When Hollywood Had a King - Connie Bruck

NY Times 'When Hollywood Had a King': The Last Tycoon

Lew Wasserman ruled Hollywood from the 1950's until 1990, when he sold his film and television production company, MCA, to the Matsushita Electric Industrial Company. It was the biggest mistake of his extraordinary career.
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Stripped of his power in the 1990's, Wasserman would hold court almost daily at his prime corner table in MCA's Universal commissary, an aging and ailing titan. He was still a figure who engendered awe and respect and even fear, like a Shakespearean king fading after a hard and brutal reign.

Connie Bruck, the author of books about the junk-bond impresario Michael Milken (''The Predators' Ball'') and Steve Ross and Time Warner (''Master of the Game''), has now chosen to explore a far more complicated figure. Her fascinating book, ... is a methodical portrait of an often secretive mogul whose vindictiveness, cunning and temper matched his shrewdness and prescience.

LA Weekly: The Man in the Black Tower

As for the fear, that depended on how much you had benefited from, or suffered under, Lew’s cold lash. Fear passes in Hollywood. And sooner or later, nothing is left except the stories, and the book. Then it is up to us how much we need to believe in great men, and how much in the nature of the business.

Wasserman made deals more than pictures, but as you’re riding along on the terrific mix of anecdotes and analysis in Connie Bruck’s new book, When Hollywood Had a King (Random House), you have to decide how far you’ll go.

NY Observer: Chronicle of a Mean Mogul: Lew Wasserman, Deal-Maker

Thank God for Melody Sherwood. It’s not until page 328 of this massive book about MCA/Universal president Lew Wasserman—a slow-moving Q.E.2 of a biography—that his pert, patient secretary puts in an appearance. But when her voice finally pipes up above the dull male thrum of ’sters (gangsters, Teamsters, shysters, trustbusters) powering the story, it’s like the welcome honk of the pilot ship’s foghorn.

NY Daily News: The last mogul: How Lew Wasserman became the hidden emperor of Hollywood

Bruck, in relentlessly detail­ing Wasserman's decades-long career, shows us that the former theater usher (a high school job) became a statesman only after he single-handedly amassed more power than any studio chief ever had - and probably more than any ever will, now that they answer to corporate overlords.

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Article Author: Temple Stark

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