Slugfest

The 1970s and 80s record business and the promoters who controlled radio play.

Oral history of CAA and the agency model.

Goldman wrote Butch Cassidy, All the President's Men, and The Princess Bride, and this book is his frank account of what it is actually like to write for Hollywood. His central claim — that nobody knows anything — is an important corrective to every book on this list that treats filmmaking as a solved problem.

How Pixar kept a creative company working after success, and the habits it used.

Mason Currey's portraits of how artists actually structure their days — Beethoven counting exactly sixty coffee beans, Glenn Gould's nocturnal sessions, Stravinsky's requirement for a daily constitutional before composing. More useful than it sounds: the book normalizes idiosyncratic work patterns and illustrates that there is no single formula for sustained creative output.

Michael Eisner's twenty years running Disney, from turnaround to shareholder revolt.