In the world of Tom King's "The Operator," a biography of the music and movie mogul David Geffen, and of Kim Masters' "The Keys to the Kingdom" an account of Michael Eisner's reign at Disney, the media biz comes across as a pixilated moosh. The artists function like businesspeople, the businesspeople are creative, everyone lives in terror of where public taste will go next, and what comes into being around and because of the movies (publicity, gossip, spinoffs, documentaries) is more entertaining than the movies themselves.
"I'm not Sammy Glick," Geffen protests, referring to the unprincipled subject of Budd Schulberg's 1941 Hollywood novel "What Makes Sammy Run?" Yet of course Geffen is Sammy Glick to a T, although a contemporary, gay variation on the standard grasping, vindictive theme.
Born in Brooklyn to an unambitious father who died early and a bossy, enterprising immigrant mother, Geffen was a flop at school, but fell in love with musicals and movies. Hustling a job in the mailroom at the William Morris Agency (he claimed that he was related to Phil Spector and had a degree from UCLA), he found his niche. Within just a few years he'd won the trust of up-and-coming artists (Laura Nyro, Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell), and made himself the indulged protigi of powerful men (Clive Davis, Ahmet Ertegun). Soon he had a record label of his own. Asylum Records was, Geffen explained to the talent he wooed, meant to be an asylum for its artists. He'd care for his musicians personally; he'd look after them. Weren't they surprised when he sold Asylum and moved on. Some years and a few attempts at moviemaking later, he was head of another new label. At Geffen Records, he explained, the artists came first. And weren't those artists surprised when he sold Geffen Records, too.
Today Geffen is worth around $2 billion. He has produced a variety of movies, from "Risky Business" and "Personal Best" to "Interview With the Vampire," and has cultivated a wide circle of high-powered friends and enemies. According to King, during his clawing-to-the-top days, Geffen was dismayed by his homosexuality; he formed intense friendships with Cher, Mitchell and a few other women while making compulsive use of male prostitutes. These days he's open about being gay and is a big contributor to AIDS charities. A shrieker, a liar and a bully for most of his working life, he's now entered a statesmanlike phase. He's a partner in DreamWorks and has become a friend of Hillary and Bill's, advising them on how to spin the press.
Geffen is small, slim and hyper. Michael Eisner, who was once described by the late producer Don Simpson as "a big Gummi Bear," is a more modern, self-satisfied kind of fat cat. He grew up wealthy on Park Avenue, wearing a jacket and tie to family dinners. Where Geffen is hysterical and pushy, Eisner is self-deprecating and entitled. According to Masters, he has some charm and smarts, and much self-possession; running things suits his sense of himself. He got started doing grunt jobs at NBC and CBS, made his mark at ABC, and together with Barry Diller, Dawn Steel, Don Simpson and Jeffrey Katzenberg, he was part of a famously aggressive executive team at Paramount. When that group fell apart, he got himself (and Katzenberg) hired by the moribund Walt Disney Productions. Together with the lawyer/executive Frank Wells, they worked the Disney brand. Out of their first 17 films, 15 made money, and within eight years, Disney was worth over 10 times what it was when Eisner, Wells and Katzenberg arrived.
Along the way, Eisner has also had some less well-known defeats. EuroDisney got off to a spectacularly bad start, losing over $1 billion in its first two years. A feud with Katzenberg led to a humiliating court battle, and Eisner's choice of super-agent Mike Ovitz to be his No. 2 was an immediate disaster; after little more than a year on the job, Ovitz was given around $100 million to leave. Masters contends that, since the death of Wells in a helicopter crash and the departure of Katzenberg, who was largely responsible for the rebirth of Disney's animation unit (and who wound up co-founding DreamWorks with Geffen and Steven Spielberg), Eisner has been floundering.
But along the way he has cashed some awfully big checks. In 1992, his salary and cashed-out stock options totaled more than $200 million, the largest sum the head of an American corporation had ever received. Where Geffen, in his new old-mogul way, actually has some dreams and some taste (he bought and refurnished a mansion that once belonged to Jack L. Warner, he owns art and he tries to make classy movies), Eisner, for all his affability and "warmth," is professionally interested only in winning -- Masters claims that Eisner doesn't even enjoy dealing with "the talent." Geffen appears to be more infuriating than Eisner, yet he's also more appealing -- he's more mixed-up, a tiny part of him may actually love the arts and he has a streak of generosity.
