Who Killed Hollywood?: And Put The Tarnish On Tinseltown - Hardcover

Bart, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1580631169 ISBN 13: 9781580631167

Publisher: Renaissance Books, 2000

Synopsis

Memo to: Filmmakers, Dealmakers, Scribes, Stars, Suits, and Readers

Who killed Hollywood? Who's responsible for studios hellbent on assembly-line "event" pictures? Why are production costs so high that no one can take artistic risks? Who decided that the studios should be a development arm of them parks? What happened to putting actual stories with characters onscreen?

And while we're at it, what happened to taste? Where are the believable human characters buried? Are all the execs out of control? How does so much money get spent for so little?

Who Killed Hollywood? is a passionate love/hate letter to the film industry. In it, Peter Bart pulls together his best columns form Variety and GQ. He groups them, juxtaposes them, and interprets them, outlining in detail the history and inner workings of Hollywood. This could only be done by someone powerful enough to phone an star or head of studio and have his calls taken on the first ring.

In story after story, Bart shows how the major studios have diverted their energies away from production of the shrewdly crafted pictures that once made the industry powerful. There isn't, for example, much range or innovation in the movies. There is only a handful of salable subjects-natural disasters, aliens, dinosaurs, ghosts, monsters, or any combination thereof. All the subjects easily parlayed into theme-park environments, action figures, video games, and clothing lines. Similarly, since Jaws twenty years ago, there's been a very short list of acceptable settings. The 1998 Academy Award nominations for best picture all went to films set in Elizabethan times or during World War II. A few years ago it looked as though Pulp Fiction and other independent films were going to save showbiz. Now independent producers like Miramax and New Line have been acquired by conglomerates.

Who and what will resurrect Hollywood? Peter Bart has the answers.

About this title

Review

In a period when Hollywood is not just doing okay but has become positively enthroned as justification for the octoplex, what is Peter Bart asking, exactly? In this guileful series of columns first published in the pages of Variety and GQ, Bart paints his bull's-eye on the new cipher-titans of Tinseltown--the media megalopolises, the conglomerate tycoons, the deal-making super-agents and, oh yeah, the $20 million actors: "Given the mania to develop new Disney Worlds," he writes, "movies themselves have all too often become special-effects odysseys devoid of personal story or point of view." Bart has bite too. With a history as an executive at Paramount and Sony, where he put together movies such as The Godfather and Chinatown, he has a Rolodex that includes truth-tellers like Terrence Malick and Robert Towne and insider scoops galore. So whether he's analyzing the "golden gut" that tells Robert Redford what script to choose, describing Warren Beatty's care with words even during "sexual congress," rehashing the Eisner-Katzenberg show, or writing acid memos to Joe "Basic Instinct" Eszterhas, Bart's credentials are undeniable. Still, the really good stuff is buried in stories of lesser-knowns like David Begelman and his protégé William Tennant, who crashed and burned, respectively, on a check-forging scandal and cocaine addiction. Tennant's tale is a weird Hollywood epic. At one point he'd risen to being Roman Polanski's agent, but his addiction lowered him to earning his bones selling sandwiches off a catering truck. Years later Bart saw him rise again, via video sales in London, which made him millions. "This is a business book," he concludes coldly of Michael Eisner's autobiography. Same goes for Who Killed Hollywood--but with the difference that this book combines juicy gossip with that rare thing, a moral backbone. --Lyall Bush

About the Author

Peter Bart is editor-in-chief of Variety, Daily Variety, and Daily Variety-Gotham Edition. A true Hollywood insider, he has been a studio executive at Paramount and MGM/UA, and a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. He is the author of The Gross, Fadeout: The Calamitous Final Days of MGM, and two novels. His columns in GQ and Variety are widely respected, if not feared, in the industry.

About this edition

• Publisher: Renaissance Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1580631169
• ISBN 13: 9781580631167
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 399