In the cut-throat world of Hollywood, where the rewards can be fabulous but failure is devastating, everyone is always looking for that extra edge. In the early 1990s, the super-agent Michael Ovitz, one of Hollywood’s most effective and dangerous schemers, insisted that underlings read The Art of War, the oldest military treatise, by the Chinese writer Sun Tzu. But Hollywood’s leading 21st-century players have supplanted Sun Tzu with another manual of strategy to inform their ruthless deal-making: The 48 Laws of Power.
The success of The 48 Laws of Power, which has sold more than 700,000 copies since it was published in 1998, has turned its author Robert Greene into perhaps the most important — his detractors would say “malign” — influence on today’s Hollywood decision-makers. Many of the book’s edicts, such as Law 14, “Pose as a friend, work as a spy”, and Law 15, “Crush your enemy totally”, have become catch phrases in Hollywood, especially with ambitious young executives. For them, Greene’s book is an invaluable manual on the use and abuse of power. Greene’s influence can also be seen in television shows such as HBO’s hit series Entourage, which features a manically driven Hollywood agent called Ari Gold, based on a real-life agent, Ari Emmanuel. Many of Gold’s more outrageous schemes seem to have been taken straight from its pages.
The 48 Laws of Power is surprisingly long, dense and intellectually demanding for a book that is big in Hollywood. It extensively cites philosophers such as Machiavelli, military strategists such as Clausewitz and politicians such as Kissinger to illustrate Greene’s lessons on power: how to get it and how to keep it.
“It’s a handbook that teaches you how to play the game of power to the greatest effect,” Hollywood’s modern Machiavelli explains. Dressed entirely in black, Greene, 46, is sitting in the darkened backroom of a restaurant near his Los Angeles home. “How to manipulate when necessary, keep people off balance, protect yourself from predators and charm those around you, neutralising hostility towards your success.”
Not everyone is enamoured of Greene’s unapologetic amorality. “By the 36th Law, you start to feel unclean and worried about your own morality,” wrote one reviewer. “By the 44th, you have accepted you are basically immoral and so is the world. By No 48, you are saying, ‘Right, who is my first victim?’” It is not surprising Greene’s book has become the Hollywood back-stabber’s bible. He wrote it partly because of his own frustrating experiences as an underappreciated Hollywood script executive and writer. “I saw so many people who were just so into power,” he says. “But it was never talked about; it was dirtier than sex. You could be sleeping with your sister and it would be more out in the open than your power moves. I thought, let’s talk about how you hire others to do the work but take credit; let’s talk about how you hire an incompetent director so he’ll get fired and you can take over the project.
“I saw people who were very talented, much smarter than those at the top, more creative,” he continues, “but they never made it because they were naive about power. The book was partly intended to give people like that the tools to figure out how to operate in what can be a nasty world. I believe power is the most elemental human need. We cannot stand feelings of powerlessness or inferiority or having no control over events.”
Despite Greene’s obvious influence, most Hollywood executives are coy about admitting it. Jonathan Baker, marketing manager for Sony Pictures Entertainment, says the book is often used by executives he knows, “but because of its nature, you won’t find a lot of people who will own up to how important a resource it has become for them. Acknowledging its influence can be damning; you are opening yourself up to being judged in a negative way. But I don’t mind saying that I stumbled on it in a very down period in my life, and it gave me a lot of clarity when I needed it most”.
Indeed, although he can’t disclose their names, Greene works behind the scenes as a kind of intellectual consigliere, a power strategist, to a number of Hollywood’s leading players. He is believed to be an adviser to Brian Grazer, the Oscar-winning producer of A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13 and The Da Vinci Code, probably the most successful producer in Hollywood.
Grazer won’t openly acknowledge the relationship, but a New Yorker story indicates Greene’s influence. “Grazer is a man of maxims,” the New Yorker wrote. “He believes that the game of life has rules, and the person who discovers the most rules and observes them faithfully will win... Grazer has developed a detailed code of conduct that covers nearly every aspect of his life, and even now rehearses his rules with a superstitious fervour.”
The only executive to whom Greene will acknowledge being an adviser is Dov Charney, the unconventional head of the hip clothing company American Apparel. Charney is using Greene and the ideas from The 48 Laws of Power to plan his imminent move into the film business. “Dov wants to be the Hugh Hefner of his generation,” Greene says. “I’m going to help him do it.”
But there is something even more surprising than the book’s stealthy infiltration of Hollywood. Greene, a self-described “geeky white guy” with a degree in classical studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has become the unlikely guru of gangsta rap. The 48 Laws of Power has become an indispensable and often-cited influence on many of America’s most successful rappers. Unlike their white counterparts, those black rappers are happy to credit Greene and his book for helping them to turn their success in music into business empires, and to destroy their enemies.
“In The 48 Laws of Power, it says the worst thing you can do is build a fortress around yourself,” the rapper Jay-Z said recently, referring to Law 18. “The only book I ever read, I could have wrote, The 48 Laws of Power,” Kanye West rapped in a song. The hip-hop producer DJ Premier has his own version of Law 5 tattooed on his arm: “Reputation is the cornerstone of power.”
Greene is about to start working on a book with the rapper 50 Cent, and a documentary on Greene’s ideas is being produced by QD3 — Quincy Jones III, son of the music producer. The documentary will explore his remarkable power over America’s hip-hop stars and his growing reputation as the Rasputin of rap. His subsequent two books, The Art of Seduction and The 33 Strategies of War, are also big in the hip-hop community.
Dr Todd Boyd, a professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television, who is also black, believes that The 48 Laws of Power is important to leading rappers “because it makes a lot of sense to a culture defined by the streets. For them, that book is like going back to the movie Scarface, which I like to call the ‘canonical text of hip-hop’. Everybody in hip-hop knows stuff from that movie, like, ‘Don’t get high on your own supply.’”
For Greene, there is more to it than that. “These guys don’t have any guilt about power, because they have always been excluded from it,” he says. “It used to be that they were influenced by things like Scarface, but now they want to get away from the violence, and they are hungry for knowledge. They are genuinely excited about having this information, because they feel it levels the playing field for them.”
Greene is amused that, because of his daunting reputation as a modern Machiavelli, even the toughest rappers have been nervous about meeting him. “They expect somebody very intimidating and formidable,” he says. “Of course, I’m really nervous about meeting them.”
Not that he’d ever want them to know that. “Power, to me, is all illusion. It’s appearances. It’s creating a persona that gives you the aura of a lot of power.”
Or, as Law 32 says: “Play to people’s fantasies.”
The key rules
Law 2: Never put too much trust in friends; learn how to use enemies.
Law 3: Conceal your intentions.
Law 11: Learn how to keep people dependent on you.
Law 17: Keep others in suspended terror: cultivate an air of unpredictability.
Law 24: Play the perfect courtier.
Law 30: Make your accomplishments seem effortless.
Law 33: Discover each man’s thumbscrew.
Law 38: Think as you like but behave like others.
Law 42: Strike the shepherd and the sheep will scatter.
Law 46: Never appear too perfect.
www.powerseductionandwar.com
The 48 Laws of Power is published in the UK by Profile Books
