Tell Me How You Love the Picture: A Hollywood Life

From the buttoned-down world of the old studio system to the freewheeling global media business of today, film producer Feldman has seen it all. With Barton's help, he spins an entertaining, often hilarious yarn of bottom-line–obsessed executives, impossibly vain movie stars and hardworking, even courageous, filmmakers all engaged in the process of keeping the seats filled in movie theaters around the world. Beginning as a publicist at Twentieth Century–Fox in New York in the 1950s, Feldman climbs the ladder of the Hollywood hierarchy, moving from company to company, project to project, oversized personality to even more oversized personality. He bumps heads with famed producer Joseph E. Levine, a man so conceited he insists Feldman include fawning mention of him in every press release. Feldman parties in '60s swinging London, with Peter Sellers setting him up with a Swedish beauty. Later he ushers Harrison Ford to global superstardom with 1985's hit film Witness . Told in a breezy style, this tale of the pleasures and pains of life in the Hollywood food chain will delight casual readers and give more serious film-business buffs yet another reason to love the movies and the people who make them. Photos. (Jan.)