The Fixers

Tonight is another book review. This time it’s “The Fixers: Eddie Mannix, Howard Strickling and the MGM Publicity Machine” by E.J.Fleming.

A fixer was someone on the studio payroll that took care of the messes caused by studio employees, namely the stars. Eddie Mannix and Howard Strickling were the fixers at MGM. They were there from the silents through the Golden Age and then the destruction of the Studio System.

It’s a good read and if you like reading about the scandals and seamy underbelly of life, this book will put you into a sleaze coma! I couldn’t put it down. And this is coming from a guy whose family stuffs his Christmas stocking every year with every tabloid paper from the supermarket.

I’ve lived in Southern California for over twenty years, have always been a film nut, and have heard about a lot of the stories in this book. This book fills in all of the gory details and does a pretty good job of documenting its claims. A lot of it is done in a round about way, through news articles of the time, archive records, old timer interviews, and other authors biographies. The “connect the dots” methodology is very good and entertaining.

Some of the tidbits in the book:

Actor Wallace Beery, gangster Pat DiCicco, and Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli beat comedian Ted Healy to death in a brawl outside the Trocadero in Hollywood. Beery was sent to Europe by the studio for a few months, while a story was concocted that three college students had killed Healy. Immigration records confirm a four-month-long trip to Europe on Beery’s part immediately after Healy’s death, ending April 17, 1938

MGM had it’s own brothel which it used to service it’s stars, law enforcement, government officials and the studio’s in and out of town business clients. The hookers came from the ranks of the 6 month contract starlet wannabes that flooded the studio from all over the country. MGM thought, and rightly so, that if they owned the shop, they could better control the clientele.

In the 1930’s Clark Gable ran over a pedestrian in a cross walk, killing her, and walked away scott free after the fixers got another studio employee to take the fall for Gable. They did it through fixes with law enforcement, paying off the family, and guaranteeing the fallguy would do only two years on a work farm and then have a job for life at the studio.

The stories go on and on and on.

Now, there are reviewers on some websites that trash this book as sensationalist junk. When you read their reviews they sound like the types that made a religion of Old Hollywood and it’s pantheon of stars. I’m sorry people, not all the people in Hollywood back then were nice. They can’t stand any criticism of their fantasies and heroes. Fleming did a descent job of researching his stories. And even if only 10% of the stories are actually 100% true, there is a special circle in Hell just for Mannix and Strickling.

ISBN-10: 0786420278
ISBN-13: 978-0786420278

Paperback: 325 pages
Publisher: McFarland & Company

Outliers: The Story of Success

I’m giving a book recommendation tonight. The book is “Outliers: The Story of Success” by Malcolm Gladwell.

Definition: outlier – an extreme deviation from the mean

Why do some people succeed, living remarkably productive and impactful lives, while so many more never reach their potential? This is basically what the book is about; an analysis, done with stories and information about successful people and people that should’ve been successful.

Gladwell challenges the notions of the “self-made man” and makes compelling arguments that superstars don’t come from nowhere riding a wave of genius and talent. He argues that they are products of unique combinations of time, place, culture, extraordinary opportunity, and multiple hidden advantages that ALLOW them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others can’t.

Amazon.com rates it 4 outa 5 stars on 656 reviews. That alone tells you that this book has stirred up a hornet’s nest of pros and cons for his arguments.

I tell ya this book just rings true to me on a gut level. Not very scientific on my part I know but I’ve really learned to trust my gut more and more as the years pass. It’s a great read, he has a very enjoyable writing style. And it really shook me up because of so many examples in the book that I could relate to growing up as a kid that had parents who just didn’t know how to deal with their son.

I strongly recommend this book to all the parents out there.

Outliers: The Story of Success (Hardcover)
By Malcolm Gladwell
Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (November 18, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0316017922
ISBN-13: 978-0316017923