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Shark stories | page 1, 2
The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New Hollywood By Tom King
The Keys to the Kingdom: How Michael Eisner Lost His Grip By Kim Masters Morrow, 469 pages
Both of these books encountered trouble on the way to the bookstore. King began his biography with Geffen's cooperation -- like Geffen, King is gay, and Geffen hoped a gay journalist's view would result in a portrait of himself as a dignified, empowering role model. (He hoped to come across as a kind of showbiz Warren Buffett.) Partway through King's research, though, Geffen shut King off without much explanation. Still, the resulting book is anything but an attack. As a writer, King, a Wall Street Journal reporter, shows calm and intelligence, and he manages the occasional low-key insight. But most readers will probably wish that he'd taken the time to polish his many not-yet-there sentences, and made the effort to move his story along with more zip. Respectful and plodding, the book might have been written by a gentleman's-butler robot. Masters' book has a very different tone -- it has the fake urgency and portentousness of a New York magazine cover story. She promises to explain much of significance; "the Hollywood power structure would never be the same" is a phrase that seems to recur every few pages. Yet she never gets around to telling us what the change is. Her book was commissioned by Broadway Books, which dumped it as "unacceptable," before being purchased and released by Morrow. In fact, it's competent, pointless and rather deranged. Masters seems like a classic example of a frantic media broad: "Stop me before I report again" is the subtext of her every paragraph. The same desperation also damaged "Hit and Run," an account of the Jon Peters/Peter Guber reign at Columbia that she co-wrote with Nancy Griffin a few years ago. Eisner often comes across as a hazy figure; he refused the author's requests for interviews, so Masters relies heavily on Katzenberg. Although Masters is a contributing editor at Time and Vanity Fair, and an adequate writer of overheated magazine prose, she seems to have no sense of perspective, and a compulsion to gather and write down facts. A typical sentence: "DreamWorks lost out on the chance to have a Burger King tie-in by moving up the film, because such efforts must be planned many months in advance." What is it that leaves her so clueless about what readers might actually care to know? Perhaps she just has little to say about the human content of her material, and so relies on facts, facts and more facts to carry her through. But page after page of descriptions of contract negotiations do not make for riveting reading. Geffen pops up on occasion, yet you'd hardly suspect from Masters' descriptions of him how high-strung and abusive he can be. (King, in his index under "Geffen, David Lawrence, screaming of," has 22 entries.) As books, both are juiceless and pitilessly overdetailed. They do, however, leave you wondering: Why do so many articles and books about life behind the scenes in show business get published? My hunch is that it's because editors of magazines and books see themselves reflected in the movie moguls and businesspeople. But perhaps readers actually like and demand these books and articles. After all, it's still show business -- bigger, sexier and more glamorous than our usual lives. These are stroke books for the power-and-glamour-hungry. There is such a thing as a movie-business book that provides some illumination. Although garish and slapdash, such in-the-midst-of-it works as Jane Hamsher's "Killer Instinct" (about the making of "Natural Born Killers"), Charles Fleming's "High Concept" (a down and dirty biography of Don Simpson), Robert Evans' breathtakingly shameless autobiography "The Kid Stays in the Picture," and Julia Phillips' notorious "You'll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again" do give a reader a sense of what life in the movie business is like. You feel that you've encountered something authentic. There are also a handful of civilized books that tell you directly about the business: Steven Bach's "Final Cut," for example, about United Artists and the "Heaven's Gate" disaster, and Julie Salamon's account of the "Bonfire of the Vanities" fiasco, "The Devil's Candy." The screenwriter William Goldman recently published "Which Lie Did I Tell," a sequel to his "Adventures in the Screen Trade" -- as a writer, he's tough and self-satisfied, but he does a good job of spelling out what it is the movie business exists to do, and how it generally goes about doing it. "The Operator" and "The Keys to the Kingdom," though, are predicated entirely on our (supposedly) pre-existing interest in all things behind-the-scenes. King manages a few passages about Geffen's taste, Masters almost none about Eisner's or Katzenberg's. As character studies, these flattened-out artifacts are just raw material. And as for the impact these men have had on the products their businesses make, or the culture at large? Next to nada. Too long, too sober and too well-vetted to qualify as guilty-pleasure wallows in show-biz outrageousness and misbehavior, these books are likely to please only those readers whose player-within demands constant feeding.
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