New York Times Bestseller • Edgar Award winner for Best Fact Crime The Day of the Locust meets The Devil in the White City and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil in this juicy, untold Hollywood story: an addictive true tale of ambition, scandal, intrigue, murder, and the creation of the modern film industry. By 1920, the movies had suddenly become America’s new favorite pastime, and one of the nation’s largest industries. Never before had a medium possessed such power to influence. Yet Hollywood’s glittering ascendency was threatened by a string of headline-grabbing tragedies—including the murder of William Desmond Taylor, the popular president of the Motion Picture Directors Association, a legendary crime that has remained unsolved until now. In a fiendishly involving narrative, bestselling Hollywood chronicler William J. Mann draws on a rich host of sources, including recently released FBI files, to unpack the story of the enigmatic Taylor and the diverse cast that surrounded him—including three beautiful, ambitious actresses; a grasping stage mother; a devoted valet; and a gang of two-bit thugs, any of whom might have fired the fatal bullet. And overseeing this entire landscape of intrigue was Adolph Zukor, the brilliant and ruthless founder of Paramount, locked in a struggle for control of the industry and desperate to conceal the truth about the crime. Along the way, Mann brings to life Los Angeles in the Roaring Twenties: a sparkling yet schizophrenic town filled with party girls, drug dealers, religious zealots, newly-minted legends and starlets already past their prime—a dangerous place where the powerful could still run afoul of the desperate. A true story recreated with the suspense of a novel, Tinseltown is the work of a storyteller at the peak of his powers—and the solution to a crime that has stumped detectives and historians for nearly a century.

Emory Goode, a ruthless Hollywood producer, investigates the death of an actress.

In a career that spans over seven decades, Roger Moore has been at the very heart of Hollywood. Of course, he’s an actor and has starred in films that have made him famous the world over; but he’s also a tremendous prankster, joker and raconteur. Despite the fact that he is well known as one of the nicest guys in the business, on and off the screen he has always been up for some fun. In this fabulous collection of true stories from his stellar career, Moore lifts the lid on the movie business, from Hollywood to Pinewood. One Lucky Bastard features outrageous tales from his own life and career as well as those told to him by a host of stars and filmmakers including, Tony Curtis, Sean Connery, Michael Caine, David Niven, Frank Sinatra, Gregory Peck, John Mills, Peter Sellers, Michael Winner, Cubby Broccoli, and many more. Wonderfully entertaining and laugh-out-loud funny, these extraordinary tales from the world of the movies is vintage Moore at his very best.

His entire life, the eccentric Eddie Rabe has been chasing that elusive golden statue with no pants, and his hope dwindles after he loses his cool and beats a tyrannical film director to a pulp, Now he's on the run with one last trick up his sleeve: deliver his latest screenplay to a rival executive by day's end. But there's only one problem: he hasn't written a word yet, and he's having trouble concentrating because his roommate-struggling actor Michael Miller-was dropped by his sleazy agent and cut from a commerical. But a phone call offers both guys a shot at redemption. What follows is a wild misadventure involving a secret society of samurai assassins, and a pair of method actors posing as cops in this interwoven tale of violence and dark humor.

How political paranoia shaped cinema for a decade: “One of the most readable and damning accounts of that period.” —The Guardian This is the story of how the politicians took Tinseltown to task in the late 1940s and 1950s. As the Cold War with the Soviet Union began in earnest, the search for “Reds under the bed,” later led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, was felt most keenly in Hollywood, where the investigations were carried out under the full glare of the spotlights. Painstakingly researched and drawing on numerous exclusive interviews, this book charts the generation of actors who found their livelihood ruined by being blacklisted and the writers forced to hire “fronts” to continue to work; it reveals how Arthur Miller was offered the chance to have his hearing dropped in return for a photo opportunity with Marilyn Monroe; and how Kirk Douglas’s naming of Dalton Trumbo as the writer of Spartacus signaled the end of this extraordinary era. Witch Hunt in Hollywood is the definitive account of how political paranoia shaped cinema for a decade.

Like sharks to blood in the water, the mob arrived in Hollywood greedy and ready to tear away huge chunks of cash. Opportunistic mobsters saw labor unions as the means for muscling into the movie industry and extorting millions of dollars from studio bosses. Control the unions to which projectionists, art directors, cinematographers, electricians, scene designers, stagehands, extras belong, and you control the whole industry. Painting colorful portraits of numerous mobsters, producers, actors, and directors, Tinseltown Gangsters tells the gripping, fast-paced, true story of corruption and greed in Hollywood throughout much of the twentieth century.

