Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street
David McClintick
Rules for thee, but not for me. Money and power talk and Hollywood has a sordid history clouded by decades of playing pretend with everything everywhere all the time.
Audiobook · Business · ~19 hours
Indecent Exposure is an excellent look into the post-Watergate "we are going to hold powerful people accountable" landscape that unfolded and how it played out in the entertainment industry.
Everything comes and goes and waves and the idealistic 1970s got a turn at the top of the wheel. But the wheel keeps on turning and things go back to the way they were before a threshing comes along again.
"If a kid on the street stole $10,000, he’d be sent to prison. But when a studio chief does it, they send him to a psychiatrist and give him an independent production contract." -- Cliff Robertson
This is a cousin to the corporate greed era that followed in the 1980s with Barbarians at the Gate; both that and this are excellent examples of in-depth investigative journalism that gives you a clearer, fuller picture of the invariably complex machinations of life.
Life is never black-and-white, but we try to make it that way. If you do X then you're cancelled or wrong or bad. And it's never that. But it is "If you do X to the magnitude of Y then you deserve to be demonized" and this shows a tale of that. Public perception was initially swayed one way but rebounded another when the gravity of the depraved moral behavior was unearthed piece by piece.
You need patience for a story like this. And the author did an amazing job. To stick with something, to make it interesting and yet objectively true, and then to make it timeless by having it interesting from near or far in the timeline of actual events.
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