When Hollywood Had a King; The Reign of Lew Wasserman, Who Leveraged Talent into Power and Influence

New York: Random House, 2003. First Edition (stated). Hardcover. xiv, 512, [2] pages. Includes Illustrations, Introduction, Acknowledgments, Source Notes, and Index. Also includes 6 chapters: The Two Caesars; Monopoly Power; Political Might; Dominion; Wasserman & Son; and Lost Empire. Connie Bruck is an American journalist and a reporter on subjects covering business and politics. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1989. Before joining The New Yorker, she was a staff writer at The American Lawyer for nine years. Her stories have also appeared in the Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Atlantic Monthly. Connie Bruck's pieces have won multiple reporting and journalism awards. She is the author of three books: Master of the Game, The Predators’ Ball, and When Hollywood Had a King. In this latter book, Connie Bruck tells the sweeping story of MCA and its brilliant leader, a man who transformed the entertainment industry--businessman, politician, tactician, and visionary Lew Wasserman. Derived from a Kirkus review: The story of MCA and its unrivaled influence on the culture and business of entertainment under perhaps the most powerful man about whom most Americans know nothing. Following MCA founder Jules Stein and his band-booking business from Chicago to Hollywood in the mid-1920s, New Yorker staff writer Bruck shapes the conduit opened between Tinseltown and Styne’s sub-rosa associates, the Chicago mob. Roots on the rough side would make MCA “too aggressive, too smart, and too streetwise” for most contenders in years to come, she notes. But it was the hiring 12 years later of a former Cleveland movie usher named Lou (later self-amended to Lew) Wasserman that put what was by then a multitalent agency on the road to forging Hollywood history and, for decades, uncontested dominion. Wasserman broke the back of the old studio-mogul empire by getting Jimmy Stewart the first star’s piece-of-the-action deal from a house that didn’t have cash up front; turning MCA into a production outfit that rushed in to “save” nascent TV networks then, in no time, dictating entire program lineups. He did business with presidents too: Lew dined intimately with LBJ at the White House; in 1950 he had turned to his client and Screen Actors Guild president Ronald Reagan to push a touchy labor situation MCA’s way, then, 30 years later, just as handily got “Ronnie,” as US President, to call off the FCC, a supposedly independent agency, from enforcing nonsyndication rules against TV production firms. A monumental piece of work, stuffed to the gills with both clean and dirty secrets. Condition: Very good / Very good.

Keywords: Lew Wasserman, Music Corporation of America, Talent Agency, Hollywood, Edgar Bronfman, Sidney Korshak, MCA, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Taft Schreiber, Screen Actors, Sidney Sheinberg, Jules Stein, Jack Valenti, Edie Wasserman

ISBN: 0375501681

[Book #80405]

Price: $27.50

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