The Big Idea
The golden years of the American motion picture industry - from 1930 to the 1950s, was when the studio system held sway. All the money, prestige and power of the industry were derived from just one activity: selling tickets at the box office. Nowadays it is very different; the movie business is just a small component of an immense synergistic moneymaking industry. The media universe’s reach extends from the silver screen to home television, recorded media and the Internet, and even to such arenas as theme parks. Unlike in the old system, film studios nowadays make enormous profits from this vast assortment of disparate, albeit related, industries, such as video-game spin-offs and soundtracks. Ticket sales count for a tiny slice of the pie, if at all.

Regardless of how profit-oriented it may be, Hollywood, however, is of course not just about making money. While profit is undoubtedly the driving force behind the movie industry, its social and political milieus - the behind-the-scene dynamics that make Hollywood tick, and which are defined by their major players’ search for power and prestige - can neither be ignored nor neglected if one wants to arrive at a true understanding of Hollywood.

This book, then, is an attempt to make sense of Hollywood - to provide a ‘big picture’ understanding of it, so to speak - making use of the perspective explained above.

About the Author
Edward Jay Epstein - Edward Jay Epstein was born in New York City in 1935. He attended Cornell University, where he received a B.A. and an M.A. His Masters thesis in government became the highly influential Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth, which examined the working of the Warren Commission and was its first real critique. It created a sensation when it first appeared in 1966 about the same time as Mark Lanes classic Rush to Judgment.

Mr. Epstein followed up Inquest with Counterplot: The Garrison Case and then in 1978 with Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, which was published by Readers Digest Press. In 1972 he received his Ph.D. in government from Harvard, and afterward taught political science there as well as at MIT and UCLA. He later returned to New York, where he works as a writer. Other books he as written include News from Nowhere, Agency of Fear, and, more recently, Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer, published by Random House in 1996.