Action! - Hardcover

Cort, Robert

 
9780679452324: Action!
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 067945232X ISBN 13: 9780679452324
Verlag: Random House Inc, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

A.J. Jastrow embarks on a turbulent odyssey through Hollywood as he struggles to build a movie empire, coping with ruthless executives, power-hungry directors, drug-addled actors, the FBI, and his duplicitous mother and son.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert W. Cort has produced fifty-two films, including <i>Outrageous Fortune, Three Men and a Baby, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Mr. Holland’s Opus, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Runaway Bride, Jumanji,</i> and <i>Save the Last Dance.</i> After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton School, he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency and McKinsey & Company. He lives in Los Angeles, California, with his wife, Rosalie Swedlin, a manager of writers and directors. He can be reached via the Internet at www.robertcort.com.

Aus dem Klappentext

What do you do when your oldest friend, Steve McQueen, pulls out his Smith & Wesson and blows your defenseless dining-room chair to smithereens? Or when your hottest client, sex goddess Romy Schneider, demands you leave your wife for her? Those are just a couple of the dilemmas faced by AJ Jastrow, the fictional protagonist of <b>Action!</b><i>,</i> Robert Cort’s page-turning saga about a legendary Hollywood family. <br><br>When we first meet AJ in 1948, a few weeks shy of his thirteenth birthday, he ranks as minor Hollywood royalty―Dad is the movie industry’s most prominent attorney, Mom is a retired actress whose uncle is Adolph Zukor, founder of Paramount. But this year will prove to be the end of the movie industry’s Golden Age and the beginning of exile for the Jastrow family.<br><br>When AJ returns to Tinseltown after a decade’s absence, he realizes that fulfilling his father’s legacy of creating a movie empire will prove a life’s work. Along the way, AJ’s soldiers-in-arms include the Machiavellian producer Ray Stark, who teaches him how to win at Monopoly and studio politics; Wall Street genius Charlie Bluhdorn, who coaxes AJ to fly under the radar on a secret mission; AJ’s wife, Stephanie, who reminds him that a conscience isn’t a luxury; and his daughter and protégée, Jessica, who refuses to leave his side despite irresistible temptation.<br><br>His enemies are formidable: studio president Paul Herzog, who seeks to destroy the son as he did the father; the wily agent Mike Ovitz, who intuits the weaknesses of any rival; AJ’s mother, Hollywood’s wealthiest woman, who cannot abide disloyalty; and AJ’s son, Ricky, an actor of uncommon ability, who holds a devastating grudge against his dad.<br><br>By blending and transforming fact into fiction, by introducing real characters to fictional ones, Robert Cort gives the reader an inside account of Hollywood’s path (and drift) from the end of World War II to the present. And utilizing his insider’s knowledge, gained as one of the town’s premier producers, he provides an intimate chronicle of how movies are really made, how producers work, and how the industry has evolved, often at the cost of its collective soul. Provocative and vastly entertaining, <b>Action!</b> is popular fiction at its best, a story that is both enlightening and great fun to read.

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CHAPTER 1

Harry Jastrow popped the hinge on his gold and porcelain pocket watch. Twenty-two minutes remained until his call to action—too much time to kill and too little to run for cover. Behind its towering bronze doors the Supreme Court stood impregnable. Settle down, Harry. You’re pleading a case, not storming a beach. Regardless of who wins in there, no one dies—just like the movies.

“Your Honors, the Department of Justice has accused the chief executives of Paramount Pictures, RKO, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Twentieth Century–Fox, and Warner Bros. of multiple violations of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. But my clients are not corrupt monopolists. They are, in fact, pioneers who have carved out a new industry. . . .”

“Dad, you’re mumbling.”

Harry smiled reassuringly at AJ, his twelve-year-old son. “I’m rehearsing.”

“Could you do it inside? I need to use the bathroom.”

They marched into the building expecting to confront history; instead, they bumped into Bette Davis mugging for photographers in front of a bust of John Marshall. Was that Clark Gable talking to reporters by the Scales of Justice? The Great Hall looked like the lobby of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre at a world premiere. In lieu of a bullet, Harry bit his bottom lip. He had warned the moguls who ran Hollywood that they couldn’t manipulate the American judicial system like an audience in Peoria. But they’d told him nine old guys in long black robes couldn’t keep their hands out of their pants when Lana Turner winked at them from the front row.

Mel Cantwell, Harry’s Washington-based co-counsel, elbowed through the crowd. “Who’s responsible for this circus?” Harry indicated a longshoreman costumed in a three-piece suit—Spyros Skouras, president of Twentieth Century–Fox. Cantwell mopped his brow with an already damp handkerchief. “The justices hate grandstand plays.”

“Don’t worry, Mel. I’ll be so riveting they won’t notice.”

