Reel power: the struggle for influence and success in the New Hollywood.

• Author: Noah, Timothy

Reel Power: The Struggle for Influence and Success in the New Hollywood.

Mark Litwak. WilliamMorrow, $18.95. For all the ink that is spilled chronicling Hollywood, very little gives readers a sense of how the movie business operates on the nuts and bolts level. Even Indecent Exposure, probably the best business book about Hollywood, is really more about the pathology of corporate boardrooms. Serious business journalists tend to avoid Hollywood, probably because they figure it's too weired to offer lessons for the rest of us. That's too bad, because what Hollywood is all about--the pursuit of creativity--is also something that other industries, in less extravagant ways, aim for. How that pursuit is corrupted or goes awry in Hollywood can help us understand how creative impulses ought to be nurtured in other businesses.

Litwak's book, funded in part byRalph Nader's Center for the Study of Responsive Law, helps fill the gap. Litwak has taken a thoughtful look at the movie business, without getting sucked in by the glamor of Tinseltown on the one hand or the power politicking of corporate executives on the other.

The movie business would seemto represent the entrepreneurial ideal. The studio system is today largely extinct, having been replaced by a proliferation of independent production companies. But as a result, much of what was good about the old, oligopolistic ways has been lost. Back when screenwriters were studio employees, one former Columbia contract writer told Litwak, "We would have lunch together and talk about our mutual problems. If you ran into a script problem you would have somebody to go...