Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Larry McMurtry's "Film Flam"

After this post on John August's screenplays, reader François Tourigny emailed to suggest Larry McMurtry's Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood "for a candid account on screenwriting, learning and all."

I haven't read it, so I put it on my list.

From the publisher:
A noted screenwriter himself, Pulitzer Prize-winner Larry McMurtry knows his Hollywood. In Film Flam, he takes a funny, original, and penetrating look at the movie industry and gives us the truth about the moguls, fads, flops, and box-office hits.

With successful movies and television miniseries made from several of his novels -- Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show, Lonesome Dove, and Hud -- McMurtry writes with an outsider's irony of the industry and an insider's experience. In these essays he illuminates the plight of the screenwriter, cuts a clean, often hilarious path through the excesses of film reviewing, and takes on some of the worst trends in the industry: the decline of the Western, the disappearance of love in the movies, and the quality of the stars themselves.

From his recollections of the day Hollywood entered McMurtry's own life as he ate meat loaf in Fort Worth to the pleasures he found in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, Film Flam is one of the best books ever written about Hollywood.
Click here to read an excerpt.

Thanks to François for the suggestion.

--Marshal Zeringue