Chew. Spit. Repeat.

"The most important thing is [your] knowledge base, the contacts that give you 'reputational capital,' " Kramer says. "That's what gets you in. An outsider has a lot of trouble breaking into that kind of network, because outside money and power aren't going to trump those connections. They don't really have time for you. The ones who are willing to let you into a network are the ones who are less reliable, the ones who are out to take advantage. Because the only thing an outsider brings to the network is money--while he still has it."

Of course, the playing field is hardly level for newcomers to the game. Neophyte actors and screenwriters can rely on books such as Fran Harris' "Crashing Hollywood: How to Keep Your Integrity Up, Your Clothes On & Still Make It in Hollywood." But nobody has written a cautionary how-to manual for, say, an oversexed, middle-aged Italian financier who fantasizes about running a movie studio. And seductive illusion is, after all, Hollywood's stock in trade.

"When Europeans fail in Hollywood, they always blame it on the superficial culture," says French anthropologist G. Clotaire Rapaille, who lived in Hollywood for eight years and has known his share of washouts. "They say, 'Everything there is fake!' I say, no, the problem is that everything in Hollywood is real fake. It's so believable that you can't help but be fooled, even if you know better. When I'd go to the studios, I'd see fake antiques that were made as props. They looked so good that I wanted to buy them. It's the same with the deals."

But just as movie viewers suspend disbelief when they gaze on the digitally generated Gollum in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, the seduction of would-be moguls entails self-deception. Some have show business in their blood--such as Bronfman, who as an adolescent persuaded his father to invest $450,000 in an obscure British teen movie so he could work as a gofer in the production. Others, such as Sony co-founder Akio Morita, have found themselves seduced by the idea of being at the controls of the Hollywood dream machine. In his book "Sony: The Private Life," Japanese-speaking author John Nathan details an August 1989 meeting at which Morita announced that he was abandoning his proposal to acquire Columbia Pictures because the price was too steep. "It's too bad," he reportedly lamented to his top aides. "I've always dreamed of owning a Hollywood studio."