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“... with mentoring her in her earlier career as a screenwriter. In 2020 David Zaslav, head of the Warner-Discovery conglomerate that includes HBO, bought and renovated Evans’s home in Beverly Hills. Biskind writes that the househad seen its share of drugs, sex and rock’n’roll, had succumbed to weeds, rot and decay, and become a fitting gravestone for ...”

“... considered buying Penguin Books’ American branch. The two men crossed the pond for talks with Alan [sic] Lane. Epstein was not impressed. He decided that Lane, ‘like most British publishers’, was in hock to his bankers. The penguin would never fly. Epstein went home to the skyscrapers, where a publisher could spread his wings. The glorious world of ...”

“... and Glamour of an Icon’. She has interviewed more than 250 people, starting with the late John Warner (Taylor’s penultimate husband, a Republican senator) and her book reads like an extended feature for Vanity Fair. We learn that Bob Dylan adored her in Raintree County and that David Lynch kissed her after the 1987 Oscars (she was a fan of Blue ...”

“... got her revenge when she won the 1965 Best Actress Oscar for Mary Poppins, her first movie role (Warner Brothers had refused her the part of Eliza because she’d never – until Poppins – performed in a film); Audrey wasn’t even nominated for her work in My Fair Lady, an omission prompting Julie to say sympathetically to the press: ‘I think Audrey ...”

“... remember how comedians only appeared in Film and Radio Fun long after their vogue had passed. Jack Warner with his catchphrase ‘Mind my bike’ and Joe E. Brown were known to me only as personalities from the comics not from the medium which had originally made them famous. I suppose this might be taken as an extension of the Hegelian doctrine that the owl ...”

“... ironing-board or mooching through a Municipal Gallery (in the expectation of being eavesdropped by Alan Bennett?). The women bring in the wages by running the claims desk down at the alternate SS (Social Security).This is a tribe of scapegoats by appointment to the culture at large, boastful losers. They are decadents, style-warriors, spending more time under ...”

“... published writing, he admitted; was a letter sent to a film magazine when he was ten, asking the Warner Brothers for more of Humphrey Bogart, just seen in The Petrified Forest. His last, a New Yorker profile of Louise Brooks, reads like a farewell hymn to Aphrodite Cinematica, ageless epitome of all the girls loved over the years on thousands of silver ...”

“... financial arrangement was part of the deal with 20th Century Fox negotiated by my expert lawyer, Alan U. Schwartz, who represented Tennessee Williams, Tom Stoppard, Truman Capote and Mel Brooks. ‘May the Schwartz be with you,’ Brooks joked in Spaceballs. He already was.As the plane began its descent, swinging over Santa Clarita, down across the Santa ...”

“... hard to imagine anything less engaging or novelistic, but the vitality of the whole, the sense of Alan Bennett characters filled with Old Testament fervour, was strong enough to blot it out. Towards the end of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit the narrator wonders what would have happened if she had stayed in the church. She decides she would have been a priest ...”

“... of rushing about that I certainly couldn’t control and didn’t even desire. A nice boy called Alan Mindel slipped on some polished linoleum as he raced around, hit his chin on the veneer of a rosewood dressing-table, and had to have a couple of stitches put in. My mother reacted with fury and gave me a beating in front of several guests. My father reacted ...”

“... to market participants is as familiar as beans on toast. (An example: when AOL took over Time Warner, the old media company supplied 70 per cent of the profit-stream, but ended up with 45 per cent of the merged firm, because AOL’s market cap was so much bigger. How successfully did that play out? Well, at the time of the merger, the new combined ...”

“... major corporations subject to official investigation included such household names as AOL Time Warner, Bristol Meyers, Dynegy, Enron, Global Crossing, Kmart, Lucent Technologies, Merck, Qwest, Reliant Services, Rite Aid, Universal, Vivendi, WorldCom and Xerox. The two largest US banks, Citigroup and J.P. Morgan Chase, are also being investigated, as is ...”