Chew. Spit. Repeat.

Instead, the Hollywood economy may be best understood in terms of chaos theory, a mind-numbingly complex discipline that De Vany explains as the equivalent of trying to figure out how tens of thousands of individual fans, moving independently, manage somehow to exit a football stadium much faster than a mathematician might calculate. "To quote the screenwriter William Goldman, when it comes to what works, 'Nobody knows anything,' " De Vany says.

Another added complication: Most industries don't have Hollywood's peculiar distribution system, in which a would-be blockbuster suddenly covers most of the nation's movie screens like kudzu and competitors get what's left. That's the equivalent of one brand of microwave oven getting all the shelf space at Best Buy, Target and WalMart for a week, but then disappearing instantly if it doesn't sell.

De Vany figures this alone confounds most would-be moguls. A guy who has made a fortune selling microwave ovens, for example, is used to basing his business strategy on the most probable outcome for a venture--that is, a microwave that at least a decent number of consumers will buy. With movies, the most likely outcome is, say, "Gigli"--that is, a consumer reject that's destined for the remainder bin at Blockbuster. He hypothesizes that most outsiders aren't aware of these realities, or choose to ignore them: "For some reason, they keep flocking to Hollywood, even though it's like [playing] the lottery."

The carpetbagging mogul usually doesn't realize that until it's too late. Early in his Hollywood misadventure, William Randolph Hearst was so confident that he brushed off Adolph Zukor's offer of management help. "Making pictures is fundamentally like making publications," proclaimed Hearst, who orchestrated such flops as 1933's "Going Hollywood," in which Marion Davies starred with Bing Crosby--an unfortunate bit of casting because the two shared an interest in alcohol and spent much of their time on the set intoxicated. The movie lost $250,000. Just a few years later, Hearst was ready to quit the movie business, despairing: "I don't think I can make any money at it."

Stripped of his competence and confidence, the outsider is vulnerable. Stuart Fischoff, a sometime screenwriter and professor of media psychology at Cal State L.A., compares the process by which outsiders get sucked in by the Hollywood culture to cult recruiting or North Korean prison camp brainwashing. The would-be mogul is "brutalized and humiliated, then infantilized and reduced to a helpless state, and then introduced to the new set of values," Fischoff says.