Wednesday, March 06, 2019

Top ten books about Hollywood

Wayne Holloway is a writer and director.

At the Guardian he tagged his favorite writing about California’s dream factory, including:
LA Quartet by James Ellroy (1987-1992)

Quintessential. Hardboiled hard-luck stories from the underbelly of the city. Written with such maverick prose, such anger and non-judgmental brutality that what you think you already know you don’t, at all. Taking the louche noir detective B movies and books we do know to their logical hyper-violent conclusion, Ellroy sometimes reads like a speedballing Ballard. Ellroy explores the eruption of organised crime and political black ops into Tinseltown. Ellroy combines fictional and real historical characters to weave together a paranoid, conspiratorial portrait of a town that shills the truth.
Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue