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Unscripted
The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy
"Addicted to Succession? Well, here's the real thing." - The Hollywood Reporter
“Jaw-dropping . . . an epic tale of toxic wealth and greed populated by connivers and manipulators.” —The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice
The shocking inside story of the struggle for power and control at Paramount Global, the multibillion-dollar entertainment empire controlled by the Redstone family, and the dysfunction, misconduct, and deceit that threatened the future of the company, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists who first broke the news
In 2016, the fate of Paramount Global’s entertainment empire hung precariously in the balance. Its founder and head, ninety-three-year-old Sumner M. Redstone, was facing a very public lawsuit brought by a former romantic companion, Manuela Herzer, which placed Sumner’s deteriorating health and questionable judgment under a harsh light.
As an all-powerful media mogul, Sumner had been a demanding boss, and an even more demanding father. When his daughter, Shari, took control of the business, she faced the hostility of boards who for years had heard Sumner disparage her. Les Moonves, the CEO of CBS, schemed with his allies on the board to strip Shari of power. But while he publicly battled Shari, news began to leak of Moonves’s involvement in multiple instances of sexual misconduct, and he began working behind the scenes to try to make the stories disappear.
Unscripted is an explosive and unvarnished look at the usually secret inner workings of two public companies, their boards of directors, and a wealthy, dysfunctional family in the throes of seismic changes. From the Pulitzer Prize– winning journalists James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams, Unscripted lays bare the battle for power at any price—and the carnage that ensued.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
February 14, 2023 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781984879431
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781984879431
- File size: 15488 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Kirkus
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.COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Formats
- Kindle Book
- OverDrive Read
- EPUB ebook
Languages
- English
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