February 2018: Going Hollywood

         

               

Going Hollywood. Well, that's a movie. But the rest of these are books, and there must be plenty more like them out there.

• The classic, The Day of the Locust.
• Norman Mailer's biography of Marilyn and the fictionalization by Joyce Carol Oates.
• A really interesting oldie, Memo from David O. Selznick.
• And a few other suggestions.

Any other ideas? Post 'em here, 'cause this year's Oscars are fast approaching (March 4). So let's start Going Hollywood!

And feel free, if you like, to move beyond Hollywood into other movies and films. Bergman, Pasolini, Antonioni. Motion picture technology. Pixar. Movie censorship. Or any other creative film-related ideas you might have. (But do let's try to avoid book-to-movie adaptations, because they're just so numerous. The Oscars, after all, have a screen-writing award just for adaptations.)

The making of the African Queen or how I went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and almost lost my mind? I've been wanting to read this for quite some time.

Whoa! These get posted early! Commenting so I don't forget to keep track of what's happening here and I don't forget to come back to figure out what I'll be reading! :-)

>3 LibraryCin: I've been in the hospital a couple times just before and after Thanksgiving with congestive heart failure, and I was concerned something might happen between now and January that could delay getting the page started and mess everyone else up. Figured I'd do it now while I'm fit and able.

ETA: One way I remember what I'll be planning to read is to page through my catalog and tag books for a particular RTT month (or quarter). Then I just delete the tags when they become obsolete.

>4 CurrerBell: Oh, wow! I'm so sorry. :'( That's pretty scary!

I am planning on reading Falling From Horses by Molly Gloss. Set in 1938, the main character comes to Hollywood to become a stunt rider in the many Westerns that were being made at that time. From the blurb, "Acutely observed and impeccably authentic, Falling From Horses charts what turns out to be a glittering year in the movie business, seen through the wide eyes and lofty dreams of two people trying to make their mark on the world". Sounds interesting.

I have My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business and Born with Teeth on my TBR pile. One I liked was by Michael Caine - great stories of his growing up in Cockney London and then being sent out to the country because of WWII.

I have several possibilities, but I'm leaning towards a script of the movie Citizen Kane.

>8 Tess_W: Great idea! I've got a number of Ingmar Bergman scripts around the house. (ETA: but I definitely have to get to Day of the Locust.)

I didn't think I'd have anything to read for this thread but Santa just sent me a book to fit (Thank you SantaThing!)

Bride of the Rat God which I confess to knowing nothing about! But it sounds interesting!

Now that I'm starting to think about February, I found one that I think is perfect! :-)

Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood / William J. Mann

I've found a likely candidate for this topic, Stars Over Sunset Boulevard by Susan Meissner. I was considering West of Sunset by Stewart O'Nan as well, however the reviews make it sound a bit depressing. Hmmmm, decisions.

>11 LibraryCin: Sounds like a great read!

I have long been a fan of silents; still consider Gold Rush and Sunrise among my list of top movies in my life. A few books that touch on the lives in hollywood at that time include Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me by Lillian Gish, and Adventures of a Hollywood Secretary by Valeria Belletti. Both extremely well written, funny and very interesting look at the beginnings of it all.

I read The Citizen Kane Book: Raising Kane and The Shooting Script which was the script for the movie Citizen Kane and a whole lot more. There were several essays extolling Orson Welles as a director. The script was difficult to read because it was a "copy" of a very old one with pencil markings, stage directions, and other things I could not make hide nor hair of. That being said, I never did see the movie, but now I know who Rosebud was! 444 pages 3 stars

Connie Sawyer, who began performing in vaudeville and nightclubs more than eight decades ago and continued to appear on stages and screens until she became known as the oldest working actress in Hollywood, died on Jan. 21 in Los Angeles. She was 105. Reading her NYT obit, I found out that she wrote a memoir, that would fit perfectly with this month, as well as one I'd love to read: I Never Wanted to be a Star Touchstone isn't showing it, sohere is the Amazon link if you are interested.