There are some small practical lessons to be learned from these books, the most obvious being that if you can't stand manic highs and suicidal lows, screaming, back-stabbing and 24/7 work weeks, you'd probably do well to consider going into another field. It's remarkable how few people with middle-class (as opposed to lower-working, or upper-middle/upper-class) backgrounds seem to find any success in the movie world. And sometimes it seems that being blessed with an adoring and ambitious Jewish mother is a prerequisite for success in Hollywood. Eisner's mother was an "iron-willed" woman who regarded Michael as her "young prince" and "helped him cheat at his schoolwork." Geffen's mom considered David "a miracle child," and called him "King David" right into young adulthood.
Both of these books encountered trouble on the way to the bookstore. King began his biography with Geffen's cooperation -- like Geffen, King is gay, and Geffen hoped a gay journalist's view would result in a portrait of himself as a dignified, empowering role model. (He hoped to come across as a kind of showbiz Warren Buffett.) Partway through King's research, though, Geffen shut King off without much explanation.
Still, the resulting book is anything but an attack. As a writer, King, a Wall Street Journal reporter, shows calm and intelligence, and he manages the occasional low-key insight. But most readers will probably wish that he'd taken the time to polish his many not-yet-there sentences, and made the effort to move his story along with more zip. Respectful and plodding, the book might have been written by a gentleman's-butler robot.
Masters' book has a very different tone -- it has the fake urgency and portentousness of a New York magazine cover story. She promises to explain much of significance; "the Hollywood power structure would never be the same" is a phrase that seems to recur every few pages. Yet she never gets around to telling us what the change is. Her book was commissioned by Broadway Books, which dumped it as "unacceptable," before being purchased and released by Morrow. In fact, it's competent, pointless and rather deranged.
Masters seems like a classic example of a frantic media broad: "Stop me before I report again" is the subtext of her every paragraph. The same desperation also damaged "Hit and Run," an account of the Jon Peters/Peter Guber reign at Columbia that she co-wrote with Nancy Griffin a few years ago. Eisner often comes across as a hazy figure; he refused the author's requests for interviews, so Masters relies heavily on Katzenberg.
Although Masters is a contributing editor at Time and Vanity Fair, and an adequate writer of overheated magazine prose, she seems to have no sense of perspective, and a compulsion to gather and write down facts. A typical sentence: "DreamWorks lost out on the chance to have a Burger King tie-in by moving up the film, because such efforts must be planned many months in advance." What is it that leaves her so clueless about what readers might actually care to know? Perhaps she just has little to say about the human content of her material, and so relies on facts, facts and more facts to carry her through. But page after page of descriptions of contract negotiations do not make for riveting reading. Geffen pops up on occasion, yet you'd hardly suspect from Masters' descriptions of him how high-strung and abusive he can be. (King, in his index under "Geffen, David Lawrence, screaming of," has 22 entries.)
As books, both are juiceless and pitilessly overdetailed. They do, however, leave you wondering: Why do so many articles and books about life behind the scenes in show business get published? My hunch is that it's because editors of magazines and books see themselves reflected in the movie moguls and businesspeople. But perhaps readers actually like and demand these books and articles. After all, it's still show business -- bigger, sexier and more glamorous than our usual lives. These are stroke books for the power-and-glamour-hungry.
There is such a thing as a movie-business book that provides some illumination. Although garish and slapdash, such in-the-midst-of-it works as Jane Hamsher's "Killer Instinct" (about the making of "Natural Born Killers"), Charles Fleming's "High Concept" (a down and dirty biography of Don Simpson), Robert Evans' breathtakingly shameless autobiography "The Kid Stays in the Picture," and Julia Phillips' notorious "You'll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again" do give a reader a sense of what life in the movie business is like. You feel that you've encountered something authentic.
There are also a handful of civilized books that tell you directly about the business: Steven Bach's "Final Cut," for example, about United Artists and the "Heaven's Gate" disaster, and Julie Salamon's account of the "Bonfire of the Vanities" fiasco, "The Devil's Candy." The screenwriter William Goldman recently published "Which Lie Did I Tell," a sequel to his "Adventures in the Screen Trade" -- as a writer, he's tough and self-satisfied, but he does a good job of spelling out what it is the movie business exists to do, and how it generally goes about doing it.
"The Operator" and "The Keys to the Kingdom," though, are predicated entirely on our (supposedly) pre-existing interest in all things behind-the-scenes. King manages a few passages about Geffen's taste, Masters almost none about Eisner's or Katzenberg's. As character studies, these flattened-out artifacts are just raw material. And as for the impact these men have had on the products their businesses make, or the culture at large? Next to nada. Too long, too sober and too well-vetted to qualify as guilty-pleasure wallows in show-biz outrageousness and misbehavior, these books are likely to please only those readers whose player-within demands constant feeding.
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