O.C. DJ Manny Pacheco honored for Hollywood book

   Manny Pacheco has enjoyed a successful 29-year career in radio, television. Still, there was something missing in his life. And so he wrote a book about a subject close to his heart – Hollywood history.

   It’s one thing to say you will write a book, and something else to actually get it done. Pacheco spent years researching actors such as Claude Rains, Lionel Barrymore, Ward Bond, Van Heflin, and Basil Rathbone, to name a few. His fresh take was to show how their films offered a parallel to America’s history. He called it Forgotten Hollywood Forgotten History. When a draft was completed, Pacheco showed it to me and I agreed to write the foreword to it. I asked questions, made suggestions, but overall found his book compelling reading. But would it sell, I wondered.

   I underestimated Pacheco. He and his wife Laurie, who live in Cypress, did what most authors don’t do – they got out there and promoted the heck out of it. Book fairs, negotiations with Amazon, Borders, Barnes & Noble, a YouTube video, and probably most important of all, a site – www.ForgottenHollywood.com — updated with fresh content on an almost daily basis to keep people coming back.

   The result: it won a key National Best Books 2009 Award this month, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has added it to its Margaret Herrick Library, telling Pacheco the book was deemed “culturally significant.”

   At a time when most entertainers write tell-all books about themselves, it’s refreshing to see one write about history.

   This article also appeared on MSNBC, USA TODAY, and SIRIUS XM RADIO news sites.