So many good reading suggestions here! I started Platinum Doll this morning and I already can't put it down. It's a novel based on Jean Harlow and I wish I knew more about her and her work. I feel like I should stop reading and go find a couple of her films but, like I said, can't put it down!

>17 novawalsh:, I was considering that one too.

I have finished my read for this theme. Falling From Horses by Molly Gloss was rather slow moving but an interesting read dealing as it does with wrangling and stunt riding in 1938 Hollywood.

>18 Roro8: - I am halfway through now and I still love it, would recommend it highly. Let me know if you decide to read - would like to know your thoughts!

>20 novawalsh:, I have already started Stars over Sunset Boulevard which is set during the filming of Gone With the Wind. So far I am enjoying it. Platinum Doll is still on my wishlist for now. It's good to know you are enjoying so far though.

Just starting Bride of the Rat God. Expecting great things!

I chose The Making of the African Queen by Katharine Hepburn. I'm not big on Hollywood, but this was delightful. For those who have seen her movies, it's like hearing her voice again. While sounding very self-aware, she still came off sounding a bit selfish at times.

I love Hepburn and read that ages ago, and you are right, very enjoyable

The Day of the Locust (in The Complete Works of Nathanael West.

I didn't particularly care for this, though there was a compelling scene at the end. I'll read West's other three novels (more appropriately, novellas, because The Day of the Locust is his"longest" and even that's fairly short), see what I think of them, and finish up my omnibus of the Complete Works for the sake of ROOTing. I might find that I like Miss Lonelyhearts better.

I mentioned the book I never wanted to be a star whose author recently died at age 105. I expected this to be a deeply involved look at her career and her journey from star to not. WEll its barely 100 pages, most of the pages are filled with photos, which I guess are interesting. But the story is hardly there, just like she's listing things she has done. Didn't finish it. Perhaps that is why the touchstone isn't bringing it up. Oh well - perhaps someone will write a bio of her - from her days in vaudville and silents to the presnt. I'd read that.

Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood / William J. Mann
3.5 stars

William Desmond Taylor was a silent movie director into the 1920s when he was murdered. His killer was never found, or at least, never tried or convicted. There were suspicions on who might have done it, but no arrests and nothing proven. This book looks at his murder, along with other Hollywood business practices, crimes, and scandals. There is some focus on Taylor’s friend and actress, Mabel Normand, as well as another young actress who was in love with him, Mary Miles Mintner, whose mother was very protective of Mary and didn’t like Taylor at all. There was also some focus on Adolf Zukor, who ran a number of (Famous Players) movie theatres, and his business practices.

I found the murder mystery part of this book interesting, but wasn’t as interested in the cut-throat business practices of Hollywood at the time, so I did lose focus at times. Overall, the murder story was enough to keep my rating at “good”. There are a number of photos included in the book, which was nice, as I don’t know and can’t picture most of the people mentioned (though I certainly recognized prominent names from Hollywood at the time!).

Paradies in schwerer Zeit by Thomas Blubacher

The book presents potted biographies of German artists and writers who fled the Nazi regime and settled on the West Coast, and here specifically in Pacific Palisades. Most of them hoped to earn a living in Hollywood, few succeeded. Some of them are still household names, like Thomas Mann and Arnold Schönberg, others have sunk into oblivion. It was interesting to observe the "six degrees of separation", somehow they all knew each other other or at least someone who knew someone...

I have read Stars Over Sunset Boulevard by Susan Meissner. The first part of the story was set during the filming of Gone With the Wind. The two main characters were both secretaries for the film company making the movie. Scarlett's curtain costume hat was a key piece of the story.

I read A Touch of Stardust by Kate Alcott. Midwestern girl comes to Hollywood wanting to be a writer, while meantime taking a job as assistant to Carole Lombard, who hails from the same city in Indiana. Through the fictional assistant's eyes, we get a behind the scenes look at the filming of Gone With the Wind, Carol and Clark Gable's relationship, studio and studio head behaviors, and the lead-up to WWII.

