Moneywood: Hollywood in Its Last Age of Excess

Stadiem, a screenwriter and celebrity biographer, provides an exhaustive insider account of the power players of 1980s Hollywood who brought Rambo, Flashdance, and Beverly Hills Cop to the big screen. It was a new age: the studio system and the old guard (Richard Zanuck, Alan Ladd Jr., and Robert Evans) were out in favor of the money men (Eisner, Ovitz, Katzenberg, and Bruckheimer). With Reagan, an entertainer turned world leader in the White House, the decade saw the stock market triple and the cost of making films, credited to Ovitz, rise 400% between 1977 and 1985. “Movies,” Stadiem argues, “became the country’s new religion, where the Cineplex overwhelmed the church.” Hollywood behind the scenes was dominated almost exclusively by white Jewish men, although there were a few notable exceptions such as the infamous Jon Peters, who got his start cutting hair, dated Barbra Streisand, and parlayed that invaluable connection into briefly becoming a key figure at Columbia. There were few opportunities for minorities or women and even the female go-getters who had a little power, like Columbia’s Dawn Steel or Fox studio head Sherry Lansing, lacked the influence and authority to greenlight a movie. A little more than a decade later, however, virtually none of the men who had shaped the new Tinsel Town were still on the scene. Stadiem captures this fleeting sentiment that all that glitters may be gold, but not for long. (Jan.)