Rating: 
Summary: Stars without the power to shock
Review: This book is sad on many levels. The first is that these stories are meant to shock, and the stories are from reliable and intellectually uplifting sources such as...nannies. The effect is nothing more than mean-spirited gossip.Given what has happened in the world, the gossip isn't even shocking, it is just Hollywood navel gazing. Uday Hussein raped and murdered young girls. He returned their body parts to their families. Wealthy people in Singapore hire women for pocket change and brutally beat them daily. Looking up from the navel makes one realize that there are even worse events than those told in this book. It's true that many people in Hollywood squander their resources and their lives and that's sad. It's also true that others have used their resources to the benefit of their loyal families. That might have been work putting in this book, but you don't get that kind of information from nannies with an axe to grind.
Rating: 
Summary: I Now See What all the Fuss Is About!
Review: As a title 'HOLLYWOOD INTERRUPTED: INSANITY CHIC IN BABYLON: THE CASE AGAINST CELEBRITY doesn't REMOTELY SUGGEST it is the latest 'dish' or 'dirt' on the current Hollywood set. So going into it, I didn't expect that. What I got was a unified field theory argumentation using an almost overkill of celebrity flameouts, as well as an anthropological look into our modern media monster. Think Alan Dershowitz meets Penn and Teller. The book is clearly the most comprehensive case ever presented against the excesses of celebrity culture, and the institutitions in LA that foster it -- from the celebrity insta-karma 'religions' to the nannies that raise their 'golden' latchkey kids to the wacky high school to the stars (and the stars' children). Was glad to see there was no Ashton Kutsher (sp?) gossip. That the book's mainstream media detractors (conflict of interest, anyone?) clearly wanted some (check the reviews demanding timely 'dirt'!) shows how they are part of the problem. There were some times I winced when the authors' right wing views shone through. Oh well. At least they were funny about their failrly obvious bias. I also thought the book could have used some funny pics to go along with the outrageous stories. There are none. One last thought: I bet the Scientologists come after these guys. Big time.
Rating: 
Summary: it is a biased, though fun read
Review: This book aims to discredit Hollywood. Chapter by chapter it analyses lives of stars and their dispicable habits, such as neglecting children, doing drugs, voicing unsolicited political opinions. Things we all know or suspect anyways... However occasionally the authors go too far. According to them the most brilliant show to ever hit the TV screen, and to be imitated for its independence of thought and perspective is South Park! Yes, it can be a fun show, but if every show was as unopologetically offensive, most parents would not bother to buy a TV. According to the authors Hollywood is feeding us all the morals. Do not forget however, that Hollywood is a business. If some director goes on and makes a movie for TV where he expressess his, arguably twisted values on family -- most people still watch something else. Yet when it comes to summer blockbusters, the moral values are usually pretty bland, and Hollywood aims to give the viewer what they ask for -- action, love scenes etc. If we as a society truely wanted something else, the theatre/opera/musical/comedy companies wouldn't straggle so hard. Overall the book has more pathos than substance. It takes a few cases and extrapolates them to infinity. Such as taking one disfunctional school (where really, not only Hollywood students go) and talking about all kid's education in general. Or quoting one previously published book for most of the nanny discussion chapter. The bottom line is, if you like reading some tabloids, track some stars but know to take things with a grain of salt -- the book will be an entertaining read. Just don't assume that everything you read is true, or that this is a final stamp on the way the world works. It's just a bit, and it is someone's opinion.
Rating:
Summary: Tracking this book to the top!
Review: Being that it's my job to keep track of book sales, it should be noted that Hollywood Interrupted made it to a number one ranking on this very service the week it was published. The authors didn't have to dream, the buyers voted with their credit cards. It is also interesting to note that the book made the New York Times extended bestseller list and has been doing consistently well on all inside tracking services. That being the case, I have read the book and found it to be groundbreaking in many respects. The backgrounds of the authors couldn't have been more different, and their perspective is fresh. Googling Mark Ebner brings up twenty plus pages of the leftiest of the left in journalism, and Breitbart's experience leads him RIGHT back to Drudge. These authors not only bring tongue in cheek humor to their diatribe on Hollywood, they also speak for the people on the left and the right who are sick to death of celebrity insanity coupled with the dearth of any good entertainment to be found. Unfortunately for the celebs in this book, their sordid backstories are more entertaining to read about than what they're putting on the screen or divulging in interviews designed to sell the very crap that they are guilty of creating. Who is at fault here? The authors point it out. The media, the stars themselves, their friendly doctor feelgoods, their crazy cults and their complete lack of concern for the unfortunate children they so selfishly bring into the world. And here is another tragic irony. I am in my own small way a part of the media elite that Brietbart and Ebner so thoughtfully desecrate. I only wish I had the balls they have. Until then I'll blame it on gynecology.
