest Movie Star in Modern Times - Hardcover

McDougal, Dennis

3.77

92 ratings by Goodreads

9780471722465: Five Easy Decades: How Jack Nicholson Became the Biggest Movie Star in Modern Times

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0471722464 ISBN 13: 9780471722465

Publisher: Wiley, 2007

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Praise for Five Easy Decades: How Jack Nicholson Became the Biggest Movie Star in Modern Times

"Dennis McDougal is a rare Hollywood reporter: honest, fearless, nobody's fool. This is unvarnished Jack for Jack-lovers and Jack-skeptics but, also, for anyone interested in the state of American culture and celebrity. I always read Mr. McDougal for pointers but worry that he will end up in a tin drum off the coast of New Jersey."
-- Patrick McGilligan, author of Jack's Life and Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light

Praise for Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the L.A. Times Dynasty

"A great freeway pileup--part biography, part dysfunctional family chronicle, and part institutional and urban history, with generous dollops of scandal and gossip."
-- Hendrick Hertzberg, The New Yorker

"McDougal has managed to scale the high walls that have long protected the Chandler clan and returned with wicked tales told by angry ex-wives and jealous siblings."
--The Washington Post

Praise for The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA and the Hidden History of Hollywood

"Real glamour needs a dark side. That is part of the fascination of Dennis McDougal's wonderful book."
--The Economist

"Thoroughly reported and engrossing . . . the most noteworthy trait of MCA was how it hid its power."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Over the years, I've read hundreds of books on Hollywood and the movie business, and this one is right at the top."
-- Michael Blowen, The Boston Globe

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From the Inside Flap:

Five Easy Decades

Unconventional, uninhibited, and unrestrained, Jack Nicholson is both a famous and infamous pop-culture icon known for his romantic escapades, his hair-trigger temper, and his love affair with the L.A. Lakers. Now, this candid, probing biography gives you a spellbinding, incisive look at the megawatt Method actor with the enigmatic Cheshire cat grin.

Jack rose to fame with portrayals of antiheros ranging from the demented, demonic, and despicable to characters who were somehow lovable in spite of their eccentricities. He has won three Oscars and seven Golden Globes, but beyond the accolades and his trademark shades is a man who remains largely unknowable. His bad-boy image masks a complicated past, a complex present, half adozen children, an art collection, and real estate and business empires that have made him one of the world's wealthiest entertainers.

Author Dennis McDougal, a veteran journalist with access to Hollywood's heavy hitters, has scoured public records extending back to the 1930s, spent hundreds of hours in film and public libraries, and interviewed scores of friends, associates, and family who Jack either didn't know or forgot long ago, to create a brutally honest account of Jack's life that unflinchingly recounts the good, the bad, and the just plain unfathomable.

In many ways, Jack's story mirrors that of Hollywood. For fifty years—from J. J. Gittes to the Joker; Easy Rider to Five Easy Pieces; The Shining, Terms of Endearment, and A Few Good Men to As Good as It Gets and The Departed—his life and career reflect the shifting fortunes of an industry that set the cultural pace for America, and then the world. Find out how it all happened, year by year, film by film, through triumph and trauma, in Five Easy Decades.

About the Author:

Dennis McDougal writes about Hollywood for the New York Times. A former Los Angeles Times staff writer, he won more than forty awards for his hard-nosed coverage of the entertainment industry. He is the bestselling author of The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA and the Hidden History of Hollywood and Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the L.A. Times Dynasty.

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