Moneywood: Hollywood in Its Last Age of Excess

As wild and sexy and over the top as the decade author William Stadiem brings to life, Moneywood is the inside story of Hollywood producers in the '80s.

From box office hits like Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun and Batman to film flops like Heaven's Gate, Howard the Duck and Leonard Part 6, Hollywood was never more excessive than it was in the 1980s. In this, the Moneywood era, the industry purse strings were not controlled by reasonably consenting adults but by pop culture cowboys who couldn't balance their own checkbooks. What they could do was sweet talk the talent, seduce the starlets, snowball the Japanese and slither out of Dodge when the low grosses trickled in. Their out of control lifestyles and know-nothing, raging narcissistic personalities make the original brutal studio heads like Sam Goldwyn and Jack Warner seem like Oxford dons. Yet, for all their entertainment flops, these Scoundrels of Spago turned movies into a Big Business that was catnip to Wall Street. They were The Producers, and they were way beyond anything Mel Brooks could dream up.

The Moneywood cast of characters includes:

-Simpson and Bruckheimer; Guber and Peters; Eisner/Katzenberg/Ovitz: the marquee teams of the era

-Mario Kassar and Andy Vajna, the Rambo boys, who went from making wigs to making blockbusters.

-David Begelman, the embezzler, gambler and sex addict who was rewarded for his sins by getting to run both Columbia and MGM.

-David Puttnam The high-toned English advertising whiz who was supposed to raise the Hollywood bar, but ended up barred from Hollywood.

Moneywood is the ultimate expose of the real hit men of Hollywood's go-go decade.