Dennis McDougal

Most recently author of Five Easy Decades: How Jack Nicholson Became the Biggest Movie Star in Modern Time (John Wiley & Sons, 2008), Dennis McDougal has chronicled Hollywood, crime and the media for over 30 years. His forthcoming Things Have Changed (John Wiley & Sons, 2011) is the new biography of music legend Bob Dylan.

A CNN producer during the O.J. Simpson trial, McDougal returned to TV last year as a producer for Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers and Their Times, the PBS American Experience documentary based on McDougal’s 2001 bestselling biography Privileged Son (DaCapo Press). A chronicle of the legendary Los Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler, Inventing L.A was honored this spring with a George Foster Peabody Award while Fordham University gave Privileged Son its annual Ann M. Sperber Award for the nation’s best media biography.

Before he began covering movies and media for the Los Angeles Times in 1983 and, more recently, the New York Times, McDougal was a staff writer at the Riverside Press-Enterprise (1973-1977) and the Long Beach Press-Telegram (1977-1981). A UCLA graduate, McDougal holds a Bachelor's in English and a Master's in Journalism.

In 1981, he was awarded a John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University and spent a year teaching and studying in Japan and Canada, as well as at the Palo Alto campus. Over the years, his journalism has won over 50 honors, including the National Headliners Award and several Associated Press awards.

Before turning his attention full-time to writing books in 1993, McDougal reported on the glamorous and occasionally corrupt aspects of Hollywood as a staff writer for 15 years at the Los Angeles Times. As a Times investigative reporter concentrating on movies, television and pop music, McDougal took readers behind the scenes of pop star Michael Jackson's troubled career, beginning with his "Victory" tour in the early 1980s; exposed the waste and mismanagement of Band Aid, USA for Africa, Farm Aid, and other "pop charities" of the 1980s; and followed celebrity courtroom dramas, such as the so-called "Cotton Club" murder trial, which featured former Paramount Pictures chief Robert Evans in a major supporting role.

McDougal's reporting has taken him to the top of San Francisco's Mt. Tamalpais at sunrise with Richard Gere and the Dalai Lama, Rodney King's rap music debut, Ethiopia with Harry Belafonte, Tokyo with former U.S. Ambassador Mike Mansfield, and Dr. Ruth Westheimer's Washington Heights bedroom for a discussion of the elements of good sex. He has interviewed dozens of celebrated men and women who have influenced our lives: pop stars, politicians, moguls and cultural icons.

A frequent contributor to TV Guide through the 1990s, his last story for the magazine was the murderous saga of actor Robert Blake and his late porn queen wife Bonny Lee Bakley. McDougal and co-author Mary Murphy turned that story into the bestseller "Blood Cold" (Putnam, 2002). McDougal is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and has also written for Los Angeles Magazine, Premiere, and dozens of other publications.

McDougal has lectured in journalism and creative writing at UCLA, Stanford, and the California State Universities at Fullerton and Long Beach. He and his wife, Sharon, live near Memphis, Tennessee, have five children, and 13 grandchildren.