“Dad, Mr. Cagney says hello.” AJ returned from the men’s room, struggling to comb his unruly hair. “I look like Einstein.”

“You look handsome.” Harry felt guilty because he’d used the last of their Brylcreem to tame his own black mop.

“Sir?” The head of publicity at Warners interrupted. “We need you for a moment.”

Harry checked his watch again, for more than the time. His father had stolen it off the corpse of a Russian nobleman who’d frozen in an ice storm outside St. Petersburg. Too bad Poppa wasn’t alive to see where it had ended up. Ten minutes remained. “Let’s go.”

The publicist escorted him into the courtroom to shake hands with Paul Muni and Lana Turner . . . in a low-cut blouse that might just do the trick. Harry listened dutifully to Muni. “You have to be bold, Jastrow, bold in your speech, bold in your being. That’s how I played The Life of Emile Zola. I’d have won the Oscar if Metro hadn’t bought it for Spencer Tracy.”

“A grave miscarriage of justice.” Harry’s irony sailed past the actor. “Why don’t you folks get seated. Show’s starting any second.”

He nudged his son toward the appellant’s table, but a man with a bald pate and wire-rimmed glasses intercepted them. Adolph Zukor, founder and chairman of Paramount, had spent his life creating an industry that didn’t exist the day he kissed the ground at Ellis Island in 1888. “Bubbala, look how big you’ve grown!” He squeezed the cheeks of his favorite grandnephew. “Did you help your father prepare for today?”

“He didn’t need help,” AJ declared proudly.

Zukor nodded. “Your dad is going to do great! He’s so honest those judges couldn’t not believe a thing he says when he says it.”

The courtroom grew still. Static electricity welded Harry’s suit to his skin. His son and Zukor scurried to the gallery as the marshal’s “Oyez” thundered.

Chief Justice Frederick Vinson pounded his gavel. He reminded Harry of a “hit ’em hard” football coach. “We will hear arguments this morning in the case of United States of America versus Paramount Pictures, et al.”

Robert Wright, the deputy attorney general of the Anti-Trust Division, rose to address the Court. His puritanical upbringing as the son of the demanding architect Frank Lloyd Wright had stripped him of compassion. Like many of his WASP colleagues in the Justice Department, he resented the eastern European Jewish immigrants who wielded untrammeled cultural influence over his country. This was his chance to cut the Horatio Algerbergs down to size. “I have prosecuted scores of businessmen for violations of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, but none has been so deliberate and deceitful a defendant as the so-called Big Five motion picture studios.”

“Basd meg!” Zukor cursed in his native Hungarian, while Skouras muttered an unflattering epithet in Greek.

Wright glared in their direction. “The Big Five not only produce and distribute virtually all the movies made in America, they also own a significant number of the nation’s theaters. They have used their monopoly power to harm independent exhibitors. And who are these exhibitors? They are small businessmen—families, for the most part—working to keep their one theater in operation. The FBI conducted a secret, fifteen-month investigation of five hundred towns which conclusively proved the industry’s guilt. The trial jury convicted the Big Five on all counts. Now the defendants are demanding a reversal. We ask that you order the studios to sell all of their theaters and exit the exhibition business permanently. Divorcement is the only remedy that will curtail their abuses.”

“Off with their heads!” “Hang ’em high!” “Fry the bastards!” That was how “divorcement” translated to panicky movie executives. Economic catastrophe loomed because the studios earned most of their profits from their theaters. In typically understated fashion, Variety, Hollywood’s newspaper of record, had labeled today’s hearing Armageddon.

Harry knew that the Big Five had played far over the edge of legality for decades, so three months ago he’d negotiated a settlement with the Justice Department that would have allowed them to maintain ownership of a limited number of theaters. But the moguls were too greedy to lose any profits. They’d rejected the compromise and assigned Harry the mission of keeping the Court from approving Wright’s draconian request.

He’d reminded everyone that, as a studio executive, he hadn’t tried a case in years. But his bosses and colleagues had argued that no one knew more about the issues than him—including their attorneys, who’d lost in the lower courts—and no one presented a more true-blue image of the industry. Insiders whispered that if Harry succeeded, he was destined to head a studio. But that prospect meant nothing today. It was the specter of failure that gripped him. The bigwigs had a habit of pumping up their expectations only to wind up bitterly disappointed. He feared joining those actors marked for stardom who’d disappeared after the movies that were supposed to make them stars died at the box office.

For fifteen minutes Justices Black, Jackson, and Burton lobbed softball questions at his opponent. Harry exchanged disbelieving looks with Cantwell. Did the justices intend to invite...

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Verlag
Random House Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
067945232X
ISBN 13 
9780679452324
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
388
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Purmerul LTD
https://strengholt.nl/en/

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