Color me surprised.
Ken Auletta’s book on Harvey Weinstein, some 20 years in the making, is a total bust.
Published a week ago Tuesday, “Hollywood Ending” has sold just 1,500 copies according to NPD Book Scan.
The book has fallen below number 3,000 on amazon.
No one wanted to read it.
It’s so strange because Auletta is a star journalist and a great writer. But he got nothing of interest on Weinstein. “Hollywood Ending” is just a revisit of facts already known from Weinstein’s trial and from accounts in the New York Times and the New Yorker. There were no scoops.
Media books are tough sells anyway, like inside baseball that the public doesn’t care about unless there’s a wider story being told. Reporters who wrote about Weinstein between 1990 and 2017, when the mogul’s world came crashing down, know hundreds of stories that haven’t been published, concerning the making of movies and the stars in them.
Auletta never got to those stories. He got bogged down in minutiae. I’ll bet Harvey is disappointed. But also relieved. Nothing in the book can do him any more damage or cause more trouble than he’s already in.
