Since show biz immemorial that dream has seduced deep-pocketed gazillionaires from Joseph Kennedy to Stephen Bing. But while one expects crazy behavior from skirt-chasing plutocrats, we generally hope for a little more common sense from our salt-of-the-earth homemakers. Sinking one's money in moviemaking after all, has long since proven to be the most insane investment one can make; investors seeking to actually make money in Hollywood are generally advised that they'd be better off, well, buying a lottery ticket.

But perhaps having defied the odds once, Stafford is essentially letting it ride by throwing it all in to film production.

According to The Wrap, Stafford is forming Queen Nefertari Productions, which has already taken on four projects and is being steered to to meetings by the Gersh Agency. The Wrap writes:

Stafford recently produced a pair of independent movies, multicultural coming-of-age tale "Polish Bar" and supernatural thriller "The Gathering."

Kalligheri attested to Stafford's love of moviemaking, saying, "She'd probably be collecting money door to door [if she had to] to make movies." Queen Nefertari expects to have its first film in production by the end of this month or, at the latest, the first of the year.

"We may even have three going at the same time in the spring," Kalligheri said. The company is looking primarily at commercial projects in four broad genres: comedy, romantic comedy, thriller/horror and faith-based.

As the piece points out, in these challenging times, even giants like George Clooney and Bret Ratner have had to apply on bended knee to unconventional sources for financing. So if Stafford is willing to set aside that faith-based rigamarole, we may live to see the grand tradition of the casting couch find a whole new life in a whole new era.

Sitting at the head of the political table in a one-party town is no mean feat, and for the men of Dreamworks, their lock on that much-contested position now looks to set to run into its third decade. Throughout the Clinton era, the President saw in Spielberg, Katzenberg and Geffen his veritable Hollywood soulmates in the international union of self-adoring baby boomers. The Dreamworks SKG company was in fact founded during a visit to White House, modeled in the heady sense of specialness that dominated those days.

After the diaspora for Hollywood Democrats of the Bush years, there was a mad scramble to see who would emerge as the new President's showbiz BFF, the 2008 campaign setting off a frenzy of industry fundraisers and check-writing. But when the dust cleared and when, just today, the ultimate announcement came, sitting at the head table once again was a certain trio of former partners, initialed SKG.

A couple others made the cut. Of course super-agent Ari Emanuel, having a certain White House Chief of Staff for a brother, got the nod. Also making the list, Sony Chief Michael Lynton, whom has been a heavyweight Democratic fundraiser with, as Nikki Finke outlines, ties to Obama since his first Senate run through his Chicago-raised wife.

Why however, did Obama give three of his five Hollywood seats to the retreads of the Clinton days? Why would he not use the dinner to elevate some brighter, younger activists?

Well, first there is always money. And they gives a lot of it. Katzenberg has written personal checks totally over $800,000 in the past decade while Geffen has shelled out over half a million out of his own pocket to various party coffers, not counting what they've raised from others (Interestingly, as is often the case with Hollywood fundraising the talent rarely feels the need to put much cash on the table, thinking they are doing more than enough by lending their name or showing their face. Steven Spielberg, in contrast to his partners, appears to have donated only around $100,000 from his deep as the Mariana Trench pockets.)

Geffen, of course, was a very vocal early, not just supporter of Obama's but detractor of Hilary's, publicly chastising his ex-friend in Maureen Dowd's column.

But most important perhaps, the former Dreamworks partners, perhaps more than any other showmen in the corporate age of Hollywood, look the part of elder statesmen. They have managed to consistently cultivate their public persona's — led by Spielberg's America's Director shtick — to keep themselves, through all the heavy turmoil of their career and company, looking like the grand old wise men of Hollywood; the boomers graduated into what passes in Hollywood for seriousness.

And even more than Hollywood, politics, above all, respects those who look the part. And so Hollywood's next generation of young upstarts will just have to cool their heels for a cycle or two more.

Ad Age reports (via) that Silverman might take over CollegeHumor at the behest of Barry Diller, who bankrolls both CollegeHumor and Silverman's new online venture. Van Veen, meanwhile. is transitioning out of CollegeHumor and into his own Diller-funded media startup, Notional, which sounds a lot like Silverman's Electus (both have something to do with online video production).

We're told Silverman and Van Veen have been working very closely together and talking to each other every day. Perhaps a grander merger is in the works that would combine Electus, Notional and CollegeHumor into one venture. Silverman may have been ousted from old media, but he could still be lord of the new media flies. Especially within a venture that actually celebrates a refusal to mature, an inability to grow emotionally and a proclivity for partying to excess. Those are Ben Silverman's specialties, right there.

(Pics: via Getty, Webbyist)

Now that Emanuel has successfully merged Endeavor, the agency he co-founded, with the venerable William Morris Agency, he has the opportunity to "fuck CAA," something that's been rumored to motivate him to get out of bed each morning. How will Emanuel do it? By controlling everything.

