Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve always loved movies. In my 20s, I went to film school – perhaps you can still find a couple of the short films I wrote with animator Matthew Hood on Vimeo (Hourglass and Metalstasis) – and I worked a little in the UK film industry reading scripts for Film4, among others. I’ve also interviewed filmmakers, including Nicolas Winding Refn, Christopher Hampton, Life of Brian producer John Goldstone and editor Anne V. Coates. And I’ve always found a romance, despite the seedy aspects, of Tinseltown being developed out in Hollywoodland, a place of orange groves and pepper trees where people from the Midwest went to retire in the sun.   


I wrote

Dark History of Hollywood: A century of greed, corruption and scandal behind the movies (Dark Histories)

By Kieron Connolly,

Book cover of Dark History of Hollywood: A century of greed, corruption and scandal behind the movies (Dark Histories)

What is my book about?

In the century since it produced its first films, Hollywood has presented itself as the glamorous home to the beautiful…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting

Kieron Connolly Why did I love this book?

William Goldman is best known as the screenwriter of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man, and The Princess Bride. Published in 1983, Adventures in the Screen Trade quickly became a favourite among filmmakers as Goldman shares gossipy anecdotes about the movies that he’s worked on – including projects that didn’t get made – and offers what he has learnt about screenwriting and Hollywood. The two major adages from the book are Nobody Knows Anything – that is, for all the smart talk in Hollywood, no one knows what the audience is going to want to see. Secondly, Screenplays Are Structure – it’s not the clever dialogue, it’s the architecture of the storytelling that matters most. But not only does Goldman have the Tinseltown experience to write about, he does it in an immensely entertaining way. 

By William Goldman,

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked Adventures in the Screen Trade as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Now available as an ebook for the first time!

No one knows the writer's Hollywood more intimately than William Goldman. Two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter and the bestselling author of Marathon Man, Tinsel, Boys and Girls Together, and other novels, Goldman now takes you into Hollywood's inner sanctums...on and behind the scenes for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men, and other films...into the plush offices of Hollywood producers...into the working lives of acting greats such as Redford, Olivier, Newman, and Hoffman...and into his own professional experiences and creative thought processes in the crafting of screenplays. You get…


Book cover of Conversations with Wilder

Kieron Connolly Why did I love this book?

Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard… Billy Wilder is my favourite filmmaker. I like the elegance of his storytelling and his bittersweet wit. In Wilder’s final years, Cameron Crowe conducted a series of interviews with the writer-director. From fleeing Nazi Germany to his admiration for Ernest Lubitsch, from the trials of working with Marilyn Monroe or Raymond Chandler to the joys of collaborating with Barbara Stanwyck, Jack Lemmon, and Charles Laughton, from his successes to his failures and on to the secret of what makes a good writing partner, Wilder needs little prodding to tell movie-making tales from Berlin to Paris to Hollywood.

By Cameron Crowe,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Conversations with Wilder as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In Conversations with Wilder, Hollywood's legendary and famously elusive director Billy Wilder agrees for the first time to talk extensively about his life and work.

Here, in an extraordinary book with more than 650 black-and-white photographs -- including film posters, stills, grabs, and never-before-seen pictures from Wilder's own collection -- the ninety-three-year-old icon talks to Cameron Crowe, one of today's best-known writer-directors, about thirty years at the very heart of Hollywood, and about screenwriting and camera work, set design and stars, his peers and their movies, the studio system and films today. In his distinct voice we hear Wilder's inside…


Book cover of Kieslowski on Kieslowski

Kieron Connolly Why did I love this book?

In contrast to Hollywood, Krzysztof Kieslowski worked under Polish Communism for the first 20 years of his career, before he became better known in the West with the Three Colours Trilogy. In Poland, it wasn’t the box office that determined a filmmaker’s fate but what the state censors thought. His film Blind Chance wasn’t released for six years because it suggested that a person’s political affiliation – whether they become a dissident or party member – was up to, well, blind chance. This is a wonderfully thoughtful book not only about film-making, but working under Communism, what it is to be a creative artist, and, if I may, life.

By Krzysztof Kieslowski,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Kieslowski on Kieslowski as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Decalogue, The Double Life of Veronique and his trilogy, Three Colours, earned Kieslowski his reputation as a world-class film-maker. Kieslowski was notoriously reticent, and even dismissive of his work and talent, but these frank and detailed discussions show a passion for film-making and a career which was often threatened by political and economic change within Poland. In the book he talks at length about his life: his childhood, disrupted by Hitler and Stalin; his four attempts to get into film school; and what Poland and its future meant to him at the time of writing, before his death in 1996.


Book cover of Making Movies

Kieron Connolly Why did I love this book?

