Welcome to pollypokcet.com - Information on Polly pocket pictures

By Rachel Abramowitz Random House. $26.95

Is That a Gun in Your Pocket? is an unfortunate title for a book that is not a "Boogie Nights"-like peek into the seamier side of Tinseltown filmmaking. No starry-eyed starlets here. No replays of famed casting-couch contretemps.

Sure, there's some good gossip and some self-destructive, ego- driven, power-lusting male creatures included in these pages: Bob Evans, Peter Bogdanovich, and the barely literate Jon Peters, to name a few. But the focus is squarely on the book's subtitle, Women's Experience of Power in Hollywood, or how women broke open the male stranglehold on a town notoriously run by men for men; how women became producers, directors, screenwriters, heads of studios, and talent agents during the 1980s and '90s; and how their career successes affected their private lives.

Rather than a dry, scholarly, fact-filled look at the power politics in the movie industry, the book is a folksy glimpse into how a few gutsy, well-educated women learned to function and play in this egomaniacal man's world.

Author Rachel Abramowitz began pouring the foundation for the book in 1992 when she was 26 and was asked by the editor of Premiere magazine to write about women in the movie business.

Her goal, says Abramowitz, was to put together an oral history filled with the "kinds of intimacies women discuss with one another, usually when men aren't around. I wanted the messy, unpredictable truth, and I wanted to hear it in their voices."

After seven years of interviews, she's filled her book with the arresting, witty, loquacious voices of the female pioneers in Hollywood.

There's the late Dawn Steel, the first woman to head a major studio, who was as famous for her unapologetic ambition and simmering rage as she was for her long, thick tresses, sense of humor, love affairs, and the movies she helped develop-"Flashdance," "Footloose" and "The Accused."

Her death at age 51 in 1997 opens the book.

While Steel was portrayed as a woman who thrived on toughness, Sherry Lansing, the Chicago native who became production head of Fox Studios in 1979, was called a geisha and was savaged by jealous and malicious gossip after her appointment.

As chairwoman of Paramount Pictures, she's helped fill the studio's coffers with the proceeds from "Forrest Gump" and, more recently, "Titanic."

Then there's the talented production designer Polly Platt, who was deeply wounded by husband Peter Bogdanovich's affair with Cybill Shepherd and soothed her pain and her insecurities with Valium and beer. Her best work, she feels, was on "The Witches of Eastwick." There's the impudent, muumuu-clad, loud-mouthed agent Sue Mengers, whose clients included Gene Hackman, Burt Reynolds, Candice Bergen, and her soul sister, Barbra Streisand, until Jon Peters elbowed his way into the star's life.

There are Elaine May, Carrie Fisher and Nora Ephron, who all excelled at writing, and the first woman to become an A-list director, Penny Marshall, whom Abramowitz says never was able to come to grips with the fact that "she wasn't as pretty as the starlets who stocked Hollywood."

There's Jodie Foster, who grew from a dutiful and docile child actor into a disillusioned adult actress only to eventually take home two Oscars and begin a career as a director.

The brief background sketches of these women give pop-psychology insight into their early development, and a history of their loves and losses; their career highs and lows are skillfully woven by the author to maximum page-turning effect. The gossip is juicy, not vicious.

One gaping hole in the book is that the most recent female directors and producers are mentioned only by name; a short epilogue on the popularity of "Titanic" tries to move the book into the new century.

Is That a Gun in Your Pocket is not a book for diehard film buffs. But it's a good read for moviegoers who want a little insight into the bigger-than-life female personalities responsible for paving the way to a more balanced gender representation in America's favorite industry.