The most recommended books on Hollywood

It doesn't matter that it was patently phony: The glamour that was Tinseltown in Hollywood's golden age was impossibly romantic and utterly irresistible. Much of it had to do with the social lives of movie stars, and in particular the shenanigans they got up to in swanky nightclubs where they danced, courted, and made merry. Jim Heimann is a superb chronicler of Los Angeles's architectural and cultural past, and this beautifully illustrated book is crammed with images of the likes of Clark Gable, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Lucille Ball, Humphrey Bogart, and Lauren Bacall patronizing such swell spots as Mocambo, the Trocadero, Ciro's, the Coconut Grove, the Player's Club, and many others. They're all gone now, but this collection of hundreds of photos of the clubs, inside and out, and the patrons, dressed as if for a royal wedding, brings them back to vibrant life.

A heterogeneous blend of class and culture collide in Suburban Chicago as detectives Marti MacAlister and her partner Vik Jessenovik rely on experience and their connection with the neighborhood to solve a 60-year-old mystery. I was born outside of Chicago and have family that moved there during the great migration of Black Americans from the South. Both Marti and her partner juggle complex jobs while caring for loved ones—an issue relevant to my present circumstances.

The glamour and propulsion in Did You Hear About Kitty Karr? are unstoppable from start to finish in this part mystery, part historical novel, and all between is beautiful prose telling several dynamic women’s stories in grand fashion.

Crystal Smith Paul transports us quickly and easily across several worlds in challenging times for women and Black people in America, breaking their shallow surfaces down to deeper implications. The characters’ voices, particularly of the resourceful Elise St. John and old Hollywood star Kitty Karr, sound loudly and its ending is one of the more unforeseen I’ve read in years.

Half of the brother duo behind Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary, Farrelly studied writing in the 1980s and penned a fairly forgotten novel called Outside Providence. He followed it with his second fiction work in the late-1990s, serving as a fictionalized account of himself broke, starving, and trying to break into Hollywood. I can listen to Peter talk all day on podcasts and interviews because he’s so natural and honest. Those traits translate here, with a story centering around a sympathetic protagonist trying to find his way. With real stories like how Farrelly wrote for Seinfeld and was introduced to Los Angeles by someone trying to leap from a building, any writer will instantly connect with this breezy human story about creativity in your twenties. 

The author, son of a silent screen star and a respected actress, acted in nine movies made by the man he called “Uncle Jack”—John Ford, winner of four Oscars and arguably the greatest director in Hollywood history. Carey could ride, shoot, and wear a convincing toupee—all of which were requirements for actors in Ford’s classic Westerns, including She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande, and The Searchers. His memoir is affectionate, intimate, and critical, not just of the hard-drinking, physically and emotionally abusive Ford—“the man I loved and, at times, tried very hard to hate”—but also of John Wayne, the great man’s favorite actor and regular whipping boy, and other members of the cast and crew whom Ford mercilessly bullied and inspired in film after film, many of them shot in breathtakingly picturesque Monument Valley.          

Published in 2016, four years after George Lucas had sold Lucasfilm Ltd., and with it the Star Wars franchise, to Disney, this is a worthy successor to Dale Pollock’s groundbreaking biography (first published in 1983 and last updated in 1999).

Brian Jay Jones brings that book’s story of an extraordinary filmmaker, who showed surprisingly little interest in movies during his early youth and then spent several years focusing on experimental short films before changing Hollywood with a series of huge blockbusters and newly formed businesses, to what appears to be its conclusion: since 2012 Lucas has largely withdrawn from filmmaking.

The book is not only very informative but in places, especially in the last chapter, also quite moving. 

I’ve long wished I could write such atmospheric scenes with so few words as Barbara Hambly manages, and to pack in so much detail while making it effortless for the reader.

The best scenes of all are multi-layered and hilarious. The base layer is being on a film set in a silent early Hollywood movie, with all the action of how it works, including the stars using lines that mean roughly what is on the cards between the scenes, but are far ruder. The next layer is a commentary on studio politics and rivalries, revenges and romances. The uppermost layer is Emma, the observer, and sometimes script writer, trying to solve the mystery while doing her job at the studio.

Awesome writing skill that I keep re-reading.

Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning Eleanor Perry put her training as a psychiatric social worker to extraordinary use writing now-classic films including the hypnotic David and Lisa and The Diary of a Mad Housewife. She brought the same dramatic skills and insights to examining her own life as a writer at a time when women faced nearly impossible challenges in Hollywood. The result was this deeply felt, authentic, often autobiographical novel. My wife Loraine Despres, herself a highly regarded novelist and TV writer, gave it to me when I first confessed an interest in screenwriting. The book, now unjustly out of print but hopefully available from libraries and at a price from rare book dealers, has haunted me ever since.

Every one of her romantic suspense books is a masterpiece! Coltrane cares for nothing and no one until he meets Jilly and Jilly cares too much for her messy family and the crumbling Hollywood mansion they live in. There is a fun secondary mystery and love story involving the two ghosts who died in the house.

Helen is a fantastic film journalist and professional peer who has put her sharp writing to excellent use with this short history of female contributions to cinema as well as their erasure.

From the original pioneers to the experience of female film critics today, this is an accessible and educational gateway into the marginalised struggle for women to be taken seriously as filmmakers and creatives on the silver screen.