Rating:
Summary: When Will God Destroy The Sodom & Gomorrah Of Hollywood?????
Review:
Breitbart and Ebner compile a brutally thorough, referential log of Hollyweird's misdeeds against its market of Middle America, indecently lecherous and hippie-idolizing "values", familial DYSFUNCTION and war against nuclear family, neurosis gone ungovernably wild, subservience to oppressive, lawsuit-abusing Scientology, gluttonous swingers scene, PC tyranny, and prejudice to hawk only Demoncratic causes in their movies and series in H.I., the book which unmasks celebrities' dirty secrets that were already suspicious, based on celebrities' unorthodox misbehaviors. Their cumulative research has convincingly presented that Hollywood IS baneful in its entertainment exports towards Middle America-something glaringly observable from all the vices Hollyweird lustfully glorifies, but probed more by specific examples from the authors. What needs to be stressed is the authors are 100% credible-unlike the irreversible scores of liberal "authors" who uncaringly, injuriously DON'T provide notes. The authors include a perverse extensiveness of references which meticulously detail each foundation of their arguments, not to mention their personal interviews with 1st-person witnesses.
This book's a revelation, just as it is important, of the fishily subtle maneuvers that Hollywood and its mischievous entertainers indulge in, in their attitudes, conveyances and affiliations. Were it not for this book, people just having to scrutinize celebrities' subtle tactics and doublespeak for themselves, people wouldn't know where to begin to uncover their favorite "idols'" ominous misdirection, unless they themselves researched the backgrounds of questionable celebrities, because not all is apparent behind celebrities' sinister visages when they make appearances.
EVERYONE, including all the nouveau-riche, raised in the afflicted values-system of Hollywood is dysfunctional!!!! The authors go to intrinsic lengths to detail the unsanitary lows of parental maltreatment, neglect and indifference; abusive disrespect and callous derision bordering on insanity of their spoiled brat children; and absolutely loveless marriages-of-conveniences which Hollywood people are subjugated in through interviews with 1st-person witnesses, the nannies. The nannies' horror stories involve celebrity "mothers" sneering down at their middle-class, basic-decency virtues in raising children, celebrity parents being uninterestedly estranged from their own offspring which they hand off to maids from the moment of birth, and celebrity parents bribing their children with cruel "rewards" for their failures or misconducts, discouraging the children from improving themselves.
The environment of the venomously ABNORMAL "upbringing" of a concerning number of celebrities is totally destructively corrupt. The specific examples given involve radical-indoctrinated Winona Ryder, parental-endangered Phoenix (River, Joaquin) litter, and walking-sideshow Courtney Love, all casualties faultily "raised" by psychotic hippies who uncaringly abandoned their responsible jobs to "travel the world", and backslid in status to "raise" their kids in countercultural hippie communes. In those Sodom and Gomorrah's, their criminally maltreating parents exposed them to sex and drugs at sinfully young ages, reasoning why, as adults, the aforementioned degenerated into shoplifters, junkies, and retards without conscientious boundaries, respectively!!!!
Accompanying this deterioration is an expose of the festering breeding place for future miscreants, the offspring of lunatic celebrities, in the infamous Crossroads "School" For Arts And Sciences. CSFAAS' "curriculum" is hazardously countercultural, with hippie-influenced courses like psychedelically inane `Mysteries', which is misguidedly intended for "meditation", but really involves the hallucinatory insanity of passing a "talking stick" around to share inner feelings, and the year-end class trip to the Ojai Foundation. The Ojai Foundation is where the REAL degradedness occurs, with some ex-students interviewed by the authors confessing that the trip accomplished only the atrocities of having sex with all one's classmates, doing drugs, and being personally dilapidated by having commune-dwellers (it's a sacrilegious hippie retreat) dance around naked. These programs are defrauded as places to "get in touch" with one's self, but the startling reality of CSFAAS is most of its students are emotionally and socially maladjusted troublemakers who're desperate for parental guidance or intervention which they'll never get, since their celebrity parents are just as deficient.
The authors disclose how Hollyweird has a bothersome allergy towards psychiatry-ironic because their studio systems embraced psychiatry during the 40s and 50s-and the fact of mental illness. This is simply a veiled ruse to excuse and endorse Hollyweird's nihilistic limitlessness in amoral misbehaviors, which is asphyxiated through the refusal of treatment by psychiatry. Hollywood USED to want to curb their stars' unhealthily obscene misbehaviors in their "Golden Age", but nowadays' publicity for perilously unorthodox debauchery from stars opposes the need to keep stars' indulgent misdeeds concealed.
