Where Did I Go Right?
You're No One In Hollywood Unless Someone Wants You Dead
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4.5 • 11 Ratings
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Beginning in the William Morris mail room in 1955, Bernie Brillstein wanted only three things: “to walk into a restaurant and have people know who I am…to be the guy who gets the phone calls and doesn’t have to make them…to represent the one performer people must have.” Throughout his long career at the top of the entertainment industry––as TV and movie producer, agent and brilliant personal manager––Brillstein has accomplished it all.
Where Did I Go Right? is Brillstein’s street-smart, funny, and thoroughly human story of a life in show business. With his trademark wit and candor, he speaks out for the first time about his feud with Mike Ovitz, and how it felt to pass the leadership of his company to his partner, Brad Grey, and “no longer be the king.” He describes his close relationship with John Belushi and what it was like being alone with Belushi’s body as it lay “stretched out across two cramped seats in a tiny jet, wrapped up in a body bag” on the way to his funeral. He shares stories about Jim Hensen and Gilda Radner, about Lorne Michaels and the early days of Saturday Night Live. He takes us behind the scenes at such hits as The Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and The Muppet Show.
Brillstein also reveals his secrets about how to survive and prosper in Hollywood, the real meaning of “the art of the deal,” the difference between “hot” and “good,” and why instinct is so crucial to the future of the entertainment industry. “Becoming successful is the most fun of all. I’m not talking about being successful or staying successful. I mean the getting there, the instant you arrive, and for the first time you think, ‘Where did I go right?’”
Phoenix Books re-release features an added epilogue "Still Going Right" penned by Brillstein in 2007, eight years after the initial publication of this title.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a 45-year career as an agent, producer, studio head and personal manager, Brillstein may have swum with the Hollywood sharks, but he doesn't consider himself one. While Brillstein understandably brims with pride when recounting how he built his impressive stable of clients--including Muppets creator Jim Henson and Saturday Night Live's John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd and Lorne Michaels--he is often self-deprecating in this engaging memoir. With a bemused tone similar to Robert Evans's in The Kid Stays in the Picture, Brillstein 'fesses up to various sins: getting into the business to meet women, booking business for a dead client early in his career at the William Morris Agency, and being the New York Jew responsible for launching the ultimate in TV cornpone: Hee-Haw. But there are glimpses of pathos, too: in his admissions of ambivalence about having sold his share of Brillstein-Grey Entertainment to partner Brad Grey; in his memories of a famous comedian uncle who torpedoed his own career, of a mother who seldom got out of bed and Brillstein's own succession of wives; and in his account of the tragic early deaths of Henson and Belushi. Perhaps most interesting to Hollywood insiders and media junkies will be Brillstein's assessment of the TV biz (he suggests doing away with pilots and having the guts to commit to shows) and his rivalry with CAA co-founder Mike Ovitz, a former friend. "When a bully is left on his own, he gets stupid," writes Brillstein, proving that even if he's not exactly a shark, he still has bite.