Ari Emanuel has made a bold calculation: in order to survive, talent firms are going to have to do more. They must stop being simple deal-makers, become "mega-agencies" – vast, multi-faceted companies with marketing departments, events divisions, and new media offshoots which help clients to leverage income from a wide variety of sources.

Agents will also have to take a more pro-active role in the actual creation of films, making them more likely to be called upon to "package" a production: attaching directors, producers, and actors from their own stable to a particular project, before selling it to the studios.

In such a business, larger firms boast a huge competitive advantage. CAA recently announced it will move into new territory financing new films. Taken to its natural conclusion, this could dramatically alter the sort of films that make it to cinemas.

Optimists, which Hollywood is never short of, believe that this represents the potential to produce a new "golden age" of film-making, where power is returned to creatives, instead of being stifled by studios. "Ari created his new firm because he knew he had to be big to be at the level where he could successfully do that," says a former colleague of Emanuel's. "It's a gamble, frankly, but if anyone can pull it off, he can."

Whether or not "packaging" and the ever-growing power of Hollywood talent management firms is a good or bad thing is open to debate, and frankly we're kind of torn on the matter, but for anyone to suggest, as the anonymous "optimists" cited in the article do, that the industry's progression toward mega-agencies is even remotely rooted in an idealistic desire to revitalize its level of artistic integrity is, well, just plain stupid.

The types of people who become agents are almost universally motivated by one thing—Money. And sex, but mostly money. Even more so than the people who work in studios, agents are driven by greed. Just ask anyone who's ever had an agent in Hollywood and we're pretty sure that they'll confirm that. Not that's there's anything all too necessarily wrong with that, we just felt compelled to address that ridiculous fantasy here and now.

Finally, with all this hype going around about Ari Emanuel, we're kind of eager to see how his inevitable downfall will play out. Will some renegade screenwriter step up to be the Joe Eszterhas to Ari's Mike Ovitz? Regardless, we give Ari's reign of terror somewhere between five and ten years, depending on how long his brother is working in the White House. Hollywood may be a town full of pricks, but it's a town with a history of taking down any one prick that dares to swell too much bigger than any of the others.

Ari Emanuel: 21st Century Hollywood Mogul [Independent]

As the co-founder of Napster, Parker (pictured) was overshadowed by Sean Fanning, who actually wrote the wildly-popular music-sharing software. Sorkin reportedly brings Parker to the fore, giving him credit for lighting a fire under Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and accelerating the company's growth.

ScriptShadow's Carson Reeves:

And don't get me started on Sean Parker - a character that can become

iconic if the film is made. The brash techy rock star revels in his own

ego, and is a key player in why Facebook is on our computers today

(Parker ended up selling his portion of the company for - I believe - a

couple hundred million dollars).

Zuckerberg, meanwhile, looks comparatively pathetic. In what Reeves calls a "heartbreaking scene," he sits alone ("not one true friend") in a dark room and "friends" the girl who dumped him right before he started Facebook. The movie nevertheless bops along as something of a comedy, thanks to Sorkin's "crazy unknown voodoo screenwriting tricks" and, apparently, jokes involving Facebook use.

Zuckerberg, whose flacks have been trashing the unreleased book on which Sorkin's script is based, may yet discover there are worse things than being depicted having sex in bathroom stalls.

(Pic: Sean Parker, by Andrew Mager)

Age: 30

Residence: The tony Los Angeles neighborhood of Bel Air.

Childhood: Born in New York, Penske went to high school in the Detroit suburbs, where he made the All-American Lacrosse team.

Family wealth: Father Roger Penske, a race car driver, owns Penske Corporation, which owns auto dealerships, leases trucks and makes various auto parts.

Love life: Has dated actresses Lara Flynn Boyle, Gina Gershon, Jordana Brewster (left) and Devon Aoki (with Penske, top of this post)

Personality: Says an associate, "He comes across as hugely elegant, massively sophisticated then as you get to know him, you see this slightly skeevy side, heavy drinker likes to party."

Business: Penske's Mail.com Media Corporation took a $35 million investment from Steve Rattner's Quadrangle Group in September; but we hear he's been having trouble finding properties to buy.

Sites: MMC runs Mail.com, an also-ran email portal whose heyday was in the 1990s; OnCars.com; our former Defamer colleagues' Movieline.com, celebrity news site HollywoodLife (he shut down HollywoodLife the magazine earlier this year) and now Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily. It also provides private-label sites to large organizations like sports teams and universities.

Dragon fetish: Penske also runs Dragon Books, a vanity boutique book store he runs a little Bel Air shopping center. Its placeholder website has been under "redesign" for more than two years. Then there's the Luczo Dragon Racing team, which he co-owns with the chairman of hard-drive maker Seagate Technologies.

