The title pretty much summarises what I’m looking for. I’d like to know more details about how the film industry works; not so much from the artistic side, i.e., how directors set up their films; more about the business models, the structure of the industry, and the respective roles, functions and responsibilities of the many people and companies involved - directors, producers, executive producers, studios, distributors, etc. Can anybody recommend a good read enlightening on these things?
no,I cannot.
Oh. Well then, never mind.
I know - great answer, right?
I also don’t know - sorry. Can you try to look up the syllabussesssss / syllabi of Film School classes on the Business of Entertainment?
I recommend The Hollywood Economist by Edward Jay Epstein as a realistic picture of how the American film industry works. Some people also praise his earlier book The Big Picture, but I haven’t read it. Here’s his blog, which I also haven’t read:
WORDPLAY: Not a book, but a series of essays by two successful Hollywood scriptwriters. It mostly covers the writing side of things, but includes several vignettes about how Hollywood works behind the scenes, as well as the process to greenlighting a film (or “development hell”, as they call it.) [Note: the website can be difficult to reach at times.]
I’ve heard good things about this book, but haven’t read it: http://www.amazon.com/Final-Cut-Making-Heavens-Artists/dp/1557043744
You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again is by a producer, talking about her issues with Hollywood. She’s obviously coming from a specific perspective, but it gives you some idea about how Hollywood works.
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is a bit from the artistic side, but also talks about the film industry in general.
I haven’t read Making Moviesby Sidney Lumet, but the description says it goes through every stage of the process of making a movie from where the director stands.
The Devil’s Candy is about the movie The Bonfire of the Vanities being made, from start to finish. That ended up being a fiasco of a movie, but it shows you what all goes in to making a movie, and what can go wrong.
Sorry OP I don’t have a book recommendation, but if you can find/rent an HBO show called Action it is a humoristic but very informative about the different aspects of film making. Jay Mohr stars as producer Peter Dragon, who makes action blockbusters, but is on the hot seat after a flop. The show only lasted one season, and the humor is pretty raunchy (there’s a running joke about the size of Peter’s boss’ penis), but it was very funny.
Some of the things the show dealt with included: hiring/auditioning actors/actresses and directors, dealing with the studio bosses (trying to get more money out of them while dodging their insane demands), trying to get backers to raise funding for the movies, dealing with tempermental and/or demanding cast/crew/etc, writers and how they are treated, the Hollywood gossip/rumor mill (including the seamier side of it).
Sure it’s exaggerated for comic effect, but it’s a fascinating and funny look behind the scenes of a movie.
The Robert Altman movie The Player is also a good Hollywood satire.
Heartily second Final Cut. It takes a while to get into the main story, but it’s well worth it.
This book is also supposed to be excellent,
as is
Enjoy! 
Nitpick, but that was on Fox, not HBO.
And I’d second the recommendation for the Hollywood Economist. Now I haven’t read the book, but I have read some of the columns written by the author on the same subject. (And I think the book is a compilation of his columns.)
The Making of Star Trek, by Gene Roddenberry and Stephen Whitfield might also be to your liking, as would David Gerrold’s The Trouble with Tribbles and The World of Star Trek. I recommend trying to find the latter two in their original, unbowdlerized editions, though the later issues of World contain a lot of information on the series’ motion pictures.
By, the way, the book Final Cut is from 1999 and it’s about the making of Heaven’s Gate, a movie from 1980. Things in the film industry have changed greatly since the movie was made and the book written.
That’s true, but The Making of Star Trek is further out of date than Final Cut.
Besides Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, his book Down and Dirty Pictures is also good.
My point wasn’t to criticize that book specifically, but that there have been big changes in the way movies are made and financed. Now, there are foreign investors (e.g., Image Nation from Abu Dhabi) and all sorts of ways that a movie can make a profit. I read somewhere that, typically, the US domestic box office represents only 20% of a movie’s revenue sources. (Foreign box office is really big now, plus there’s cable rights, broadcast TV rights, DVD sales, streaming media sales, showings on airlines and cruise ships and product placement.)