The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up

Rating:
Summary: A Wild Ride from Start to Finish!
Review: Pick up the book and open to any page, this stuff is hilarious, shocking, and all true. I kept asking myself: Ohmigod, did these people know they were being interviewed for a book?? From the outrageous ways these power brokers got their starts, to the hazing rituals they inflicted on each other, to the stories they tell about their famous clients, THE MAILROOM is a must-read for any film or television buff, and especially for the closet power broker in all of us.

Rating:
Summary: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up
Review: You don't get what you deserve in life, you get what you negotiate.

This is the first quote in the book and I cannot tell you how many times I have used this in the past month. This book looks at the entertainment industry from the earliest days of William Morris (1930') through the collapse of the studio system, to the "young turks" of CAA until today. The author speaks to a varied group of people who went through the system. Many survived and stayed in entertainment business and some moved on to other things. What I most enjoyed about this book was that it didn't just cover the famous (Geffen, Diller, Ovitz) who rose out of the mailroom, but it also covered those who helped create the system that these people who control what we watch today came out of. For the number of people interviewed and covered, this book was excellently edited for flow and did not double up too much on stories. Very readable and informative. After reading this I pulled out my copy of "Swimming with Sharks" and watched it again with the new feeling of an insider.