The Men Who Would Be King, Nicole LaPorte
The Men Who Would Be King, Nicole LaPorte
2 Rating(s)
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The Men Who Would Be King
An Almost Epic Tale of Moguls, Movies, and a Company Called DreamWorks

Author: Nicole LaPorte

Narrator: Stephen Hoye

Unabridged: 18 hr 1 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/10/2010


Synopsis

For sixty years, since the birth of United Artists, the studio landscape was unchanged.Then came Hollywood's Circus Maximus—created by director Steven Spielberg, billionaire David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who gave the world The Lion King—an entertainment empire called DreamWorks. Now Nicole LaPorte, who covered the company for Variety, goes behind the hype to reveal for the first time the delicious truth of what happened.

Audiences will feel they are part of the creative calamities of moviemaking as LaPorte's fly-on-the-wall detail shows us Hollywood's bizarre rules of business. We see the clashes between the often otherworldly Spielberg's troops and Katzenberg's warriors, the debacles and disasters, but also the Oscar-winning triumphs, including Saving Private Ryan. We watch as the studio burns through billions, its rich owners get richer, and everybody else suffers. We see Geffen seducing investors like Microsoft's Paul Allen, showing his steel against CAA's Michael Ovitz, and staging fireworks during negotiations with Paramount and Disney. Here is Hollywood, up close, glamorous, and gritty.

About Nicole LaPorte

Nicole LaPorte is a former film reporter for Variety, where she covered the Hollywood movie industry for several years. She also wrote the "Rules of Hollywood" column for the Los Angeles Times Magazine and has also written for the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Observer, the Sunday Telegraph Magazine, and W magazine. For The Men Who Would Be King, she did more than two hundred interviews with subjects at every level of the entertainment business.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Katherine on July 11, 2011

I used to idolise Spielberg when I was about 11. He was the genius who made movies fun again. Now that thirty years have gone by, my approach to the world of movies is far less reverent, far more cynical. I wanted to read this precisely because I wanted insider-view details on the world of moviemaki......more

Goodreads review by Jay on November 04, 2012

Story of the creation of DreamWorks through its buyout and re-birth. Takes a journalistic view of the proceedings, introducing the three principals and describing how they got together to create the DreamWorks super-studio, how they managed the business, and how they sold out to Paramount and then r......more

Goodreads review by Ed on July 10, 2012

As Dreamworks was my first job when I got to LA, I had a particular interest in this book aside from my normal interest in Hollywood history. In fact, some of the people I worked for are written about in this book which was a little strange. What's fascinating is that unlike everything else I've rea......more

Goodreads review by Kirk on December 01, 2024

Loved this!! I started it probably a year and a half ago I’m glad I picked it up again there was so much I didn’t know about DreamWorks......more

Goodreads review by Lia on October 30, 2024

More of a 3.5 - interesting to dissect the different POVs on the rise & fall of Dreamworks, but argumentation felt stretched at times......more