Cagney & Lacey ... and Me: An Inside Hollywood Story OR How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blonde Review

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Cagney & Lacey ... and Me: An Inside Hollywood Story OR How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blonde ReviewBarney Rosenzweig's memoirs of the 1980s are long on industry detail and short on self-examination, but that's Hollywood for you.
CAGNEY AND LACEY was credited as being the first big feminist TV show and it was hailed as such by Gloria Steinem and other pundits in the pages of MS. Magazine.
Rosenzweig was there from the beginning, after a checkered and mostly D-level career as a producer and sort of go-fer for more famous producers. He had worked his way up to a midlevel status when the job that made him notorious sort of fell in his lap. As he sees it, his then-wife created the show with another woman, and he managed to get it made and shown on the air, albeit with different stars. There was a version with Loretta Swit, another with Meg Foster, etc. Finally the lineup shifted to Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly, and after a year of threatened cancellations, CAGNEY AND LACEY became a huge hit and won Emmys for everyone involved with it.
Rosenzweig's tale of what it was like producing the show is filled with ugliness. He savages some of his writers, including the man who went on to become the renowned thriller writer Robert Crais, but he saves most of his venom for his blow by blow depiction of the vanity and ego wars between his two leading ladies. Both equally insecure, Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly come off in Rosenzweig's rendition as supremely neurotic and paranoid, each one afraid the other was getting more money, perks, or directorial attention. Gless was a blonde beauty on the model, Barney admits, of Doris Day. But could she act? Tyne Daly could act, or should I say "act" in capital letters, but was she attractive enough for TV? Neither of them ever enjoyed a single happy moment, and made everyone miserable on the set and off for years and years. As a producer, it was Rosenzweig's job to keep them content, butter them up, flatter them outrageously, promise each one that the other wasn't getting anything she didn't have, and so on.
This element of the book just goes on and on and on and on. You feel like you were in the stars' trailers for every beef they had. Gless would complain that Daly was married to the show's director, Georg Stanford Brown (another diva according to Barney). Daly would say that Gless was getting all the close-ups. The picture got even grimmer once Barney himself started seeing past the tantrums that Gless threw on a daily basis, and started falling for her, leaving his wife and eventually making Gless his number one woman. After the way he writes about her throughout the first three quarters of the book, I'm surprised he could stomach her, much less love her. And they're still married apparently! Life is stranger than fiction and this book proves it for sure.Cagney & Lacey ... and Me: An Inside Hollywood Story OR How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blonde Overview"If they gave out Emmys for best book about an Emmy-award winning TV series, Executive Producer Barney Rosenzweig would have another to add to his huge collection. If you love Cagney & Lacey—as I do—this is a must read. Triple love it!" —Rosie O'Donnell, award-winning TV and motion picture icon
"Cagney & Lacey ... and Me is terrific—a must-read for anyone interested in how the television business really works. From insecure stars with over-sized egos, to network executives blundering their way to success in spite of themselves, Barney Rosenzweig's chronicle of the rise and fall of the hit series Cagney & Lacey has it all: tempers, tears, greed, deceit, duplicity and sex—in short, more juicy melodrama than a daytime soap opera."—Steven Bochco, producer writer of award-winning series Hill Street Blues, LA Law, and NYPD Blue
"One of Hollywood's greatest producers is also a brilliant storyteller. Barney recounts tales from the front lines of network television battlefields—with candor, intelligence and inimitable wit. If you want to know how television really works, this is the book for you"—Linda Bloodworth and Harry Thomason, award-winning creators, writer, producers and director of Designing Women

"It is the nuts-and-bolts story of creating the show, putting it on the air, then keeping it on the air. Fascinating and fun."—Liz Smith, America's most loved gossip columnist
"Barney wrote a book?"—Peter Falk, Emmy-winning star of iconic television series, Columbo, and twice nominated Academy Award star of motion pictures too numerous to mention

"Just as William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade is considered a bible for screenwriters, Rosenzweig's new memoir offers a Master Class for television producers."—Kevin Howell, Publisher's Weekly

Hardcover Collector's Edition also contains the official Cagney & Lacey "bible" of key credits and storylines for all 125 episodes, along with annotated index.


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