Action! is a family saga in which five decades of Hollywood history are embodied in the lives of three generations of a movie dynasty, with each generation reflecting the changing values of the motion-picture industry.
AJ Jastrow, the producer at the center of this story, seeks to build a movie empire and thus fulfill his father’s legacy. Along the way he battles manipulative executives, power-crazed directors, drug-addicted actors, duplicitous agents, the FBI, and his own mother, Hollywood’s wealthiest woman. Interwoven into the fiction are some of Hollywood’s most colorful historical characters: Bing Crosby, Adolph Zukor, Steve McQueen, Romy Schneider, Ray Stark, Mike Todd, Julia Phillips, and a who’s who of today’s players.
This book entertains on a number of levels, as a page-turning family drama, as an inside account of Hollywood’s progress – or drift – from the end of World War II to the present, and as an intimate chronicle of how movies are really made. |