Barry Isaacson

Friday

Barry Isaacson

Does Hollywood need bullies?

From our UK edition

There have always been bullies in Hollywood; it's institutionalised, like a form of hazing, but the key difference between the film business and the Marine Corps is that bullying in Hollywood is not meant to inculcate esprit de corps; its purpose, for the bully, anyway, is to provide confirmation that the hierarchy is working in his favour.  I was one of the last generation of studio executives at Universal that reported to the old mogul, Lew Wasserman.  Wasserman was a physically imposing screamer who had parlayed with gangsters, bootleggers and union enforcers as a supplier of dance bands to illicit nightclubs during Prohibition, so he could terrorise white-collar employees without breaking a sweat.

Saturday

Barry Isaacson

The secret letters of the Jonestown death cult

From our UK edition

In 1993, my wife Jenny and I bought a small, beautiful, mid-century modern architectural house in the hills of Silver Lake, an enclave of East Los Angeles. We became aware that the previous owners, Dr Herbert and Mrs Freda Alexander, had lived for the previous 15 years with an awful family secret: their daughter Phyllis, son-in-law Gene Chaikin and two teenage grandchildren had died with 914 other members of Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple movement in the infamous Jonestown mass-murder/suicides of 18 November 1978. In an orderly manner, the Jonestown community, which included 250 children, had ingested a cocktail consisting of fruit punch, cyanide and sedatives. Infants, children and others unwilling to drink the liquid had it forced down their throats by syringe.