Flops: Started Firefly Mobile, selling cell phones for kids, in 2002; by 2006 the company needed a restart.

So how much did he pay for Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood?: Seven figures, supposedly. PaidContent's Rafat Ali reports that his company had been in talks with Finke at a lower number. We heard from Finke's editor at the LA Weekly, Jill Stewart, that Finke was talking as if she was looking at "so much money" while she pondered the deal. Seven-figures sounds mighty high for DHD, but if Penske was having trouble making deals, maybe he was willing to overpay.

Aspirations: Penske is said desperately seeking entree to the fashion world, part of a broader quest for elegance. The same associate:

He wants to be a modern day Si Newhouse, he wants to have a glamourous publishing company.

We hope, then, he reconsiders the name Mail.com Media Corp. as the name of his flagship.

Ari "has emerged in the last six weeks as the pre-eminent power player in a Hollywood that has often bemoaned the sunset of colorful moguls from an older generation...." What has he done in those six weeks, exactly? He merged his agency with William Morris and then fired everyone at William Morris.

But we all know that Ari is relentlessly ambitious and cutthroat—in fact we know this is true of the entire Emanuel family, even the doctor one. So what is really different? Why does it matter that Ari is threatening the co-chairman of NBC Entertainment "with personal ruin"? Surely he's done that a million times before?

"Nobody wants to be on the wrong side of Ari Emanuel, especially now that his brother is running the White House," said one television executive, who asked for anonymity to preserve harmony with him.

Oh, hah. Of course! Rahm is the most second-most powerful man in the country now, so all of show business belongs to his brother.

[Photo: Getty]

Nevertheless, the reports in The Wrap and Variety say it's true: Carey is apparently close to a deal to become vice chairman at News Corp., replacing longtime number two Peter Chernin, who left the media conglomerate back in February. Murdoch's son James had long been considered the odds-on favorite for Chernin's job.

Murdoch is still widely expected to pass control of News Corp. to one of his children, giving Carey a limited future at the company. His work is also likely to be constrained by the direct lines of control Murdoch has established at News Corp. in the wake of Chernin's departure. Murdoch's involvement is now sufficiently extensive that the chairman was expected to personally screen new shows for Fox TV this past spring.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.If things don't work out with Murdoch, Carey will can always fall back on his role as the Pringles mascot, as Seth Abrmovitch notes over at Movieline. After all, the tasty snacks can officially be called "chips" now, making the Procter & Gamble brand more respectable than ever.

Look who else has been added to the victim list today:

Arpad Busson, the billionaire fiancee of Uma Thurman! Busson runs a hedge fund called EIM, which has more than $150 million in exposure in Madoff's funds. You can do better, Uma.


Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, the CEO of Dreamworks! He lost millions. It's the Hollywood thing to do—so did Katzenberg's pal...


Steven Spielberg! His charity got swindled out of an unknown amount. Sad. But not as sad as...


Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate and humanitarian! His charitable foundation may have been almost wiped out. That's despicable. Then there's...


Mort "Mort" Zuckerman, real estate mogul and Daily News owner! More than 10% of his charitable trust was invested with Madoff. And finally...


Frank Lautenberg, ancient New Jersey senator! His charity also took a hit.

Of course there's also a laundry list of banks and rich individuals and whatnot, which can be seen in its fullest version here. God bless whatever unlucky WSJ drones were forced to assemble it.

Last month the MPAA banned the movie's poster for being too raunchy. That was a huge red flag. The company responded by thumbing its nose with a cute little riff on the controversy, and continued on its merry way, marketing-wise.

But ads for the film were still getting banned across the country. Now it seems to be sinking in that the very title of the movie could prevent it from being properly marketed and advertised, dooming it to box office failure:

The public outcry has left the film's director and distributor flabbergasted. "I can't believe this is happening in the 21st century," says Mr. Smith. "When was the last time you saw a porno with the word porno in the title?"

"Anyone who takes the title seriously is missing the comedic aspect of the movie," says Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of Weinstein Co.

"This is the one time I don't want controversy. This is a big, broad, fun Seth Rogen comedy," he says. "Hopefully people will see the movie for what it really is."

Do we detect a touch of nervousness in Harvey's quotes? As dumb as American puritanism is, you'd think that a company in Weinstein Co.'s position would go out of its way to make sure that a promising film actually succeeds financially. If Zack And Miri tanks because of a careless title... well, let's just hope it doesn't. For Harvey's sake!

Any divorce settlement would come out of Sumner Redstone’s own pocket, and not his family's Boston-based business, National Amusements Inc., said two people close to the firm. National Amusements is caught in a credit squeeze and Redstone's daughter, Shari Redstone, who runs the company, is trying to restructure its nearly $1.6-billion debt load, including an $800-million bank loan that is due in mid-December.

