Believe It or Not

By Gene Lichtenstein
Published on August 5, 2004

"It's All True" (Simon & Schuster, 2004) by David Freeman offers us a portrait of an outsized Hollywood, so unbelievable that it must be dead on. It is, more precisely, a novel, lovingly unfolded about the movie business: How it works and how its players -- adults spoiled by too much money and power -- act out their lives. "Oh me-oh, my-oh," as Henry Wearie would say.

Wearie is the novel's hero. He is actually a fictitious character, a screenwriter trying to hustle a script idea into a movie deal, but in a voice that sounds eerily like that of Freeman, who himself is a screenwriter. In its way, this book serves as a more knowing successor to Freeman's earlier work, "A Hollywood Education," published 18 years ago, after the author had moved to Los Angeles from New York.

Year in Review

By Rob Eshman
Published on December 27, 2001

Remember the fear and trepidation that accompanied the coming of the year 2000? Millennialists ran around like Chicken Little, selling us on bottled water and canned tuna, promising disaster.

It turns out they were off by a year.