DISNEYWAR is based on hundreds of interviews with company executives and voluminous documents, including accounts of critical meetings and strategy sessions. No company - and no book - so captures the essence of American capitalism and popular culture, its story told here in all its free-wheeling, often chaotic and ultimately exhilarating detail by one of the most acclaimed journalists of his generation.

Gain a comprehensive understanding of the business of entertainment and learn to successfully engage in all related aspects of global production and exploitation with this revised and updated handbook. With The Producer's Business Handbook as a guide, you'll learn to create the relationships that the most successful producers have with the various participants in the motion picture industry-this guide provides a global view of how producers direct their relationships with domestic and foreign studios, agencies, attorneys, talent, completion guarantors, banks, and private investors. You get a thorough orientation to operating production development and single-purpose production companies. You'll also become familiar with the team roles needed to operate these companies, and learn how to attach and direct them. For those outside the US, also included is information on how to produce successful films without government funding. This edition has been updated to include comprehensive information on the internal greenlighting process, government financing, and determining actual cost-of-money. It includes new, simplified project evaluation tools, expediting funding and distribution. Together with its companion website (www.producersbusinesshb.com)--which contains valuable forms and spreadsheets, tutorials, and samples-this handbook presents both instruction and worksheet support to independent producers at all levels of experience. New to the 3rd Edition: * Production Financing Worksheet-a producer's must-have * Comprehensive new media, financing, and distribution updates of all chapters * Expanded global focus and references * Internet marketing&DIY distribution * Financing sources * Access to a website providing spreadsheets available nowhere else: Financing Worksheet, greenlighting worksheets, film comparables, activity and cash flow projections, and more

Balloonology goes beyond just teaching balloon twisting techniques and how to make the projects in the book. Professional balloon twister Jeremy Telford provides 32 projects-a flamingo, a princess, a jet with pilot, and many more-with easy-to-follow instructions and how-to photos that teach not only the most useful twisting techniques, but also how to design new balloon sculptures. Telford also gives information about twisting balloons professionally, including how to find and book gigs, what supplies are necessary, and how to entertain an audience. Jeremy Telford has been running his business, Balloon Guy Entertainment, since 2003 and has performed at hundreds of events and parties. He has created over 250 designs. He is a graduate of Brigham Young University with a degree in Recreation Management and Youth Leadership. He lives in Pleasant Grove, Utah.

It’s like something out of a Hollywood potboiler: start out in the mailroom, end up a mogul. Only for dozens of Hollywood’s brightest, it happens to be true. Some of the biggest names in entertainment—including David Geffen, Barry Diller, and Mike Ovitz—began as trainees in musty talent agency mailrooms. Now, in this fascinating new book, veteran Hollywood writer David Rensin travels behind the scenes and through sixty-five years of show business history to tell the real stories of the marvelous careers that began—and in some cases ended––in the mailroom.Based on more than two hundred interviews, Rensin unfolds the never-before-told history of an American institution––in the voices of the people who lived it. Through seven decades of glamour and humiliation, lousy pay and incredible perks, killer egos and a kill-or-be-killed ethos, you’ll go where the trainees go, do what they must do to get ahead, and hear the best insider stories from the Hollywood everyone knows about but no one really knows. The kids in The Mailroom have done it all: from hanging out with Elvis to delivering a senior agent’s urine sample to the doctor; from pouring drinks for Sinatra to sending ice to Johnny Carson on the Nile; from crashing the Academy Awards ceremony to hoping to deliver more than just the mail to sexy actresses’ homes.The Mailroom reveals why Harvard MBAs fight to turn down secure six-digit corporate salaries to start work at a major agency for less than $400 a week; what it takes to appease impossible bosses, outsmart the competition, and “agent” the agents; and how a hungry, star-struck kid can become the next Geffen or Diller by sorting mail, eavesdropping on crucial conversations, and trying anything to get noticed. Full of revealing stories and delicious dish, The Mailroom is not only a non-stop, engrossing read, but a crash course, taught by the experts, on how to succeed in Hollywood through hard work, shrewd manipulation, and a hell of a lot of nerve. The Mailroom is classic Hollywood—a vibrant and complex tapestry of dreams, desire, exploitation, power, and genuine talent. If you want to know who rules Hollywood and how they got their power, if you want to know how to start with nothing and get ahead in any business, this is the book you must read.

Now in paperback, the scandalous international sensation: brash, candid, and utterly hilarious, Luciano Pavarotti’s longtime manager tells all.The name “Luciano Pavarotti” is as central to the world of opera as high C’s and dueling sopranos. Pavarotti has had, quite inarguably, the most successful career in the history of the operatic profession, having gone from a once-reserved but brilliant tenor to a media-stupefying superstar. In The King and I, Herbert Breslin, Pavarotti’s publicist, manager, and friend for thirty-six years, reveals, in a fashion that is witty and bitingly frank, the truth about that white-hot career in all its delicious grandeur. Full of jaw-dropping anecdotes about the most famous divas and disputes of the past three decades, The King and I even features an afterword by the famed tenor himself. A one-of-a-kind read, The King and I is the ultimate backstage book about the greatest opera star ever.

A complete and indispensable guide to launching a career in the lucrative field of voice-over work.Voices are increasingly in demand for commercials, cartoon characters, announcements, and other spots. This outstanding handbook explains how to launch a career and find work. Along with sample commercials and script copy, the author gives advice on vocal exercises, self-promotion, and business matters. Chapters include: getting started, voice-over aerobics, copy basics, melody and tempo, layering techniques, believing what you say, commercial and stylized characters, corporate narration, animation, video games and toys, getting an agent, marketing your talent, and staying on top of the business. This expanded edition features new tips on making a demo CD, vocal modulation and breath techniques, advanced copy-reading strategies, and a section on how copywriters see the job of the voice artists for whom they write. If you’ve ever been interested in voice-over acting, you need this book!

No other book for actors focuses so succinctly on the business of self-management. Whether an actor has an agent and manager on his or her team or is going it alone, "Self-Management for Actors" will provide a roadmap for surviving and thriving in the entertainment industry.

The Pixar Touch is a lively chronicle of Pixar Animation Studios' history and evolution, and the “fraternity of geeks” who shaped it. With the help of animating genius John Lasseter and visionary businessman Steve Jobs, Pixar has become the gold standard of animated filmmaking, beginning with a short special effects shot made at Lucasfilm in 1982 all the way up through the landmark films Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Wall-E, and others. David A. Price goes behind the scenes of the corporate feuds between Lasseter and his former champion, Jeffrey Katzenberg, as well as between Jobs and Michael Eisner. And finally he explores Pixar's complex relationship with the Walt Disney Company as it transformed itself into the $7.4 billion jewel in the Disney crown.