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All That Glitters
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20464 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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5 / 1991 |
1,921 Words |
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Cynthia Grenier
Cynthia Grenier is contributing editor to the Arts section of
The World & I. |
THE POWER AND THE GLITTER
The Hollywood-Washington Connection
Ronald Brownstein
New York: Pantheon Books, 1990
437 pp., $24.95
It was a neat concept: Hollywood stars making up to the powers-that-be in Washington, D.C., as Washington bigwigs cozied up to the denizens of Lala Land. Hollywood has always given New York publishers and editors a special frisson mingled with an edge of disdain: East Coast intelligentsia enjoys looking down on those crass money spinners on the West Coast. Which is one of the reasons why Woody Allen is so popular with certain segments of moviegoers in the east--his visceral distaste for everything smacking of Los Angeles really speaks to them. As for Washington, the publishing world has long acknowledged the power factor while managing to maintain its own sense of infinite moral superiority.
Even the most ivory-towered editors would have had no trouble, however, imagining how a book about Hollywood and Washington would appeal to the sales and marketing departments. Warren Beatty. Jane Fonda. Frank Sinatra. JFK. In short, the editors must have surely figured they had a natural with guaranteed reader and sales appeal. Which is what the editors at Pantheon were no doubt thinking when they signed Ronald Brownstein, national correspondent of the Los Angeles Times to write The Power and the Glitter. Pantheon, it will be remembered, is the division of Random House that had its editorial director dismissed last year on grounds that his publishing record was too often in the red. A serious treatment of Hollywood and Washington must have struck corporate powers as an easy route straight into the black. (Mind you, the sub-rights department has had a good run with the book, chapters being excerpted prepublication in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and Mother Jones.)
Insider story it isn't by a long shot. The book reads like one long feature article conscientiously researched from a good newspaper's morgue. Judging by his footnotes and bibliography, Brownstein was certainly industrious in his background reading with citations from Variety, (the bible of show business), the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times abounding. Actual interviews conducted by the author with key Hollywood players are few, far between, and sadly, singularly unrewarding. He did seem to have gotten Warren Beatty, notoriously a poor interview, to talk about Gary Hart, but came away with little that
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