I love Swimming With Sharks. I like that it goes so far beyond the complaints of a person stuck in an abusive working relationship with their employer. It really gets to the heart of the problem, which is the abuse cycle that is so central to human psychology. And it does it in a fairly even-handed way, considering how much venom Huang seems to have for Joel Silver. It's a much more nuanced take on that kind of thing than most people would be able to produce. Also Huang's commnets about what Benico Del Toro was trying to do with his character and what he eventually did do with his role in The Usual Suspects -- funny shit.

I know a young producer who was sitting down at a meeting with a bunch of other young producers and one of them was bitching about old, has-been screenwriters that have no place taking meetings, and that he had to meet with this "milly guy" that day. "Milly guy?" "Yeah, jim... joe... milly something."

"John Milius?"

"Yeah, him."

Goddamn. That would be hilarious if those people weren't in charge of so much money (it still kind of is in a horrible way). That story reminds me a bit of the young well connected guy in The Player who decided that he wanted to be a producer. So he went to a meeting and spent the whole time flipping through headshots of all the starlets, sorting out the ones he wanted to fuck.

Have you read Zeroville?