Toby Young

Once upon a time, long, long ago, people used to argue about politics. Now they argue about parenting. Thirty-five years ago, the issue that defined a generation was whether American troops should be in Vietnam. Today, it’s whether to follow the advice set out in The Contented Little Baby Book. Defend the war on Iraq at a dinner party and your neighbour will barely raise an eyebrow, but dare to suggest that Gina Ford is a good thing and the room will immediately divide into two warring camps. As the parent of a one-year-old, I naturally feel quite strongly about some of these issues and I sat down to read Fatherhood, Marcus Berkmann’s new book, with a warm glow of anticipation.

Tom Shone, the ex-film critic of the Sunday Times, is out to pick a fight. The clue is in the subtitle of this book, a surprisingly sympathetic history of Hollywood’s most despised school of moviemaking. To the untrained eye, it will simply conjure up Dr Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, but more seasoned observers will spot the resemblance to the subtitle of another book, Seeing Is Believing: Or How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties by Peter Biskind. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a deliberate bit of provocation on Shone’s part.

This book, which presents itself as a no-holds-barred account of Joe Eszterhas’s reign as the toughest and most highly-paid screenwriter in Hollywood, is doubly misleading. To begin with, it’s heavily censored; and, secondly, he isn’t the fierce defender of his work that he purports to be, at least not judging from the way he’s allowed the lawyers to decimate this book. Eszterhas revels in his image as a Hollywood bad boy. When a lowly grip on the set of Betrayed, his 1988 film starring Debra Winger and Tom Berenger, suggests how the film’s ending might be improved, the warrior-screenwriter punches him in the stomach. The director of another of his scripts receives a memo that’s so eviscerating he suffers a heart attack while reading it.

H. L. Mencken once said that the function of journalism was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, but few of us manage to live up to that standard today. On the contrary, most of us are more likely to hurl ourselves at the feet of the high and mighty and ignore everyone else. Mencken’s thoroughbreds are now so rare that when you come across one it’s like encountering a unicorn. Michael Wolff is one such creature. He’s been throwing custard pies at the rich and powerful since he was appointed New York magazine’s media columnist in 1998. His willingness to skewer the robber barons of the media-industrial complex has made him one of the most famous journalists in America and Autumn of the Moguls is his greatest hits collection.

Dear James, Thanks for sending me a copy of your … what shall we call it? Memoir? Novel? Anyway, I really enjoyed it. You’ve completely captured what it was like to be an Oxford undergraduate in the mid-80s — all that Sloane Ranger crap, the Pimms, the seccies. Every time I turned the page I had a horrible jolt of recognition. ‘Oh Christ,’ I kept thinking. ‘Were we really that bad?’ (We were, we were.) The drug stuff, too, is absolutely spot on. I don’t think I’ve ever read such an accurate account of what it’s like to smoke dope. Or drop acid. Or take shrooms.