In this book you'll find everything you always wanted to know about the real, honest-to-not-so-goodness, day-to-day inner workings of Hollywood. Not the glamorous Oscar-winning-Spielberg-red-carpet Hollywood, but the real-life daily grind of working Hollywood. For the very first time, a Hollywood film agent has opened up her phone sheet and crackberry to show us how agents, writers, and directors function in a world of producers, development executives, and studio executives. This isn't another book dishing the dirt about the rich and famous; it's a fresh, tell-all translation from Hollywood-speak to plain English, a peek behind the wizard's curtain into a culture that's rarely captured without cliche and hyperbole. You'll learn how to get an agent, how to keep one, what they do, and what they don't do. You'll learn how agents navigate through the murky, film-world politics and even why agents are such infamous liars.

Audiences love the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, but beyond the red carpet and behind the velvet curtain exists a legion of individuals who make showbiz work: agents. Whether literary, talent, or indie film, agents are behind the scenes brokering power, handling mediation, and doing the deal-making that keeps Hollywood spinning. In Representing Talent, Violaine Roussel explores the little-known but decisive work of agents, turning the spotlight on how they help produce popular culture. The book takes readers behind the scenes to observe the day-to-day activities of agents, revealing their influence on artistic careers and the prospects of Hollywood’s forthcoming projects. Agents are crucial to understanding how creative and economic power are intertwined in Hollywood today. They play a key role in the process by which artistic worth and economic value are evaluated and attributed to people and projects. Roussel’s fieldwork examines what “having relationships” really means for agents, and how they perform the relationship work that’s at the heart of their professional existence and success. Representing Talent helps us to understand the players behind the definition of entertainment itself, as well as behind its current transformations.

A humorous and pithy guide to the craft of writing a screenplay and the business of being a screenwriter. Seeing your name on the silver screen beneath the words "Written By" is a moment most writers only dream of. But for those daring and talented few, brave enough to take their hopes to Hollywood, there are clear and tangible steps to achieve that goal if one knows the path. The Aspiring Screenwriter's Dirty Lowdown Guide to Fame and Fortune provides that path. And Andy Rose has walked it. With years of experience with every major film studio and network, and dozens of successful screenplays, Andy knows the business. He’s here to debunk the big screen and teach you how to write a blockbuster screenplay and equally important, how to sell it. Andy has worked with the best: Ron Howard, Tom Hanks, David Geffen, and Jeff Katzenberg to name a few. He has filled this book with real life examples to learn from including contracts, screenplays, treatments, press, and more. For anyone who’s ever dreamed of writing a screenplay, for anyone who’s wondered how to sell one, this is a must read.

My dissertation covers a hitherto overlooked dimension of the classical Hollywood film industry: the role of talent agents in the 1930s and 1940s, the formative years of the studio system. Through extensive primary archival research I have unearthed the strong function served by talent agents in the studio system of the 1930s and 1940s. Drawing on recent work in economics, economic sociology and theories of institutions, my project broadens and complicates traditional depictions of the studio era. I trace the syndicate of managerial roles---agents in particular, but studio executives as well---that constituted the studio "system" as much as the concentrated management within the major film production companies. I demonstrate the social connections that translated into business relationships and how this system aided and abetted the individual reputations of stars, directors, and writers---as well as the reputations of the agents themselves. Thus, my project, in addition to documenting the early history of agents, adds a new theoretical perspective on agency within the studio system.

In 1969, a low-budget biker movie, Easy Rider, shocked Hollywood with its stunning success. An unabashed celebration of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll (onscreen and off), Easy Rider heralded a heady decade in which a rebellious wave of talented young filmmakers invigorated the movie industry. In Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind takes us on the wild ride that was Hollywood in the '70s, an era that produced such modern classics as The Godfather, Chinatown, Shampoo, Nashville, Taxi Driver, and Jaws. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls vividly chronicles the exuberance and excess of the times: the startling success of Easy Rider and the equally alarming circumstances under which it was made, with drugs, booze, and violent rivalry between costars Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda dominating the set; how a small production company named BBS became the guiding spirit of the youth rebellion in Hollywood and how, along the way, some of its executives helped smuggle Huey Newton out of the country; how director Hal Ashby was busted for drugs and thrown in jail in Toronto; why Martin Scorsese attended the Academy Awards with an FBI escort when Taxi Driver was nominated; how George Lucas, gripped by anxiety, compulsively cut off his own hair while writing Star Wars, how a modest house on Nicholas Beach occupied by actresses Margot Kidder and Jennifer Salt became the unofficial headquarters for the New Hollywood; how Billy Friedkin tried to humiliate Paramount boss Barry Diller; and how screenwriter/director Paul Schrader played Russian roulette in his hot tub. It was a time when an "anything goes" experimentation prevailed both on the screen and off. After the success of Easy Rider, young film-school graduates suddenly found themselves in demand, and directors such as Francis Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, George Lucas, and Martin Scorsese became powerful figures. Even the new generation of film stars -- Nicholson, De Niro, Hoffman, Pacino, and Dunaway -- seemed a breed apart from the traditional Hollywood actors. Ironically, the renaissance would come to an end with Jaws and Star Wars, hugely successful films that would create a blockbuster mentality and crush innovation. Based on hundreds of interviews with the directors themselves, producers, stars, agents, writers, studio executives, spouses, and ex-spouses, this is the full, candid story of Hollywood's last golden age. Never before have so many celebrities talked so frankly about one another and about the drugs, sex, and money that made so many of them crash and burn. By turns hilarious and shocking, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is the ultimate behind-the-scenes account of Hollywood at work and play.

EBONY is the flagship magazine of Johnson Publishing. Founded in 1945 by John H. Johnson, it still maintains the highest global circulation of any African American-focused magazine.

This is a history of Hollywood agents as they rose in the studio system in the late 1920s and early 1930s up through the 1940s, demonstrating the central role they played in the classical Hollywood period.