Unscripted

Starred review from April 1, 2023
Page-turning expos� of very bad behavior in the top echelons of the entertainment industry. If you need a tale of intrigue, infighting, and crime that makes the Trump White House look like a bastion of normalcy, this is it. Veteran reporters Stewart and Abrams uncover the untoward doings of the heads of CBS and Viacom: Les Moonves, "the first chief executive of a major publicly traded company forced to resign for predatory sexual conduct," and Sumner Redstone, a much-feared business leader who threw it all away to satisfy his own urges. Then in his ninth decade and, by the authors' account, in evident decline, Redstone courted women young enough to be his granddaughters--and never mind that he had grandchildren of his own who were on the way to being bilked out of their inheritances by two of his paramours, who, one bragged, "could get [him] to do pretty much whatever she wanted." Amid all the sexual and financial misadventures came a complex dance to merge the two corporations. "Given Sumner's mental state and communication issues," the authors write, "it's hard to know how much of the intricacies of the proposed Paramount deal he knew or understood." Enter Redstone's often estranged daughter, Shari, a sharp negotiator and sole hero of this book, who went up against both her father and Moonves, cleaned house on the domestic and corporate fronts, and, amid a flurry of lawsuits, prevailed. Moonves and the parasites were gone, and the newly restructured Paramount was emergent, if well behind Netflix and Amazon, in the streaming-services market. To call it sordid is to undervalue the word, but Stewart and Abrams serve up a sharp-pointed morality tale that excoriates a corporate culture--now on the way to extinction, one hopes--that "had largely ignored the misconduct of so many rich and powerful men so long as they delivered profits and higher stock prices." An ugly yarn full of money-grubbing villains, irresistible in all its inglorious nastiness.

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