Sunday, May 14, 2017

Pg. 99: Jon Lewis's "Hard-Boiled Hollywood"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Hard-Boiled Hollywood: Crime and Punishment in Postwar Los Angeles by Jon Lewis.

About the book, from the publisher:
The tragic and mysterious circumstances surrounding the deaths of Elizabeth Short, or the Black Dahlia, and Marilyn Monroe ripped open Hollywood’s glitzy façade, exposing the city's ugly underbelly of corruption, crime, and murder. These two spectacular dead bodies, one found dumped and posed in a vacant lot in January 1947, the other found dead in her home in August 1962, bookend this new history of Hollywood. Short and Monroe are just two of the many left for dead after the collapse of the studio system, Hollywood’s awkward adolescence when the company town’s many competing subcultures—celebrities, moguls, mobsters, gossip mongers, industry wannabes, and desperate transients—came into frequent contact and conflict. Hard-Boiled Hollywood focuses on the lives lost at the crossroads between a dreamed-of Los Angeles and the real thing after the Second World War, where reality was anything but glamorous.
Learn more about Hard-Boiled Hollywood at the University of California Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Hard-Boiled Hollywood.

--Marshal Zeringue