Volume 52, Number 6 · April 7, 2005
The Grand Acquisitors
By Larry McMurtry
The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood
by Edward Jay Epstein
Random House, 396 pp., $25.95
In his study of 'the new logic of money and power in Hollywood,' Edward Jay Epstein offers the reader a goodly array of facts, some of them charming and others of them snooze-making. I can't easily suppress my indifference to the fact that Sony employed seven thousand people in 2003, but I'm mildly charmed to learn that Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first movie to gross $100 million, and, also, was the first film to boast a score that became a hit record. Walt Disney, as Mr. Epstein observes, was perhaps the first person to recognize that the way to control actors was to draw them. The never-easy-to-please Ezra Pound could not get enough of Disney's early masterpiece Perri: sheer genius, he called it.
Review, 2039 words
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