Director Norman Jewison is one of the few working filmmakers to succeed in everything from musicals (Fiddler on the Roof) to romantic comedy (Moonstruck) to socially conscious dramas (In The Heat of the Night, A Soldier’s Story). This makes his honestly-titled memoir This Terrible Business Has Been Good To Me of special interest to those intrigued by the longevity of an instinctive genre-hopper. Unbridled enthusiasm leaps from the pages as the Toronto-born director recounts his illustrious career in television and film, from cajoling Frank Sinatra to attend a dress rehearsal for his Judy Garland TV special (adding at the end of his phone pitch, ‘Oh, and Frank, bring Dean, will ya?’), to being the skeptical producer when tough guy Steve McQueen lobbied for the part of elegant playboy Thomas Crown. Then there was his frustration over trying to quell accusations of truth-fudging surrounding his 1999 biopic of imprisoned black boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter.

Naturally, the making of In the Heat of the Night–the Best Picture Oscar-winner for 1967 (though Jewison lost Best Director to Mike Nichols)–gets lots of attention from this longstanding advocate for civil rights and better race relations. (Other films Jewison wanted to direct were The Confessions of Nat Turner and Malcolm X.) What stands out, though, are the details of making the film: how Jewison got screenwriter Stirling Silliphant to rewrite dialogue by purposefully exaggerating the lines during read-throughs, and how chewing gum and pecan pie helped Rod Steiger fill out his bigoted cop character. Perhaps the most amusing anecdote tells how Jewison, who is not Jewish, came to direct Fiddler on the Roof. Suffice it to say, a box office track record trumped religious concerns. But Jewison hit an insurmountable obstacle when it came to directing Malcolm X. That assignment went to a black director, Spike Lee. Jewison never mentions what he ultimately thought of Lee’s film. In some instances, what an autobiography doesn’t say says everything.

The question “what does a producer do?” is probably best answered by someone who has actually gotten films made. In So You Want To Be A Producer, Lawrence Turman, the force behind The Graduate, shares some lessons learned. Using his own experience, Turman, who has shepherded dozens of films and is the Endowed Chair at USC’s Peter Stark Producing Program, lays out the responsibilities of his profession. A producer, according to Turman, is someone who starts the ball rolling, and keeps it rolling on the path he has in mind. (Like Jewison’s book, this one includes recollections of working with the erratic Judy Garland, in Turman’s case producing her in I Could Go On Singing.) He is kind to directors, bemoaning the age discrimination that keeps older, pedigreed names from working. He’s highly reverent of Mike Nichols, whom he hired to direct The Graduate. An entertaining, point-by-point case study of that film closes the book. Turman also relates a humorous, embarrassing anecdote in which Nichols delivered an acceptance speech for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the DGA awards dinner when his name had merely been the first read from the list of nominees. The next year, Nichols actually won for The Graduate, and Turman accepted for him, relishing the chance to pass on Nichols’ regrets with the quip, “But it doesn’t really matter because all of you already heard his acceptance speech last year.”

Any book about the life of Louis B. Mayer can’t escape being a history of the place that took the studio system to its purest, and most infuriating, heights. No studio was more favorable to producers (the Irving Thalbergs) over directors (the Clarence Browns) than that glitter factory Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, whose heyday is vividly described in Scott Eyman’s rich biography of its outsized mogul. MGM was notoriously a studio where the swift, economical brilliance of a W.S. “Woody” Van Dyke II (one of the 13 founders of the DGA)– a director who could wrap an A picture in only a few weeks– was infinitely preferred to the wild, untamed vision of an Erich Von Stroheim. “It’s clear that the rise of the auteur theory was a reaction against the Mayer-Thalberg ethos,” writes Eyman, who informs us that Mayer would tell new directors at the studio, “I consider the director is on the set to communicate what I expect of my actors.” Producers rarely changed on a project, whereas five different studio directors might be used to bring a film to completion. Eyman makes a well-supported case suggesting that MGM both benefited and was hamstrung by its leader’s sentimental immigrant vision of an America that was beautiful, shiny, respectful to mothers, and blind to humanity’s baser nature or more disturbing sociological problems. A movie like Fritz Lang’s 1936 lynching drama Fury, for instance, got made only because Mayer wanted to prove that it would “go on its ass” even with the same marketing push as a Romeo and Juliet (it didn’t, incidentally.) Eyman recounts how Elia Kazan came to the studio to make Sea of Grass only to discover that the second unit footage had been completed, the costumes and sets designed, the script finalized and his services deemed unnecessary for editing. When Kazan questioned whether the wardrobe accurately reflected rural life, he was told, “Actually, this picture takes place in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayerland.”