Portfolio at NYU

David McClintick, Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street (Random House, 1982)
Reissued by HarperBusiness in paperback in 2002.

Former Wall Street Journal writer McClintick doesn't waste any time putting the reader in the middle of the late-Seventies Hollywood scandal that would "jostle the foundations of the world's most glamorous industry." From the first chapter, McClintick has actor Cliff Robertson, forthright and loaded with common sense, sitting on the patio of an L.A. home he had rented, examining an IRS 1099 form claiming that Columbia Pictures had paid him $10,000 in 1976. The money was supposedly paid to cover Robertson's expenses while promoting Obsession, Brian de Palma's 1976 homage of sorts to Hitchcock's Vertigo.

But Robertson remembered that he never had received the $10,000 and asked his secretary to call the accounting department at Columbia to determine where the money had gone. After more than several months, the answer came back: Robertson's former "flamboyant" agent, David Begelman, now the head of the studio, had signed Robertson's name on the check. Soon, Begelman would be charged with embezzlement and later convicted. And "Cliff Robertson soon would be engulfed in a holocaust of controversy and pain that would maim several lives, including his own," McClintick writes. The scandal would "wound hundreds of people."

Indecent Exposure is a fast-paced, engaging re-creation of the scandal, a book that could be just as useful to budding business journalists as to entertainment writers. The usual aesthetic pitfalls of breathless nonfiction narratives apply here (McClintick describes a bank headquarters as "a twelve-story building of gray-green glass and beveled mirror trim at Little Santa Monica Boulevard and Camden Drive opposite the Mandarin Restaurant and Dick Dorso's fashion boutique," as if that actually tells the reader anything).

MORE:
Salon.com on the Script of McClintick's Book