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The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA, and the Hidden History of Hollywood
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 790
EAN: 9780306810503
ISBN: 0306810506
Label: Da Capo Press
Manufacturer: Da Capo Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 600
Publication Date: April 19, 2001
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Studio: Da Capo Press
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Editorial Review:
"I run all the studios," 38-year-old Lew Wasserman boasted in 1951 when turning down an offer to run MGM. Indeed, he did. As president of MCA, the most powerful talent agency of its time, Wasserman gained unprecedented artistic and financial clout for Hollywood's top stars, hastening the end of the studio system. Not that he did it out of the goodness of his heart. The canny, ruthless Wasserman was famous for inventing new ways to increase MCA's percentage, most notably by bundling clients into packages the agency produced for the burgeoning television market--a glaring conflict of interest that finally prompted a Justice Department investigation. Veteran movie journalist Dennis McDougal (author of Fatal Subtraction: The Inside Story of Buchwald v. Paramount) uses Wasserman's career as a case study in how the entertainment industry has changed over the course of the 20th century. He chronicles MCA's evolution from a band-booking business in wide-open Jazz Age Chicago (where persistent rumors about the company's Mob ties began) to a postwar movie and TV powerhouse to a Japanese-owned subsidiary in the 1990s. Seamlessly blending biography, business reporting, and juicy celebrity anecdotes, this is first-rate showbiz muckraking. --Wendy Smith
The reviewer of the Boston Globe said point blank: "Over the years, I've read hundreds of books on Hollywood and the movie business, and this one is right at the top." As the elusive, tyrannical head of the Music Corporation of America (MCA) until the 1990s, Lew Wasserman was the most powerful and feared man in show business for more than half a century. His career spanned the entire history of the movies, from the silent era to the present, and he was guru to Alfred Hitchcock, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, and Jimmy Stewart, and to a new generation of filmmakers beginning with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. For more than four years, Dennis McDougal interviewed over 350 people who knew the man with the giant dark horn-rimmed glasses—colleagues, relatives, rivals—and drew on tens of thousands of pages of documents to produce this extraordinary and first-ever portrait of a legend and his times, a book that the New York Times Book Review called "thoroughly reported and engrossing" and that the Daily News called, simply, "a bombshell."
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - A workout of a good trip through an amazing man's eventful life
Fantastically well-researched, exhaustively detailed book that is a treasure trove to anyone lured by the business of Hollywood. There is so much to this book that the inter-weaving of vaudeville, television, film is made to appear seamless, which at MCA, was the whole plan. One learns of Wasserman, MCA, and a whole lot of other trivia, stories and tidbits from the golden era of television and film. Like so many biographies, the latter years of the subject's life become the most scant and in need ... Read More
Rating: - Fantastic
If you are only vaguely interested in how Hollywood was really ruled in the 40s - 70s, buy this book. Great insight. A must read for anyone in the industry.
Rating:  - Not my kind of book
What is so bad about people starting a business that mushrooms and has some control over an industry and the people it represents? This author had something against Jules Stein, Lew Wasserman, their wives, the employees, you name it-right from the beginning. And he is determined to prove I guess how awful they were and how big and corrupt their business is. I don't think there's any reason for a expose of MCA and the people who ran it. If it wasn't them it would have been someone. Plus, I do not ... Read More
Rating:  - Often Funny
Good book, very funny and detailed. Read it
after listening to the interview on First Voice.
The interview is online at
http://www.7to7.net/mcd.html
There's a transcript for those using dial up.
--J. R.
Rating:  - Not For Me, But...
If you like Hollywood gossip columns, you'll like this.
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