My Amazon Review of James Stewart's and Rachel Abrams' "Unscripted: The Epic Battle......"

Sex, Lies and a Boardroom Battle

 

James Stewart and Rachel Abrams have really written two books. The first is about the sexual proclivities of the media mogul and Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone and the second one is about the boardroom battle for the control of CBS which also involves the sexual proclivities of its CEO Leslie Moonves.

 

Sumner Redstone, a self-made billionaire, who in his 80’s has two live in paramours who try to take him for all he has got. The two paramours Sidney Holland and Manuela Herzer end up with over $150 million and almost succeeded in taking over his entire estate. They ultimately fail because Redstone’s estranged daughter Shari prevails in a legal fight to gain control over her father’s estate. The Redstone family seems to have put the “dys” into its dysfunctionality.

 

The second part of the book deals with Shari Redstone gaining control over CBS in an epic battle with Les Moonves. There are quite a few of boardroom machinations, but Moonves falls victim to the investigative reporting of the New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow. Moonves’ very aggressive behavior towards too many women finally caught up to him in the growing #MeToo climate. What is striking is that the CBS board was very nonchalant in dealing with all of the accusations facing Moonves. If Moonves didn’t mislead his board and its attorneys from the start, he just might have survived. Further all of the incidents discussed occurred prior to his becoming CEO of CBS. All of this corporate dysfunction is going on when CBS and Viacom should have been focusing on the competitive threat coming from streaming.

 

It is obvious that Shari Redstone talked the writers into adopting her view as to all that happened with her father and CBS. My guess is that her version of the events described are not quite accurate and she might be far from the aggrieved daughter depicted in the book.

 

Nevertheless, despite overdoing their view of “white male privilege” when they are really talking about the privileges of the very rich and powerful, Stewart and Abrams have brought us a behind the scenes of view of what can happen in the upper echelons of the media business.

For the full Amazon URL see: Sex, Lies and a Boardroom Battle (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Sam Wasson's "The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood"

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood*

Sam Wasson has written a very long (416 pages in the print edition) and detailed book about the making of the classic 1974 movie “Chinatown.” It is far more than that in that he introduces the biographies of his four leading protagonists and it is in part a social history of Hollywood and Los Angeles.

His protagonists are screenwriter Robert Towne, who was born in San Pedro; Krakow born director Roman Polanski, actor Jack Nicholson of Asbury Park, New Jersey and producer Robert Evans, the son of a Manhattan dentist who served his Harlem clientele. These Hollywood icons were not to the manner born.

Robert Towne got his idea for “Chinatown” after reading Carey McWilliams classic history of Los Angeles, “Islands on the Land.” From that book he learned how the City of Los Angeles “stole” the water rights to the Owens Valley, 260 miles to the north. It was that water that enabled Los Angeles to become the great city of today. As Balzac once said that behind every great fortune there is a crime.

However Towne’s “Chinatown” is not a literal history. In order to copy the film noir themes of the 1930s, his water grab takes place in 1937, not the 1908-1913 time period when the great water project was developed. Further not much happens in the real Chinatown which is a metaphor for the corruption of Los Angeles.

We see Jack Nicholson coming into his own as a star. First in Towne’s “The Last Detail” and later in “Chinatown.” We learn how the movie simulated the breaking of his nose and for a star he unlikely as it sounds wore a bandage around his nose for most of the movie.

Producer and Paramount studio boss Robert Evans rightly fancies himself as the new Irving Thalberg, MGM’s legendary studio boss of the 1930s. He brings Paramount hit after hit, especially “Love Story” and “The Godfather” series. However he uses cocaine to excess and after his divorce from Ali McGraw he surrounds himself with a bevy of lovelies.

To me the most interesting character is director Roman Polanski. It he who rewrote Towne’s script and made the movie what it is. Polanski suffered from the Nazis and later the Communists in Poland, but manages to get to Hollywood. There he marries the actress Sharon Tate who while eight months pregnant was brutally murdered by the Manson gang. As a sidebar after the Tate murder, fear gripped the oh so liberal Hollywood community that there was a rash of gun buying for self-protection.

Given Polanski’s childhood and the brutal murder of his wife and unborn baby it is no wonder that he became so messed up with drugs and young women. That reached its denouement in 1977 when Polanski was charged with rape and drugging a 13 year old girl. Although the sentence was reduced to unlawful sex with a minor, he skipped the country and hasn’t been here since. Had #MeToo been around in 1977 Polanski would have been sent to the slammer for a long time.

I experienced Wasson’s Los Angeles when I first moved there in 1964. To him and to me the 1960s were a great time of optimism and only to him everything turned bad in the 1970s. I was on the periphery of Hollywood at the time knowing a few A-List movie stars and having two friends who wrote for movies and television. To Wasson Hollywood was about art up until the big 1975 hit “Jaws” hit the screen and then it became all about money. Not true. Hollywood was always all about money. Just look at the big houses in Beverly Hills, Brentwood and Malibu and the lavish parties. My guess is that Wasson took Mike Davis’ dystopian “City of Quartz” too seriously.

Readers will learn an awful lot how a great movie was made including costumes, sets and cinematography. For me the technical discussions and nuances of the personalities involved were a bit much. And one more thing the year “Chinatown” was up for an Academy Award “Godfather Part 2” won and its only major award was for Towne’s best original screenplay.

*With apologies to Quentin Tarantino.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2JY38YJQP6BGG/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Bob Woodward's "Fear: Trump in the White House"

LOSER

Famed journalist Bob Woodward has written a book about an undisciplined narcissist who also happens to be a congenital liar; unfortunately he is the President of the United States. Much of the juicy tidbits in Woodward’s book have already been widely disseminated in the media so I won’t bore you by repeating them.

What comes across loud and clear is that Trump hates trade. He even writes in a briefing packet “Trade is bad”.  Like a stubborn 14 year old he is unyielding in his beliefs about trade even the face of strong evidence placed before him by his staff. As was widely noted Trump was ready to blow up the Korea –U.S. trade agreement just when we were working hand in glove with South Korea on the North Korea nuke problem. Woodward demonstrates how that jerk, Peter Navarro with his mercantilist views, plays to Trump’s worst instincts and somehow has easy access to the Oval Office.

Woodward was very successful in getting leading administration figures to talk to him mostly on deep background, but sometimes on the record. We can hear the voices of Steve Bannon, Gary Cohn, Trump lawyer John Dowd, Lindsay Graham, John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, Rob Porter, Reince Priebus, and Rex Tillerson. We continually see Priebus, Cohn, Porter and McMaster valiantly trying save Trump from his worst instincts. Although they had some successes, in the end they failed. It is a shame that Porter’s domestic difficulties forced him out; he was a real check on Trump.

The book ends in March so there is no discussion of the North Korea, G-7 and Putin summits. Hopefully Woodward will soon give us some insights into those events. Further for those looking for evidence of a Trump-Russia conspiracy, it is not here.

Let me close with what Steve Bannon said with respect to the effects of #MeToo on the coming election.

  “Trump is the perfect foil. He’s the bad father, the terrible first husband, the

     boyfriend that f*****d you over and wasted all those years and (you) gave up

     your youth for, and then dumped you. And the terrible boss that grabbed you

     by the p***y all the time and demeaned you.”

Woodward gives the reader a real flavor of how the Trump White House works and he proves that Jeb Bush was dead right when he said that Donald Trump would be the “chaos president.”

The full Amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3T7G4N8GXMMXZ/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B075RV48W3