By BARRY DILLER (Simon & Schuster; 2025)
If MEMOIRS OF THE DEVIL weren’t already taken, I’d suggest it as an alternate title for this book. It’s a memoir by mega-mogul Barry Diller, one of the main architects of the movie apocalypse that occurred in the late 1970s and early 80s, when Hollywood, under the tutelage of Diller and his cronies, shifted from a creative to corporate-run business with a focus on high concept packaging and increased executive interference (and salaries).
Barry Diller and Diane Von Fürstenberg in 1978
To his credit, Diller doesn’t try and disguise his true nature. This is to say that he refrains from presenting himself as a modest patron of the arts who was just following orders (as is often the case with movie mogul memoirs), fully owning up to and even bragging about his effect on Hollywood and positioning himself as an industry savior.
Diller’s life began in the privileged enclave of Beverly Hills and, as he freely admits, contained a lot of lucky breaks. Included in that category were his being promoted to Vice President of Development at ABC in his early twenties, installed as chairman of Paramount Pictures in his thirties and made CEO of Twentieth Century Fox a few years later, all of which occurred simply by virtue of him being in the right place at the right time. This book belies the famous Ayuel Monykuch quote “Never be jealous of others, because you don’t know which life they had been through,” as now we do know the life Barry Diller lived and can be jealous.
Barry Diller and Diane Von Fürstenberg
His one major conflict, as revealed here, has been his sexuality. Diller claims to be gay, which apparently rendered him an outcast in mid Twentieth Century America and led to a nervous breakdown at a young age, and yet he’s been in a 50 year relationship with, and in 2001 got married to, fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg.
Not that any of this ultimately matters much, because Hollywood memoirs depend primarily on their gossip quotient, and WHO KNEW contains gossip a ‘plenty. Diller has some juicy recollections about the making of POPEYE (1980), on which “everyone…and I mean everyone, was completely coked out,” and dismisses George Lucas as a “sanctimonious, though supremely talented, hypocrite” for insisting on renegotiating his contract in the wake of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK after promising not to do so. There’s also some dirt on the late Don Simpson, a “complex character” who was demoted from head of production at Paramount after a drug induced stupor that resulted in him falling face-first into his lunch.
In addition, you can expect plenty of bragging about Diller’s non-movie related endeavors. The creation of the Fox network in the late 1980s is blustered about at some length, as is Diller’s takeover of QVC in the mid-90s and subsequent backing of the Home Shopping Network.
Also aired are some disheartening, and on-target, observations about the entertainment industry in its present form: “Today, in the final throes of what I believe is the end of Hollywood as we know it…All is now controlled and dominated by the tech overlords. That mighty roar of the lion of MGM is now whimper, a vassal for the retailer Amazon.” What Diller doesn’t seem to understand is it was his dealings that unwittingly set the stage for this sorry state.