Boff Hollywood trial epic in which Art Buchwald, his screenwriter/producer partner Alan Bernheim, and legal whiz Pierce O'Donnell battle Paramount Pictures over Buchwald's part in the script of Eddie Murphy's dizzyingly successful Coming to America. After Buchwald goes to the Capawock Theater on Martha's Vineyard to see Paramount's new Eddie Murphy comedy (about an African king who comes to the States, finds a wife in Queens, and takes her back home to marry), he arms his sling with stones and goes looking for Paramount. The story, in part, is taken from a treatment Buchwald sold to Paramount, which then spent over a half million on scripts (the first being by Bernheim) for this Murphy vehicle. Aside from cash, Buchwald-Bernheim were offered points in the picture's net profits, should it be made and there be such profits. Then the top execs who bought Buchwald's story and put it into development moved to other companies and the Buchwald/Bernheim script was dropped. The authors resold it, to Warner Brothers, but then Paramount announced Coming to America and Warner dropped its flick as too similar to the new Murphy vehicle. Enter O'Donnell (writing here with Los Angeles Times entertainment reporter McDougal), whose legal firm breaks a rule and takes the case on contingency. Paramount and its legal team deny any theft of Buchwald's ideas but then find themselves defending Hollywood's net-profits clause, which allows a studio to deduct its overall losses from its hits' earnings. Huge stars get points in gross profits, but, through creative accounting, small-time creators are denied rewards, despite a film's massive returns. Here, the case's legal stages are spellbinding and not excessively detailed. Don't miss Buchwald's drolleries to the servile Writers Guild of America or Eddie Murphy's toothy two-day deposition, though he's a no-show at the clause-busting trial. You'll never eat net profits in these contracts again. (B&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Aug. 15, 1992
ISBN: 0-385-41686-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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