The most fearful section concerns the blasphemously money-hungry, bastard Scientology "religion". Detailing celebrities' grim dependence on EVERYONE in their lives-celebrities are so vain, they shirk personal responsibilities on underlings so to devote more time to self-centeredness-from agents to make-up "artists" to publicists to managers to spin doctors, the authors convince that celebrities are retarded in being self-sufficient. This functional retardation stems from their malpractice of being disparagingly attended to by their subordinates, who deprive them of personal answerability. From this brittle mentality, celebrities are RIPE for being baited by cults because they're unthinkingly, submissively liberated from having to decide anything independently. Cults prey on weak-minded sheep like celebrities for their easy susceptibility to brainwashing, cults' primary method of subjugation, as celebrities are humiliatingly swayable because of public opinion subjection. If you're a braindead follower of celebrities, you should realize that many, like Travolta, Cruise, and the Presleys, are persecuted, and consequently blaspheme cult-imposed subordination like Scientology manuals cure dyslexia, and can instruct how to fly planes.
My regret's not to be able to detail each chapter and subchapter, because they contain quite varied and even more unorthodox waywardness that's practiced as normal in Hollyweird. The rest of H.I. is loaded with scandals after scandals of celebrities fiendishly exploiting far-Eastern fads like Yoga for monetary advantage; alleged proliferation of impure swingers who solicit pay-for-sex profanity at private locales masquerading as "mansion parties"; P.I.s who dissolutely extort celebrities with uncovered, damaging information; most EVERY "star" ideologically despising President Bush; PC infecting celebrities' causes; celebrities subjected to Oprah PC sanctimoniousness; B-movie "actors" relegated to unscrupulously selling cookware at tradeshows; plagiarism and HBO's falsifying of "reality" TV; and supposed celebrity congregation on AOL, longing to experience contact with "ordinary" folks.
Rating:
Summary: Heard it all before
Review: Definitely a well-written book about many of Hollywood's two-faced hypocrites, but if you have any knowledge current Hollywood scandals you've probably heard most of these stories before, plus the book has a not-so-subtle Right Wing-brand "family values" patina to it, thus making the authors' agenda a little suspect. If you read the book as an Op-Ed piece rather than unbiased reporting (even though the stories told are all pretty much true) it'll probably make an easier read.
P.S. Upon reviewing many of the other reviews left for this book, I see more than quite a few other people were also put off by its Right Wing bias and lazy, re-hashed research.
Rating: 
Summary: Political Correctness - The New McCarthyism.
Review: This book is not merely a feast for the gossip monger, it is an expose on the PC thuggery of the Hollywood left wing and the hypocrisy therein. To be sure, all Americans, left, right or center, share in some hypocrisy, but regular folk in "fly over country" generally do not have the money or influence to bully others into political submission. The book decrys celebrity dissent as PR motivated and that that is always the primary motivation for the famous, whether they are involved in politics, or getting married and divorced countless times, or having or adopting children. The authors further state that the famous view the vast majority of regular Americans as unenlightened children who need to be schooled by them - the cultural elite of Hollywood. Although the notion of hollywood as a modern day Sodom and Gomora is not new, the book is still provocative and an informative insider's view of the hollywood dysfunctional machine.
Rating:
Summary: A great book on Hollywood.
Review: Hollywood is crazy and it's filled with crazy people. But that doesn't stop us from loving it and reading every single thing on it we can. This book offers up the gossip and delivers. A definite recommend to anyone who likes books on La La Land.
Rating:
Summary: Read this book? Shoot yourself in the foot? A real toss-up!
Review: I enjoy books about Hollywood and its celebrities--the good the bad and the ugly--but this book was simply repulsive. As for naming names, there were some, but there were still enough blind items to be frustrating. Plus, the tone was so completely unredeemingly negative that there were entire sections of the book I simply skipped because they were repetitive and demeaning. There aren't many books that can make me feel "slimed," but this one managed to. It's one thing to dish the dirt, like gossip columnists do--they often do it with a sense of humor at least--but these authors simply poured on the manure unrelentingly, and made me totally regret having bought the book and rewarding them for it. If you're a person who genuinely loves the entertainment biz, even with its excesses, do yourself a favor and pass this one up. Compared to this book, even the tabloids read like "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm."
Rating:
Summary: They'll never eat lunch in that town again
Review: I LOVED this book. The authors paint a clever and amusing picture of how so many celebrity Talking Heads in Hollywood need to STOP THEIR INSANITY!!! How dare these hypocritical, reactionary, insecure, narcissistic, drug & sex addicted, overpaid celebrities assume that they can dictate social consciousness to the rest of us? To paraphrase from the book, as Patricia Heaton suggests when she defies the pack of lemmings on a sociopolitical issue - "it won't be Barbara Streisand" she has to answer to when she reaches the pearly gates. I have recommended this book to my friends who enjoy celebrity dish as well as amusing anecdotes and social commentary.
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