Vanity Fair Hollywood Power 2015

Vanity Fair is widely considered the pop-culture bible for gauging power and personality in Hollywood. No magazine has told more compelling—and definitive—tales about the big-studio players, the back-lot intrigues, and the indie upstarts, as well as the behind-the-scenes stories of the rise and fall of the movie industry’s greatest showmen. Vanity Fair’s Hollywood Power—a Special Edition available on newsstands and digital devices—showcases 10 classic Vanity Fair articles about the titans of the film colony, along with timeless portraits of the men and women who have ruled the motion-picture business. Many of the great face-offs are here: Joe Kennedy (who was once the town’s most influential studio head) versus the Hollywood establishment; the knock-down, drag-out fight for Paramount Communications; and the saga of agent Sue Mengers, who battled the studio stiffs.…

POWER LUNCH There was a time when Lew Wasserman’s name was not uttered or printed without his full title in tow: the most powerful man in Hollywood. The long-reigning agent and executive is often credited with being the pioneer of the back-end deal, which began to shift authority and profits from the moguls to the stars. Wasserman also helped dismantle the old studio system during his 60-year career—33 of them as C.E.O. and chairman of MCA. From entertainment to media to politics, Wasserman held sway over power brokers of every stripe. (Though a prolific contributor to the Democratic Party, he shared a friendship with Ronald Reagan, which began when Wasserman was the young Gipper’s agent.) As Vanity Fair’s Dominick Dunne would decree: “Of all the legends of the industry—Louis B.…

BOSTON FINANCIER PURCHASES CONTROL OF F.B.O. STUDIOS, ran the headline in a Hollywood trade paper in February of 1926, and the news sent shock waves through the business end of the film industry. Hollywood studio chiefs in the mid-20s were almost all immigrants, men such as Carl Laemm le of Universal, Louis B. Mayer and Marcus Loew of MGM, and Adolph Zukor of Paramount, men who had started with arcades, nickelodeons, or small theaters and grown up with the business. Before Joseph P. Kennedy, no one had come from Wall Street and simply bought himself the presidency of a studio. “A banker?” said Marcus Loew, summing up their surprise. “I thought this business was for furriers.” The tall, sandy-haired, 37-year-old Kennedy also presented a sharp physical contrast to the other…

Sue Mengers is dead!” The voice on the phone is deep, sandpaperrough, too many cigarettes, too many deals. It is immediately recognizable, if you’ve heard it even once, as the voice of Sue Mengers, very much alive but not feeling all that well, in a worse humor even than usual. This is how it’s been since 1996, when her husband of 23 years, Jean-Claude Tramont, died of cancer and she entered a tunnel that led to radiation therapy for cancer of her own on top of quadruple-bypass surgery and then her mother’s death—a tunnel from which she has yet to emerge. [Mengers would die in 2011 from pneumonia.] She’s definitely not up to talking, certainly not about herself in the 1970s, when she was famous throughout the Western world as…

Among the many rapidly shifting tensions of today’s Hollywood— a place which has meaning as metaphor more than geography—the question of original authorship is one of very few that have existed without interruption and are likely to continue to exist for the rest of film history. Invented art versus derivative art. Of course, great work— and dreadful work as well—has emanated from both approaches, but there is a special pride in originality. I seem to have stumbled into a vested personal interest in this perennial battle as the result of a paradox: the one claim I can lay to cinematic uniqueness is that I have recently become the only filmmaker, to my knowledge, who has had both of his first two movies— The Gambler and Fingers—remade. Fingers, which I wrote…

On February 20, 1983, an otherwise uneventful day in Hollywood, a small wire-service story appeared in the Los Angeles Times announcing the death, at age 56, of the founder and chief executive officer of the Gulf & Western Corporation. According to the report, which was tucked away near the bottom of page 19 of the sports section, cause of death was a heart attack, suffered aboard a corporate jet as it approached New York on a flight from the Dominican Republic, a country renowned for sugar and major-league ballplayers. The account noted that the deceased was an Austrian wartime immigrant who’d done well since the purchase of a small automobile-parts manufacturer in the mid-50s. No mention was made of a local Gulf & Western holding, an entity on Melrose Avenue…