The name “Hollywood” conjures up fantastical images of bright lights, glamorous dreams, and impossible riches. From its humble beginnings as a ranch sprawling northwest of Los Angeles in the late 1800s, Hollywood has spanned lifetimes as a factory of dreams, a dazzling place where all things are possible. This collection of stories takes you on a journey into the golden age, illuminating the space between the airy fantasy and the gritty reality of life in Hollywood. In a transient city where nothing lasts, thousands of stories have taken place in their time here. From the offscreen debauchery of the silent era, to countless dramatic and mysterious deaths, to the sinister past lives of world-famous LA landmarks, vestiges of Hollywood’s checkered past can still be found all over the city. With generations of Tinseltown’s luminaries living and working under the sunny guise of paradisal prosperity, their real stories reveal the sordid underbelly lurking directly beneath the surface. A dangerous collusion between the studios, the press, the mob, and the LAPD forms an impenetrable behind-the-scenes network of corruption, power and control, where the truth is always up for sale. A network in which the most glamorous and well-known figures are merely players in this elaborate charade. It’s magical and gritty, it’s ugly and dirty, it’s the land of dreams...it’s Hollywood.

Close readings that look for "the real Los Angeles" in a selection of contemporary movies. Los Angeles is a global metropolis whose history and social narrative is linked to one of its top exports: cinema. L.A. appears on screen more than almost any city since Hollywood and is home to the American film industry. Historically, conversations of social and racial homogeneity have dominated the construction of Los Angeles as a cosmopolitan city, with Hollywood films largely contributing to this image. At the same time, the city is also known for its steady immigration, social inequalities, and exclusionary urban practices, not dissimilar to any other borderland in the world. The Spanish names and sounds within the city are paradoxical in relation to the striking invisibility of its Hispanic residents at many economic, social, and political levels, given their vast numbers. Additionally, the impact of the 1992 Los Angeles riots left the city raw, yet brought about changing discourses and provided Hollywood with the opportunity to rebrand its hometown by projecting to the world a new image in which social uniformity is challenged by diversity. It is for this reason that author Celestino Deleyto decided to take a closer look at how the quintessential cinematic city contributes to the ongoing creation of its own representation on the screen. From Tinseltown to Bordertown: Los Angeles on Film starts from the theoretical premise that place matters. Deleyto sees film as predominantly a spatial system and argues that the space of film and the space of reality are closely intertwined in complex ways and that we should acknowledge the potential of cinema to intervene in the historical process of the construction of urban space, as well as its ability to record place. The author asks to what extent this is also the city that is being constructed by contemporary movies. From Tinseltown to Bordertown offers a unique combination of urban, cultural, and border theory, as well as the author's direct observation and experience of the city's social and human geography with close readings of a selection of films such as Falling Down, White Men Can't Jump, and Collateral. Through these textual analyses, Deleyto tries to situate filmic narratives of Los Angeles within the city itself and find a sense of the "real place" in their fictional fabrications. While in a certain sense, Los Angeles movies continue to exist within the rather exclusive boundaries of Tinseltown, the special borderliness of the city is becoming more and more evident in cinematic stories. Deleyto's monograph is a fascinating case study on one of the United States' most enigmatic cities. Film scholars with an interest in history and place will appreciate this book.

Tinseltown Riff is a novel of suspense, crime, and Hollywood. Shelly Frome is a professor of dramatic arts emeritus, a former professional actor, a writer of mystery novels and articles and books on theatre and film. He also writes profiles of leading figures in the arts for a regional magazine covering the Berkshires, Hudson Valley and the Litchfield Hills

"Singin' in the Rain" meets "Hollywood Babylon"! On a farm in Walnut, Iowa, the ambitious Ellie Ash dreams of becoming a famous screen star. Luckily for her, Hollywood-bound screenwriter Elmo Green just happens to ride by on his bicycle. Elmo is smitten with Ellie; Ellie jumps on his bike; and together they travel west to the 'promised land.' Once there, Elmo and Ellie work with a wild array of colorful Hollywood characters, and Ellie soon triumphs as the 'Girl of a Thousand Sounds, ' America's Newest Sweetheart. But when gossip columnist Adele DeRale exposes a few dirty secrets, Ellie has to claw her way back to the top before the new "it" girl takes her spot. "Wacky fun! Suggests "Dames at Sea" crossed with Carol Burnett's entire oeuvre. Delicious, tuneful, winning!" -Los Angeles Times