The Men Who Would Be King: An Almost Epic Tale of Moguls, Movies, and a Company Called DreamWorks
What really happened when three of the most powerful men in Hollywood - director Steven Spielberg, billionaire David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg - decided to build their own empire? Are Dreamworks’ business practices really as cutthroat as the battle scenes in Saving Private Ryan? To launch her much ballyhooed account, The Men Who Would Be King: An Almost Epic Tale of Moguls, Movies, and a Company Called DreamWorks (Thomas Allen Publishers), investigative reporter Nicole LaPorte will separate fact from tabloid fiction with celebrated film critic Richard Crouse. WARNING: You’ll never see a Dreamworks film the same way again afterwards. Marc Glassman, Executive Director of This Is Not A Reading Series (TINARS), will host the evening. – A TINARS event presented by Thomas Allen Publishers, The Gladstone Hotel, NOW Magazine, Torontoist.com, and Take Five On CIUT.
The Men Who Would Be King For sixty years, since the birth of United Artists, the studio landscape was unchanged. Then came Hollywood’s Circus Maximus—created by director Steven Spielberg, billionaire David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who gave the world The Lion King—an entertainment empire called DreamWorks. Now Nicole LaPorte,who covered the company for Variety, goes behind the hype to reveal for the first time the delicious truth of what happened.
Readers will feel they are part of the creative calamities of moviemaking as LaPorte’s fly-on-the-wall detail shows us Hollywood’s bizarre rules of business. We see the clashes between the often otherworldly Spielberg’s troops and Katzenberg’s warriors, the debacles and disasters, but also the Oscar-winning triumphs, including Saving Private Ryan. We watch as the studio burns through billions, its rich owners get richer, and everybody else suffers. We see Geffen seducing investors like Microsoft’s Paul Allen, showing his steel against CAA’s Michael Ovitz, and staging fireworks during negotiations with Paramount and Disney. Here is Hollywood, up close, glamorous, and gritty.
Nicole LaPorte is a former film reporter for Variety, where she covered the Hollywood movie industry for several years. She also wrote the “Rules of Hollywood” column for the Los Angeles Times Magazine and has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Observer, the Sunday Telegraph Magazine, and W magazine. For The Men Who Would Be King she did more than 200 interviews with subjects at every level of the entertainment business.
Richard Crouse is the host of the show, Richard Crouse’s Movie Show on the E! Channel and has a regular movie review segment on CTV’s Canada AM. Crouse often appears on CBC radio as a musical trivia expert. He has written several books on the music and movie industries, such as the bestseller Son Of The 100 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen.
Media / Info Contacts:
Nicola LaPorte: Jenna Illies, jenna.illies@t-allen.com, (416) 361-0233 ext 5
TINARS: Chris Reed, coordinator@tinars.ca, (416) 598-1447