Another source tells us that Martha Stewart and Mark Burnett, the reality show maven who works with her, "had a giant blowout, over money." Along with the timing of this Sumner Redstone rumor, it paints a grim picture. Let's hope this doesn't get so bad that it filters down to the non-rich.

When Weinstein first made his "significant" investment, A Small World was touted as the place where the rich and powerful would meet online, "friendster for people who self-identify as being dually-based in two large cities with modern Western economies, an abundance of 8-figure real estate and a luxury resort or two."

With the Weinstein Co. on such unstable ground, Harvey sure would have loved to have the insurance of a successful ASW. Just imagine, a site with Facebook's popularity but the demographic profile of the WSJ. It would be a gold mine! Alas,much like Denise Rich, megayachts, and parties in St. Tropez with Naomi Campbell, ASW was overhyped. An illustrative look at how the game-changing site (that's too exclusive for you) has been performing:

Hence today's fairly seismic introduction of SnagFilms — Leonsis's own marketplace for a world that some think may have passed the documentary by. He isn't taking any chances, though, buying the film news outlet indieWIRE just in case and putting upwards of 700 feature docs under contract before today's launch. And suddenly, Leonsis's change has a whole new batch of industry careers at stake.

"Most of these films are created with a double-bottom-line in mind," Leonsis told us in a conversation today. "You want to activate discussion, and you want to activate charitable giving." He calls it "filmanthropy," and SnagFilms is intended to spur more by allowing bloggers and other Web publishers to embed full-length docs. Leonsis likens it to a theatrical model writ large, with 90 seconds of advertising per hour (sold by AOL, natch) generating revenue that Snag splits 50-50 with the filmmakers.

Except, of course, even bigger fish than Leonsis have tried and failed to monetize online video. And docs are proven box-office poison, with everyone from Oscar-winners Errol Morris and Alex Gibney to, of course, Leonsis himself, taking baths on acclaimed films in the last year. Leonsis acknowledged that despite current programming that includes Super Size Me and the Sundance hit Dig!, the majority of SnagFilms titles will come from distribution libraries on the "short end of the long tail" as well as fest-circuit faves that may not have made it into theatrical release. "We're a viable new window for a lot of films that are laying there collecting dust," he said.

Hardly music to advertisers' ears, right? Enter indieWIRE (where, full disclosure, this author interned for one grad-school semester in 2004), the influential 12-year-old Web site featuring news, blogs and social networking components for the indie film community. "While the market is going to have to develop, I do believe that some of their films ... suffer from limited availability," iW co-founder and editor-in-chief Eugene Hernandez explained to us earlier. "And by connecting those films to the causes that people care about, I think Ted has hit on something unique."

And IndieWIRE is key to that connection, averaging around 500,000 unique visits per month and hosting nearly 11,000 members on its networking site indieLOOP. Meanwhile, iW gets an unspecified bump in resources for covering a niche it has almost entirely to itself — which may or may not emphasize SnagFilms' core product. The Hollywood Reporter placed the sale at under $1 million, though, provoking concern among territorial indie circles that indieWIRE is anything but, or worse yet, that Leonsis bought a house organ for a song.

Leonsis and Hernandez reject the claim outright, though one can sense the latter has lost more than a little sleep over it. "We put 12 years into this, and we didn't build this brand to undermine the integrity developed over the years." Hernandez said. "But at the same time, [I] wanted to find a partner. We almost sold the company a few times in recent years and in every single instance, if we had done the deal we could have been compromised or the acquirer is now out of business. ... I know that people will call us on it if we fuck up."

So: Grand experiment? Genre dumping ground? Either way, for better or worse (if still not for good) the doc is in.

Project Runway was a big hit on the Bravo network. But Weinstein decided to move the show to Lifetime, which agreed to up his cut to around $1 million per episode. He also screwed Bravo by lining up sponsors for the show on his own, which precluded the network from selling ads to other companies in the same categories. Weinstein even ended up favoring a Wal-Mart placement on the show over a Macy's one, proving he wasn't in it for taste.

Still, the show is a hit, and a cash cow. Project Runway has been successful enough to demand that fashion magazines like Elle and Marie Claire pay for the privilege of being featured on the show. Hardcore media hardball.

