Best Books on Old Hollywood
Top 10 Best Books on Old Hollywood
: City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s, Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder, Hollywood Babylon, West of Sunset, The Day of the Locust, Hot Toddy: The True Story of Hollywood's Most Sensational Murder, Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings, Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies, The Rocketeer: The Complete Adventures, Girl About Town (Lulu Kelly Mystery #1)
| Author | Otto Friedrich |
| ISBN | 0520209494 |
If you were going to have only one book on Hollywood, this is it. Beyond essential. Beyond ... well anything. Any book that combines the Marx Brothers with Thomas Mann with Howard Hughes with Brecht with Sam Goldwyn with ... It just goes on and it's one great story after another.
The key thing is...
Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder
The Black Dahlia murder hit post-War Los Angeles like a bombshell and this impenetrable mystery was the haunting crown jewel of LAPD's unsolved murders. Even before her savage death, beautiful 22-year old Elizabeth Short, an aspiring starlet and nightclub habitué, was known as the Black Dahlia....
| Author | Kenneth Anger |
| ISBN | 0517344084 |
Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon is a boiling cesspool of lies! Practically none of this shit happened. The ratio of truth to lies is like 10 to 1. I have it on the highest authority those girls looked thirty under the bad set lighting. My great-great-great aunt was there for that underage (by trickery!...
| Author | Stewart O'Nan |
| ISBN | 0670785954 |
A “rich, sometimes heartbreaking” (Dennis Lehane) novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last years in Hollywood
In 1937, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a troubled, uncertain man whose literary success was long over. In poor health, with his wife consigned to a mental asylum and his finances in ruins,...
| Author | Nathanael West |
| ISBN | 0451523482 |
The Day of the Locust is a novel about Hollywood and its corrupting touch, about the American dream turned into a sun-drenched California nightmare. Nathanael West's Hollywood is not the glamorous "home of the stars" but a seedy world of little people, some hopeful, some despairing, all twisted by...
| Author | Andy Edmonds |
| ISBN | 0688080618 |
Organized Crime, goes Hollywood in this captivating mystery of the unsolved murder (or was it murder?) of well known comedic actress Thelma Todd. Author Andy Edmonds, does another outstanding job on this biography and true life crime. I felt as though I'd been transported back to 1930's Hollywood...
Manny Farber (1917–2008) was a unique figure among American movie critics. Champion of what he called "termite art" (focused, often eccentric virtuosity as opposed to "white elephant" monumentality), master of a one-of-a-kind prose style whose jazz-like phrasing and incandescent twists and...
| Author | James Agee |
| ISBN | 0375755292 |
"In my opinion, [Agee's] column is the most remarkable regular event in American journalism today."--W. H. Auden
James Agee was passionately involved with the movies throughout his life. A master of both fiction and nonfiction, he wrote about film in clean, smart prose as the reviewer for...
| Author | Dave Stevens |
| ISBN | 1600105378 |
The phenomenally popular Rocketeer by the legendary Dave Stevens is collected in its entirety for the first time as an oversized hardcover, in a beautiful slipcase, including hundreds of never-before-seen Rocketeer drawings and preliminaries by Dave Stevens! This impressive collection combines...
Girl About Town (Lulu Kelly Mystery #1)
| Author | Adam Shankman |
| ISBN | 1481447874 |
Not too long ago, Lucille O’Malley was living in a tenement in New York. Now she’s Lulu Kelly, Hollywood’s newest It Girl. She may be a star, but she worries that her past will catch up with her. Back in New York she witnessed a Mafia murder, and this glamorous new life in Tinseltown is payment for her...
| Author | Peter Kobel |
| ISBN | 0316117919 |
A gorgeous, lavish history of silent movies - with more than 400 amazing images - captures the birth of film and icons like Chaplin, Garbo, Clara Bow, and Valentino.
Drawing on the extraordinary collection of The Library of Congress, one of the greatest repositories for silent film and...
Dangerous Curves Atop Hollywood Heels: The Lives, Careers, and Misfortunes of 14 Hard-Luck Girls of the Silent Screen
| Author | Michael G. Ankerich |
| ISBN | 1593936052 |
"We were like dragonflies. We seemed to be suspended effortlessly in the air, but in reality, our wings were beating very, very fast." - Mae Murray "It is worse than folly for persons to imagine that this business is an easy road to money, to contentment, or to that strange quality called happiness." -...
