Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency Paperback by James Andrew Miller (Custom House)

This book covers the period from the time that the some of the CAA founders worked at William Morris, how CAA was created, how it functioned in it's long heyday, and how it changed when the Young Turks took over after Ovitz left. If you've never seen the inside of the book or read any excerpts, it is not a narrative by the author; instead, it is a compilation of narratives by the founders of CAA, some of the agents, some actors, the Young Turks, and people on the periphery. If you don't know at least who these people are, this book may be very confusing to read. It does provide an interesting insight into the mindset of agents, how they function, what the job entails, and the "it's-good-to-be-King" philosophy of the major power brokers in Hollywood. Yes, they eat their young for breakfast in that town!

Since the narratives are provided by the individuals themselves, I found that there was a lot of back-patting, and "he was so nice", "everybody loved him" etc. etc. etc. That was not genuine and clouded some of the book for me. Come on...this is Hollywood. If you're an agent, and a successful one, you would throw your mother off of a cliff or sell your firstborn to get the best client and/or deal. Having most of the people praise Ovitz when, in reality, he was to the right of Ghengis Khan, was feeble. But I suppose that most of the people in the book are still active in Hollywood so you never burn your bridges - especially in Tinseltown where the powers-that-be NEVER forget ANYTHING.

Comments on the Kindle edition: BAD, BAD, BAD.....in what world do booksellers think they can just copy/paste a hardcover into a Kindle versionn?? It doesn't work. The formatting was terrible in many places; there were "bookmarks" already in the book - what's that about? and....there are photos but 99% of the photos are on one page and captions are either on the page before the photo or after the photo. So if you want to know who's-who in the photo to have to keep going back a page or forward to next page. Ugh!!! I find this is an issue with other Kindle versions of books and it astounds me that we can land a man on the moon but someone can't spend the time to format a hardcover book into a reader-version.