I have read Alcott's The Daring Ladies of Lowell and The Dressmaker, and enjoyed them both more than this one. Stardust garnered 3 stars from me, but my view of it may be tainted by the reader (Cassandra Campbell), who put a different spin on every sentence than I would have in reading it myself. Her narration made the assistant come off as trite. Then again, I've no interest in either Hollywood or stars. So between the reader and the subject - ambivalence. But I'm happy to have been able to complete a book for the challenge this month.

Finished Bride of the Rat-God set in Hollywood during the 1920s. Lots of fun, with a Chinese God stalking a starlet.

Blonde (4****) by Joyce Carol Oates, her Marilyn Monroe novel. I'm not crazy about MM, never have been, but this is a superb novel, one of JCO's best, and I think it's also one of her own personal favorites. Could be as much as 5***** if it wasn't a bit wordy (it also satisfies the Big Fat Book challenge @738pp), but the wordiness can at times be poetic. I've had this in a TBR pile for several years, so it's nice to use this month's theme as a chance to get through it for ROOTing.

It's definitely a "novel," not a biography (a reading that JCO herself insisted upon), so don't try reading it to get true-to-life factual details on MM's life. Having read Blonde, though, I'm anxious to get on to a complete read of Arthur Miller's plays (in my Library of America editions) as well as an Arthur Miller biography that I've had around the house for some time now.

I have some other reading to do before the month winds down, so I don't know if I'm going to get to any other RTT for February. I'd been hoping to get to Gore Vidal's Hollywood, but even though it's not Big Fat Book eligible, it's still probably a longer read than I'll get accomplished in just a couple or three days.

I knew I had a novel about Hollywood on my shelves. I read American Blonde, a murder mystery involving a Hollywood star and her friend, the actress who is trying to solve her murder. It is set just after WWII, when the studio system controls the actors and has police officers and press in their pocket. Not only was it a good mystery, but a really good inside look at how the studio system worked.

>32 CurrerBell: I'm surprised, but I managed to finish Gore Vidal's Hollywood: A Novel Of America in the 1920's late last night. As the subtitle indicates, it's not entirely about Hollywood; a good deal of the book deals with the later years of the Wilson Administration and then on into the Harding Administration and Harding's death.

For anyone who doesn't know Vidal's politics, he was anti-imperialist and anti-interventionist, so much so that today he's rather popular among some antiwar libertarians as well as Old Right anti-interventionist paleocons. He doesn't portray Wilson in all that favorable a light – Wilson is well-meaning but an academic who is sometimes quite inept politically.

On the other hand, Vidal portrays Harding in a much better light than Harding has been accorded by traditional historians. What a lot of people forget is that Harding commuted the sentence of the Socialist Eugene Debs, freeing him after he'd been sentenced to ten years for sedition during the Wilson Administration. In fact, as to his treatment of Debs, Harding – "back to normalcy" – comes off somewhat like Jimmy Carter in his pardon of the Vietnam era draft resisters. (Hollywood was published in 1990, so Carter very well would have been in Vidal's mind, but Vidal doesn't preach – he presents what is in appearance an objective history.)

Vidal's assessment of Harding?

[Senator Thomas] Gore thought [after Harding's death] that Harding was probably well out of it. "He was much too nice a man for the presidency."

Note that Senator Thomas Gore was Gore Vidal's maternal grandfather, so Vidal is here doubtless using the senator has the author's own voice. And Vidal gives Harding credit for the 1921-22 Washington Naval (Disarmament) Conference, portraying Harding as politically much more skillful that Wilson in accomplishing his ends.

So much for the history. The novel itself derives its title, Hollywood, from the fictional Caroline Sanford's involvement in the motion picture industry, as a producer and also as screen star under the name "Emma Traxler'; and such real-life characters as Will Hays, Elinor Glyn (a Virago author), and many others make significant appearances. Caroline, who is the leading fictional character of the later volumes of the Narratives of Empire series, has figured promimently in Empire and will appear as an older woman in The Golden Age. In particular, it's Caroline's presence – along with other fictional characters, notably her half-brother Blaise Sanford – that lifts Hollywood from a rather pedestrian (compared with Vidal's Lincoln) semi-fictionalized history to a 4**** novel.

EDIT to fix a couple minor typos.

>34 CurrerBell: very nice review, especially to this history prof!