ALA Booklist Editor's Choice 2003 list
Action! is a family saga in which five decades of Hollywood history are embodied in the lives of three generations of a movie dynasty, with each generation reflecting the changing values of the motion-picture industry.
AJ Jastrow, the producer at the center of this story, seeks to build a movie empire. Along the way he battles manipulative executives, power-crazed directors, drug-addicted actors, duplicitous agents, the FBI, and his own mother, Hollywood's wealthiest woman. Interwoven into the fiction are some of Hollywood's most colorful historical characters and a who's who of today's players.
Author Robert Cort, the producer of fifty-two films that have grossed more than $2 billion at the box office, has written a novel that is not only a page-turning family drama but also an inside account of Hollywood and how movies are really made.
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“Some of the best writing evokes the larger-than-life personalities of movie moguls, the Machiavellian studio politics, the travail of producing a big-budget action movie on location with a power-crazed director. The serendipity of success and failure, the ecology of power, the intangibility of talent are elements not just in the book’s themes but in its brushstrokes. Cort has the wardrobes, the restaurants, the golf courses, the argot of the business down pat.”
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Los Angeles