And a treasure trove of new evidence dug out of Weinstein's trash can by the Village Voice's Tony Ortega shows that the mogul himself is closely involved in the show's sponsorship choices. An email from a former Weinstein Co. employee shows the calculating negotiation process:

"I wish there was more time. Twc [The Weinstein Company] has already gone to great lengths with new partner at lifetime to not only secure both categories for you but also to be flexible toward loreal in coming up with an alternative for you on their packaging of [seasons] six + seven. Unfortunately, due to filming of season five and tresemme's feeling that they are being iced out of season 6, there just is not more time to give. As you know, season five commences in days...twc is now at risk that tresemme will pull out of season 5, which puts twc at risk for 1.1m [$1.1 million]. Carol is welcome to call hw [Harvey Weinstein] or me, but the deadline has to remain at close of business tuesday for loreal to decide on hair category for [Project Runway]/models for season 6 and structure of [seasons] 7/8. I would additionally say that the whole reason we are to this point is a result of the relationship! Without the relationship and the history, l'oreal would not have the opportunity to even engage in the opportunity to obtain the hair category."

Good thing they have such a good relationship! Or this sponsorship thing would really be nasty. And here's how much the company is expected to cough up to Weinstein in order to have its goop featured on the faaabulous production:

"Hw - if you get a call from carol hamilton it will be regarding [Project Runway] season 6 and beyond. I've imposed a tuesday, close of business deadline for them to commit to hair category in addition to make up. They have two choices: 1) Take both hair and make up for [$2 million] plus [$1 million] to twc (no split) for season 6 and [$2 million] for hair and makeup for season 7 plus [$1 million] to twc for a total of [$6 million]. 2) Commit to season 6 only for [$2 million] hair/make up plus [$1 million] to twc] and then by 3rd episode must pick up both season 7 + 8 for a total of [$8 million] (but must take additional [$1 million] to twc regardless) They have asked for additional time and I have declined that citing tresemme and season 5 which starts shooting shortly. Call me if you have questions. Best, lori"

A mogul's life: not so different from a used car salesman. Buy now! There's a guy on his way here right this minute to take it off my hands if you don't want it.....

[VV; pic via NY Mag]

Think of how easy it might have been to understand Arianna Huffington's bloggy animus toward Tim Russert if there were a book out chronicling all the sordid details of their decade-and-a-half-long secret feud. (There is.) Every gossip-mongering gadabout should know the full backstory on every spat, falling out, and long-running mutual antagonism in media. Below are the volumes no shelf should be without.

1. The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New Hollywood, by Tom King

The Gist: A gay Polish-Ukrainian Jew from Borough Park moves to Hollywood and enters the mail room at the William Morris Agency. After forging a letter suggesting he had a college degree when in fact he did not, Geffen rises through the ranks to become an agent, then leaves WMA and founds Asylum Records and produces albums by Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. Asylum is sold to Warner Communications, and Geffen becomes Vice Chairman of Warner film studios. He then retires and un-retires after a minor but erroneous health scare, founds Geffen Records, courts John Lennon and Yoko Ono (see below), produces Cats, Risky Business (see below), co-founds Dreamworks SKG, produces Saving Private Ryan, backs Bill Clinton, gives lots of money to AIDS research, falls out with Bill Clinton over one of the sleazeballs he didn't pardon, and now backs Barack Obama. Along the way Geffen throws many temper tantrums and raises his voice to the point where even Steven Spielberg asks him politely to lower it. He also shows a remarkable ability for betraying the confidences of good friends and business associates in order to charm potential clients he’s just met. The night Lennon was shot, Geffen was in bed with a male prostitute and loves to boast about it.

The Pull-Quote: “’What about my music?’ [Yoko Ono] asked. ‘Well, I’ve never heard any of your records.’ ‘Really,’ Ono said. ‘That doesn’t sound like a very good reason for me to make a deal with you.’ ‘I’m a big fan of John’s, and I have a great deal of respect for the two of you, and we do a very good job. We’re a good record company.’ ‘What do you mean you’re a good record company?’ Ono fired back. ‘You haven’t put out a record yet!’”

The Takeaway: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Be enlightened and progressive on your own time, but cunning and ruthless on corporate time. Respect for others’ privacy won't make you rich and powerful. Endear yourself to those you want to impress by gossiping about people you know behind their backs. It'll smack of such poor judgment that would-be clients will assume you're either crazy or brilliant, and guess what? You are.

