Dangerous Company [Hardcover]

Peter Bart (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 26, 2003

In Hollywood, reality always teeters on the verge of ction. Outlandish paydays encounter outsize egos; fading beauties ght desperately to retain an illusion of youth; moguls plot and feud while bitter enemies air-kiss over lunch at the Ivy. The stakes are higher than anywhere else, and the dreams are crazier. No one else can capture the insanity like Peter Bart, the editor-in-chief of the showbiz bible, Variety. Bart has presided over the follies and iniquities of the business for many years, observing the ups and downs of the players with detached, knowing amusement. As Cindy Adams recently proclaimed in the New York Post, 'If Peter doesn't know it, it never happened.' Dangerous Company resonates as though it came from some of Hollywood's best and juiciest behind-the-scenes gossip. A literary agent covers up a surreal screenwriting scandal in order to close on a commission. A studio lawyer tries to reconcile a director-producer rift using an unspeakable secret about their children as leverage. And a stranger brokers a suspicious deal that lands him facedown in his own pool. Fascinating and pitch-perfect, full of masterfully crafted twists, Dangerous Company reads like Nathanael West crossed with Roald Dahl. And just to keep us on our toes, Bart throws in a few clues that may lead us to believe that what we're reading is, well, maybe not ction after all.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Unless Bart, editor in chief of Variety and author of several books about the movie biz (The Gross; Shoot Out; etc.), plans to put out a companion volume of "Light Tales," the 13 interconnected stories in this entertaining, cutting collection will stand as consummate cautionary tales about why not to work in Hollywood. Many of the men and women Bart observes here with a clear eye are venal and vain, nearly monstrous but for the foibles, frailties and pettinesses that reveal their deep, flawed humanity. The connective tissue is provided in the first story, "The Founder," in which a real estate agent explains how she transformed a neglected residential corner of Hollywood into Starlight Terrace; the following tales feature residents of that gated community, and two of the stories bring many of them together for neighborhood association meetings. In the longest entry, "The Ghostwriter," a young female William Morris agent learns that the new screenplay by her up-and-coming writer was in fact penned by his arrogant father, who plans to use the son as his face for youth-obsessed Hollywood; the agent decides to endorse the deception. In the next tale, "The Makeover," a 52-year-old actress whose visage has been frozen by Botox injections is about to lose a starring gig until her manager proves that she can still emote by driving her into a towering rage and videotaping her fit. And so it goes, as Tinseltown types maneuver, backstab, manipulate and cajole, some with compassion, many not, in stories that are brisk, smartly told, penetrating and, at times, clever enough to seduce the reader into schadenfreude, as in "Power Play," in which an Ovitz-like entrepreneur gets his comeuppance. Bart knows Hollywood like nobody's business, and he exposes it here in all its glorious bizarreness.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

When a Zsa Zsa Gabor-wanna-be realtor "invents" Starlight Terrace (formerly known as Rattery Lane) by switching street signs and greasing the right municipal palms, it quickly becomes a magnet to Hollywood actors and writers as well as the "suits" (agents and studio lawyers). Bart has each ST occupant tell his or her tale in engagingly interconnected monologues. There's the happily married man who suddenly develops a passion for another man; the over-the-hill movie queen (Norma Desmond, move over); and the scriptwriter rescuing his career with his father's ghostwriting. Twisting and turning like some of the roads snaking through the Hollywood Hills, and including "truths" stranger and darker than the fictions enacted on greater L.A.'s sound stages, these fast-paced yarns add up to a tough-to-set-down read that just begs to be made into . . . a Hollywood movie! Variety editor-in-chief and GQ columnist Bart exploits his knowledge of Tinsel Town delightfully. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Miramax; 1 edition (November 26, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1401351905
• ISBN-13: 978-1401351908
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,526,501 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Surpasses low expectations, April 23, 2004

By 

Daniel Friedman "dfja17" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dangerous Company (Hardcover)

I have to qualify this review up front by saying that I am not, by any stretch, a fan of Peter Bart. I've found his books on the film industry to be sorely lacking in a good editor, fact-checker, and general humility. I picked up a copy of Dangerous Company because I saw Mr. Bart on the talk show circuit promoting it and it intrigued me, as do most things related to Hollywood and the film industry.

For starters, the book focuses on the "dark side" of Tinseltown. Okay, fair enough. All is well and good. It's a collection of stories that have, as their common theme, a Hollywood enclave where various characters who fill various niches in the industry live and come and go. Like any collection, there are some that are quite good, some that aren't, and some that are somewhere in-between. The main criticism I would have with the collection over all is that when Mr. Bart has something good going, he often doesn't see it all the way through. I admire some of the situations he devises and the characters he sets up, but then they sort of just resolve their issues (or not) in a rather pedestrian manner.

One other thing, and this is another quality of Mr. Bart's that I have found irritating over the years, is that this is a work of fiction but a lot of trouble seems to have been taken to avoid disclosing that. Mr. Bart was notorious in his book The Gross for dropping names left and right, yet criticizing people who drop names. He seems guilty of some hypocrisy here as well. I saw him give an interview on a conservative-leaning program that was there to discuss the seediness, corruption, and non-mainstream values of Hollywood and the host used Dangerous Company as an illustration of that, never once mentioning that it was fiction. Mr. Bart made no effort to point that out either, which to me leaves a somewhat dubious mark on the book. However, looking at it objectively, it's pretty good for those who have an interest in the subject.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Boring book, January 29, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Dangerous Company (Hardcover)

I didn't like this book. Its written in fiction/novel form and I prefer Hollywood tell-alls that name names - real names. I honestly got bored not too many pages into this book. I couldn't finish it. This book may be more interesting to Hollywood insiders because so many of them can figure out who this author is talking about. I'm not from Hollywood, so I didn't know who he was talking about, if anyone.

I would recommend other books over this one - "Mr. S" by George Jacobs (a book about Frank Sinatra and friends), and I plan to read the Eszterhas book "Hollywood Animal," that just hit the book stores.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tyro Scribbler Inks O.T.T. Boffo Click, December 30, 2003

By 

Larry Mark "editor of MyJewishBooks.com" (nyc) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dangerous Company (Hardcover)

As Bart writes, "the movie business does not attract reasonable people." This makes for tasty stories. The tales are smarmy, entertaining and enlightening, but definitely not dangerous. I would have titled this Mildly Menacing Deceitful Egos; in these stories one can witness why Hollywood is called tinseltown, since each character shimmers briefly and believes they are really platinum rather than cheap reflective plasticized aluminum. Bart's characters could easily have become stock cliches, but happily, in his hands, they aren't. Most of the petulant characters are connected not by their Atkins diets, but by their ownership of homes on Starlight Terrace, a street that had its name changed from Rattery Lane, like an actress with a foreign sounding surname. There are stories about actors, agents, writers, lawyers, producers, directors, studio execs, more lawyers, an MPAA rater, and husbands, wives, adopted kids, and lovers. Most memorable are the stories of the aging actress who uses so much Botox, her director says she can no longer show facial expressions; her 60 year old agent who celebrated his birthday with a chemical peel that might melt his face in the LA sun; a rabbi who is more concerned that his MPAA-rater wife discusses curse words than the fact she is Catholic; the young agent and her younger boy-toy whom she uses for `recreation'; and her retiring mentor who reinforces the adage that successes have many fathers, and failures are orphans. While these may be cautionary tales to some, to many others they will serve as appetizing enticements.