Fatal Subtraction: How Hollywood Really Does Business

During the 1980s, Gordon Gecko and Michael Milken taught America that "greed is good," and Eddie Murphy was listening. This is the saga of two professional storytellers -- humorist Art Buchwald and producer Alain Bernheim -- who bucked conventional wisdom and protested when Murphy used his star status to steal their work and claim it as his own. They sued Paramount Pictures and won -- though, in the end, it wasn't enough.

Selected Works
Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the L. A. Times Dynasty
"Part biography, part dysfunctional family chronicle, and part institutional and urban history, with generous dollops of scandal and gossip." --
The New Yorker
Five Easy Decades: How Jack Nicholson Became the Biggest Movie Star in Modern Times
"McDougal makes Nicholson’s everyday life just as fascinating as his films in Five Easy Decades"
--Publishers Weekly

The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA and the Hidden History of Hollywood

“Engrossing”
--New York Times
“A bombshell!”
--New York Daily News
“Tough and adversarial”
--Los Angeles Times

Blood Cold: Fame, Sex & Murder in Hollywood (co-authored by Mary Murphy)

The true Hollywood nightmare and tragic love story of Robert Blake and Bonny Lee Bakley.