Sidney Lumet directed Twelve Angry Men and The Verdict, among many others, and the beauty of this short book is just how practical he is about his craft. In the magazine interviews and hagiographies about directors, we seldom get a true sense of the working day on a movie set, or what happens long before shooting begins and months after it finishes. But here Lumet reveals why he always tried to schedule a very simple shot for the first set-up on day 1 of production, the value of a rehearsal period (if he was granted one) and that he took a lunchtime nap. From first being offered a script to the final sound mix, this is what a movie director really does.

By Sidney Lumet,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Making Movies as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

“Invaluable.... I am sometimes asked if there is one book a filmgoer could read to learn more about how movies are made and what to look for while watching them. This is the book.” —Roger Ebert, The New York Times Book Review

Why does a director choose a particular script? What must they do in order to keep actors fresh and truthful through take after take of a single scene? How do you stage a shootout—involving more than one hundred extras and three colliding taxis—in the heart of New York’s diamond district? What does it take to keep the studio…


Book cover of The Last Tycoon: The Authorized Text

Kieron Connolly Why did I love this book?

F. Scott Fitzgerald was hired twice to work for Hollywood studios during the 1920s and 1930s. Not much came of his screenwriting, but Tinseltown gave the novelist something else: a glamorous industry to write about. Fitzgerald died having only written half of The Last Tycoon, but, in those 150 pages, we observe Hollywood through the eyes of Cecelia Brady, the student daughter of a studio chief. (‘At worst I accepted Hollywood with the resignation of a ghost assigned to a haunted house,’ she writes. ‘I knew what you were supposed to think about it but I was obstinately unhorrified.’)

The love story between studio producer Monroe Stahr and an English woman isn’t that compelling. What’s interesting is Hollywood: Stahr’s life dealing with English novelists who don’t understand writing for movies, directors he has to replace mid-shoot, union leaders challenging the way he runs his studio. And then there’s Fitzgerald’s eye. The sets on the backlot of a French chateau or African jungles didn’t look like the real thing but ‘like the torn picture books of childhood.’

By F. Scott Fitzgerald,

Why should I read it?

4 authors picked The Last Tycoon as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940 before he finished this novel. This text purges the printers' errors and editorial interventions that have appeared in previous editions. The tragic centre of the book is film producer Monroe Stahr, who sees film as art, rather than a money-making device.


Explore my book 😀

Dark History of Hollywood: A century of greed, corruption and scandal behind the movies (Dark Histories)

By Kieron Connolly,

Book cover of Dark History of Hollywood: A century of greed, corruption and scandal behind the movies (Dark Histories)

What is my book about?

In the century since it produced its first films, Hollywood has presented itself as the glamorous home to the beautiful and talented. But there has always been a dark side to Tinseltown. Right from the beginning, the Dream Factory created a hothouse of excess – too much money, adulation, expectation, and ego. Some actors would trade sex in the, often vain, hope of career advancement, while mobsters muscled in on the unions and extorted the studios, whose heads kept close ties to the police and the Press. 

From the movie moguls to the corporations that run the studios today, from drug addictions to witch-hunts, Dark History of Hollywood is the story of murder and suicide, ambition and betrayal, and how money can make almost everyone compromise.

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Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

By Mimi Zieman,

Book cover of Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

Mimi Zieman Author Of Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m an OB/GYN, passionate about adventuring beyond what’s expected. This has led me to pivot multiple times in my career, now focusing on writing. I’ve written a play, The Post-Roe Monologues, to elevate women’s stories. I cherish the curiosity that drives outer and inner exploration, and I love memoirs that skillfully weave the two. The books on this list feature extraordinary women who took risks, left comfort and safety, and battled vulnerability to step into the unknown. These authors moved beyond the stories they’d believed about themselves–or that others told about them. They invite you to think about living fuller and bigger lives. 

Mimi's book list on women exploring the world and self

What is my book about?

Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route up the East Face without the use of supplemental oxygen, Sherpa support, or chance for rescue. When three climbers disappear during their summit attempt, Zieman reaches the knife edge of her limits and digs deeply to fight for the climbers’ lives and to find her voice.


Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

By Mimi Zieman,

What is this book about?

The plan was outrageous: A small team of four climbers would attempt a new route on the East Face of Mt. Everest, considered the most remote and dangerous side of the mountain, which had only been successfully climbed once before. Unlike the first large team, Mimi Zieman and her team would climb without using supplemental oxygen or porter support. While the unpredictable weather and high altitude of 29,035 feet make climbing Everest perilous in any condition, attempting a new route, with no idea of what obstacles lay ahead, was especially audacious. Team members were expected to push themselves to their…


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