2. Tina and Harry Come to America: Tina Brown, Harry Evans, and the Uses of Power, by Judy Bachrach

The Gist: Gifted writer Tina Brown makes her fellow students feel small at Oxford, dates a host of famous men (including Auberon Waugh, who washes frantically after sex, Martin Amis, whom she adores, and Dudley Moore, whom she does not), deflects charges of arrivisme, and becomes editor of UK tabloid Tatler at age 25. She meets Harold Evans, then married and famously editing the The Times of London and The Sunday Times, which names her Most Promising Female Journalist. Brown and Evans marry in 1981, then move to New York three years later, whereupon Brown revives the moribund Vanity Fair by turning it into the must-read glossy on celebrity doings and the leisure class. She hires true crime reporter Dominick Dunne, photographer Helmut Newton and inaugurates a new wave of magazine journalism, operating under the assumption that "intellectuals should be read and not seen." Meanwhile, Tina and Harry are now East Coast socialites whose fiercely guarded life together aspires to shape headlines, not become them. (Their best friend is British libel law.) Brown takes over The New Yorker in 1992 and remakes that antiquated smart sheet, too, acquiring Malcolm Gladwell, Anthony Lane and David Remnick, who later replaces her as editor-in-chief. On a manuscript submitted by Yiddish Nobel laureate, Brown writes, "Beef it up, Singer," which more or less encapsulates her style of feared-but-respected-or-hated tenure. She founds Talk magazine in 1999, which folds after just two years, an over-sensationalized failure from which this unauthorized biography derives all of its rise-and-fall schadenfraude. (Bachrach is a contributing editor at the new VF, edited by Brown’s archnemesis Graydon Carter.)

The Pull-Quote: "We live in a time when infamy sells.... There is no honor, no reticence, no loyalty." Spoken by Maureen Dowd on Brown's New Yorker reign, and quoted by author to make a clichéd point.

The Takeaway: Develop a nose for future A-listers. Sleep with as many as you can all the while adopting an “amused” air about them. Overpaying the talent means you can bully them into submission, so don't be cowed by easily tossed around phrases like "national institution" or "greatest living writer." Fuck 'em if they can't take a kill-fee. Oh, and marry old men.

3. How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, by Toby Young

The Gist: Son of highbrow sociologist Michael Young, who coined the term "meritocracy," Toby Young devotes his life to testing how much strain that already weakened concept can take. He writes for the British Times, gets fired from the British Times. He founds celebrated Modern Review, which traffics in "low culture for highbrows," then shuts it down, much to the dismay of everyone else involved. Young moves to New York in the early 90's, gets hired by Graydon Carter as a contributing editor (read: sinecurist) at Vanity Fair, then proceeds overlong tenure as a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of Graydon Carter’s shoe (this is G.C.’s description of him, not ours). Young cracks dud jokes to celebrities, refers to doormen who won't let him into parties he'd end up hating anyway as "clipboard Nazis," does blow while on assignment, asks Nathan Lane if he's gay, gets fired from Vanity Fair. Now back in London (this isn't in the book), Young edits The Spectator, a conservative weekly, and boasts of his "negative charisma," probably as a way to boost paperback sales. HTLFAAP, much like Young himself, has been up and down the wicket of sadomasochistic success. A film adaptation is said to be in post-production, starring Simon Pegg and Kirsten Dunst.

The Pull-Quote: “Cool Britannia was a cry of independence, a howl of protest against the all-enveloping cultural hegemony of the United States, yet, paradoxically, it didn’t really mean anything—it hadn’t really happened—until it was noticed by the American media. That explained the schizophrenic attitude of people like Damien Hirst, Keith Allen and Alex James: they wanted to assert their indifference to the attentions of glossy, New York magazines, and yet they wanted to be photographed striking this insouciant pose in Vanity Fair. Like rebellious schoolchildren, their protest wouldn’t have counted unless it was registered by the authorities. Unfortunately, in this scenario I was cast as the toothless substitute teacher.”

The Takeaway: The memoir is a good object lesson in what not to do if you want to hang onto a job or a masthead listing, or cast the impression that deep down you really had high expectations for the world of glamour-besotted New York media. Also, it pays to be obnoxious in a way that only you find ironic.

4. Spy: The Funny Years, by Kurt Andersen, Graydon Carter, George Kalogerakis

The Gist: In 1986, Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen found the future of piss-taking journalism in the form of Spy magazine. Épater le bourgeoisie never had it so good, or so the editors – now all dressed up and fixtures of the very culture they once lampooned – are the first ones to remind you. Spy pioneers satire as a clever agglomeration of facts, and specializes in the infographic, the listicle (just like this one!) and the blurb cloud. It attempts to decipher just who, exactly, is on the New Yorker’s indecipherable masthead. It follows Anthony Haden-Guest into the dank reaches of his own nightlife. It refines hatred of Donald Trump into an art form. Features include the Liz Smith Tote Board, Separated at Birth, and Logrolling in Our Time, without which everything from The Onion to Conan O’Brien’s pre-interview fooling would be unimaginable. The self-conscious prose style is a cocktail of H.L. Mencken, A.J. Liebling and Wolcott Gibbs, and its been swigged by every glossy editor in search of a readership ever since. Once G.C. leaves, it all goes to shit. Like Studio 54, the new owners can’t make it work, ergo the justified hubris of the book’s title.

The Pull-Quote: “How easy is it to steal the sour cream?” – in a chart surveying the various Manhattan cafeteria chains.

The Gist: You need only ask yourself if you read Radar to determine whether there’s any pedagogic value to be mined from Spy.

