|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Tom King, The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New Hollywood (Random House, 2000) Published in paperback by Broadway Books in 2001 The Operator garnered copious pre-publication publicity because it promised to describe in detail the machinations of music and film mogul David Geffen, known to many as "the most hated man in Hollywood" because of his apparent duplicity and sudden rages. The book certainly lives up to the hype: The Operator is a disturbing read; pure capitalism, and pure capitalists, can be disturbing. But King has accomplished a commendable journalistic feat, logging more than 300 interviews and persevering after Geffen refused to cooperate with him after he realized that King, the late Wall Street Journal's Hollywood columnist, was going to tell the entire story and not just the self-indulgent version he wanted to propagate. There are explicitly detailed passages in The Operator in which Geffen makes promises to various filmmakers to not meddle in their creative vision and then demands happy endings, insisting that that's what he had bought from them all along. King's fluid but unintriguing prose and Geffen's "searing focus, unyielding drive, and outlandish nerve" fuel the breathless pace of this page-turner, but it's the promise of discovering yet more of Geffen's lurid acts of malfeasance that also lure readers. A short course in extreme Hollywood. MORE: New York Magazine article about Geffen deciding to stop cooperating with King Audio excerpts from an interview King did with The Paula Gordon Show Interview with King in which he discusses the nuts and bolts of his journalistic relationship with Geffen |
|
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||