One of her five best authoritative works on Hollywood, as told to the Wall Street Journal:Moving PicturesRead about another book on the list.
by Budd Schulberg (1981)
What [Hortense] Powdermaker struggled to define [in Hollywood, The Dream Factory (1950)], Budd Schulberg lived. It's one thing to visit the natives and quite another to be born among them. As the doted-upon son of one of Hollywood's biggest moguls (the legendary B.P. Schulberg), the author had an insider's view. From the day he was born (Mary Pickford sent a "woolly blanket") to his hardworking school days (he sold newspapers from the back of a chauffeured limousine) and his youthful antics (hobnobbing with Clara Bow on her movie set), Schulberg was at the top of the social ladder. "For me," he writes, "Hollywood was a way of life; indeed, the only way." Schulberg, a Dartmouth grad, writer of novels such as "What Makes Sammy Run?" and screenplays like "On the Waterfront" and "A Face in the Crowd," knows how to spin a yarn. His book is a fascinating personal story that is also indirectly an incisive social history. He knew the real Hollywood—if there was one—and saw it as a company community that was "half Baghdad and half Our Town." He tells everything he can remember, right up to the moment when he packed his bags and decamped for the East, writing in his diary, "Goodbye to Home Sweet Hollywood. New Page Ahead."
Also see the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five top books on making movies, Leo Braudy's five best books on Hollywood, Steven J. Ross's five best books on politics & the movie industry, Stefan Kanfer's five best books on remarkable Hollywood lives, and Jane Ciabattari's five best list of novels on Hollywood.
--Marshal Zeringue
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