5. Bright Lights, Big City, by Jay McInerney

The Gist: Nameless 24 year-old fact-checker for elite New York glossy (a thinly veiled New Yorker) moonlights as an aspiring novelist, or wants us to believe he moonlights as that while he’s busy Hoovering coke by the suitcaseful and partying through the vertiginous 80’s club scene with a yuppie twat called Tad Allagash. Tad calls the narrator, who writes annoyingly in the second person, “Coach.” His mother has recently passed away, so we’re shin-kicked into wondering if a life of artifice and glitz is simply an emollient for real pain. Behind the hatred there lies a plundering desire for love. Or something.

The Pull-Quote: “Just now you want to stay at the surface of things, and Tad is a figure skater who never considers the sharks under the ice. You have friends who actually care about you and speak the language of the inner self. You have avoided them of late. Your soul is as disheveled as your apartment, and until you clean up a little you don't want to invite anyone inside.”

The Takeaway: Once Tina Brown takes over Coach’s magazine, he’s fired. Sort your soul out before you move to the metropolis of infinite distractions, otherwise you, too, will wind up a shiftless anonymity with withdrawal symptoms. (Your apartment can still be a mess, however.)

6. The Devil Wears Prada, by Lauren Weisberger

The Gist: Recent Brown graduate Andrea Sacks wants to write for the New Yorker (sigh) and blankets the media world with her resume hoping to get a dues-paying job somewhere that will eventually allow her to become Larissa MacFarquhar. Whoops. She gets hired by fashion bible Runway’s bitch supreme Miranda Priestly (Anna Wintour, not even thinly veiled) as her junior personal assistant. Next thing Andrea knows, she’s chasing down lattes at Starbucks and sirloins at Smith and Wollensky instead of learning about ledes and nut grafs. Not what she had in mind but she loves the clothes and even develops a knack for being a second-string slave to a subhuman narcissist. Unlike in the film, Andrea doesn’t quit – she gets fired for saying “Fuck you, Miranda. Fuck you.” Ballsy, sure, but she does get to keep some of the Dolce and even snags an interview for a real writing position at another magazine in the same building. (N.B. Author Weisberger was Wintour’s personal assistant, so this novel is a bildungsroman, which is a word Andrea learned at Brown but seldom got to use after graduation.)

The Pull-Quote: “Fuck you, Miranda. Fuck you.”

The Takeaway: How many bright young girls have come to New York hoping to fill these Cinderella slippers, only to discover that not only is Wintour not hiring, but she’s honed her filter for confessional opportunists more interested in publishing advances than making sure her Apple Fritter is extra flaky. If you want to be a bona fide reporter, save yourself the aggro and dashed hopes and apply for an internship at the New York Sun your junior year. Also, while it’s true that some ball-breaking editors respond well to self-assertiveness, telling your boss “Fuck you” isn’t the wisest career decision.

7. Monster: Living Off the Big Screen, by John Gregory Dunne

The Gist: The story of Dunne and wife Joan Didion's attempt to transform the life of anchorwoman Jessica Savitch, who died in a car wreck after more or less proving on air in 1983, during a broadcast of NBC News Digest, that she was a drug addict. Instead of a sadder version of Network, the screenplay transforms into the Disneyfied Up Close and Personal, which makes absolutely no mention of Savitch and which even Robert Redford doesn't remember filming.

The Pull-Quote: “The purpose of such a meet-and-greet is to allow the executive to size up the supplicant. [Disney studio chairman Jeffrey] Katzenberg had not read Golden Girl, but he was aware of the less savory details of Jessica Savitch’s life. He liked the ugly-duckling idea; it was the kind of narrative he wanted, and he was also responsive to the television background against which it would be played. He did have reservations, and here I quote Joan’s notes of that first meeting: ‘Wants to know what is going to happen in this picture that will make the audience walk out feeling uplifted, good about something and good about themselves.’”

The Takeaway: Dunne is witty and disarming, especially when he quotes Jack Warner's definition of screenwriters: "schmucks with Underwoods." Interestingly, the "monster" in question is not the industry or any particular studio executive, but rather the money that governs all, including Dunne.

8. You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, by Julia Phillips

The Gist: Scandal-sponge Jewish producer reveals the vast corruption, drugs and sexual indiscretions that motor the movie industry. Phillips gets fired by Steven Spielberg on the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, accuses Goldie Hawn of body odor, and, on the night she becomes the first woman to win a "Best Picture" Oscar for The Sting, downs three valiums, one upper, one and a half drinks, two joints and a dash of cocaine. The book is a sprayfire indictment of practically everyone Phillips ever met in Hollywood, and it got her banned from Morton's.

The Pull-Quote: "They were really a rogues' gallery of nerds. Marty [Scorsese] was tiny and asthmatic, Steven [Spielberg] had the soft, flabby look of a typical Twinkies kid, and Brian [De Palma] never took his safari jacket off."

