Moneywood Hollywood In Its Last Age Of Excess

"From Top Gun to Howard the Duck, Hollywood was never more excessive than it was in the 1980s. In the Moneywood era, the purse strings were not controlled by adults, but by pop culture cowboys who couldn't balance their own checkbooks but could fast talk the talent, snowball the Japanese, and explain their way out of Dodge when the grosses came in. Their know-nothing raging narcissistic personalities make Sam Goldwyn look professorial and some of the biggest flops the industry has ever seen (Days of Heaven, Howard the Duck) were released on their watch. They were the producers. Out to line their pockets, trash each other, and never forget to look out for #1, the Moneywood cast of characters includes: Don Simpson, the Flashdance and Top Gun producer whose big-swinging-dick swagger and bigger drug habit only made him more desirable in studio boardrooms Ronald Betts, the Silver Screen Partners founder and former frat-mate of George W. Bush at Yale who milked that connection for all it was worth (and with Ronald Reagan in the White House it was worth a lot) David Begelman, the embezzler and womanizer who was president of MGM Ray Stark, Jon Peters, Peter Guber, Michael Eisner, Mike Ovit