The Takeaway: Sour grapes ferment the best, although it's not as if anyone still believes in some West Coast Arcadia where dazzling moving pictures are made. Still, you'll hardly do better for the brutally honest story of a show biz prodigy that had to burn everything before she flamed out.

9. Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures With the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys Who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media, by Michael Wolff

The Gist: Following up on Burn-Rate (1998), which was about Wolff’s bust foray into the world of online startups, this is the nasty-minded sequel by the former New York media writer who wants badly to be the next Murdoch but can’t and decides to just insult everybody he ever envied instead—especially Fox News President Roger Ailes. Most of the stuff in here consists of Wolff's recycled columns, but it's all in one place and no true mogul ever wasted his time searching through web archives. Harvey Weinstein is obese and grotesque. The media business is "collapsing” like communism. Some of Wolff's axioms should be true even if they aren’t: “The larger and higher-profile the company, the bigger the nutcase who runs it.”

The Pull-Quote: “This was the meta thing. Meta gave both irony and gravitas to what we did. The delicious incongruity between our superficiality and our importance. The joie de vivre of self-referentialism. The stupendous, intoxicating power of being able to create the world we lived in."

Bonus Pull-Quote: “So, as I arrived for my speech, I was thinking of my relationship to the absent but always present [Fox News head Roger] Ailes. He was the greatest, but the Antichrist too.”

The Takeaway: Still fun. Like Young’s book, AOTM is a serviceable monument to failure dressed up as critical thinking. Though most of the wisdom you could just as easily cull by lunching at Michael's. Wolff went on to try and match-make the sale of his old haunt New York (he's now at Vanity Fair) to Mort Zuckerman, who in the event lost out to hedge fund wizard Bruce Wasserstein. That means more meanness is forthcoming in what promises to be the Dance to the Music of Time of inferiority complexes.

Tyra is obviously a quick study, and in her quest for branding "Tyra" as what she refers to as "attainable fantasy," TyTy has no doubt closely watched her idol Martha Stewart, and has learned from her mistakes as coming off too cold or business-y. Bu it's hard to believe that Tyra's first concern isn't money, particularly because she continually talks about it in the article. Normally cartoonish, she actually comes off like Montgomery Burns.

"I'm frugal," she said. "I've always been this way. When I was young, my mom would give me my allowance, and I'd peel off a little each week and have some to spare." She looked around the room, which had cream industrial carpeting and walls painted in a shade somewhere between cantaloupe and terra cotta. "When we moved into these offices, I didn’t like the carpet," she continued. "But do you know what carpeting costs? It’s really expensive. So, I picked out a color palette that would go with this carpet, and I painted the walls instead. Painting is much less expensive than carpet." She considered this decision for a moment. "One of the first things I ask when I hire someone who deals with the financials of the company is about their spending habits. How you spend money reveals a lot about you."

Only people who super care about money say they're frugal. She also writes in very small print so that she doesn't have to go through notebooks as quickly. And you know that has nothing to do with being green.

Hirschberg remarks on Tyra's weird, yet winning, combination of deliberate details and chaotic improvisation when it comes to her shows and producing projects. But even Tyra herself talks about how her current success was a longtime in the making, a plan she and her mother (her best friend, manager, and onetime stage mother to a child star, although the two would deny that) had carefully mapped out years ago when she first got into modeling.

"My mom said, 'You will not go to Paris without studying the industry first,'" Banks said. "I went to the fashion library in Los Angeles and looked at all the French magazines from the past. My mom explained that I should study the names of the hairdressers, the stylists, the makeup artists, the photographers, the editors and, of course, the designers. I watched videotapes of models walking. My mom said, 'This is not just glamour — it is a business.' So when I arrived in Paris, I was ready.'"

Um, except she never bothered to learn French. LOL!

Once she got to Paris, she "saw that the girls with cosmetic and swimsuit calendars made more money than the high-fashion girls," so when she began to gain too much weight for runway, she looked at it as an opportunity to really cash in with Victoria's Secret contracts and Sports Illustrated covers. She even viewed her skin color as a lucrative opportunity rather than a setback, because at the time, there was no "black Cindy Crawford." as she puts it.

At the end of the day, Tyra—who points out that she doesn't drink and is not into the latest fashions — is just like any other success story: She's a geek who made good. And like most embittered geeks, she wishes to inherit the earth. Or at least to rule it.

"I want power," she said. "The power to make change. I have never been interested in being ‘hot’ or ‘cool.’ I’m not interested in walking down a bunch of red carpets, dating someone famous, being in a big movie. I’ve done those things, and it never felt right. But I do want power and not for financial reasons."

But it's kinda hard to believe that someone so calculating isn't all about the numbers. Not that there's anything wrong with that!

Banksable [NYT Magazine]