I grew up blocks from Hollywood Boulevard in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s and had something like a front-row seat to the greatest pop culture five-car pile-up in American history. At the Canteen on Hollywood and Vine, where my aunt would take me on summer weekdays for the “Extras for Extras Smorgasbord,” you’d rub shoulders with aging starlets, cowpokes, starry-eyed young hopefuls, and “leading men” in five-and-dime ascots who never had a leading role. Even Billy Barty, always of good cheer, would make the scene—he was so nice to me, and I had no idea he played my hero, Sigmund the Sea Monster!
If this beautifully illustrated collection of Hollywood tragedies were only kink, only lurid scandal like so many cheap TV potshots, it wouldn’t be the iconic masterpiece it has become. Kenneth Anger’s take on the faded and fallen Hollywood differs because he loves the place and its people with all his heart.
A child starling and renegade director in his own right (Scorpio Rising, Kustom Kar Kommandoes), he oozes child-like wonder and horror on every page. As he puts it in the book’s equally stark sequel, Hollywood Babylon II, the movies “promise immortality, but don’t really deliver.”
“Kenneth Anger has fashioned a delicious . . . box of poisoned bonbons. Picking through the slag heap of the Hollywood dream factory, [he] has put together a truly prodigious anthology of star-studded scandal.”—The New York Times
Kenneth Anger is a former child movie actor who grew up to become one of America’s leading underground filmmakers. Hollywood Babylon was originally published in Paris, and quickly became an underground legend. Not a word has been changed. Not a story omitted. Here is the hot, luscious plum of sizzling scandal that continues to shock the world.
Not usually considered a Hollywood novella per se, Bellow’s “small grey masterpiece” (V.S. Pritchett) tracks failed actor Tommy Wilhelm on a dark Manhattan day when his luck and his money run out.
This book is at once a tender portrait of failure and a searing indictment of the false promises America makes to the gullible. Along the way, Tommy recalls his one and only screen role—as a Hollywood extra, he briefly appeared barelegged in a kilt, pretending to blow bagpipes—just one more humiliation in a string of let-downs. By day’s end, Tommy goes face to face with humanity in a subway station and spirals toward “the heart’s ultimate need”—tears.
“What makes all of this so remarkable is not merely Bellow’s eye and ear for vital detail. Nor is it his talent for exposing the innards of character in a paragraph, a sentence, a phrase. It is Bellow’s vision, his uncanny ability to seize the moment and to see beyond it.” –Chicago Sun-Times
A Penguin Classic
Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos: He is separated from his wife and children, at odds with his vain,…
Wanna know what happens when you don’t pay off the mobbed-up indie record promo guys, fellas like Joe Isgro and Fred DiSipio? I’ll tell you what—your record doesn’t get played on the radio, shmuck.
This killer history of the mavens and crooks who made the record business spin is enlightening, chilling, and hilarious at turns. Some radio programmers, once paid off, will take a record they have never heard, shake it by their ears, and say, “Sounds good; I like it!”
Copiously researched and documented, Hit Men is the highly controversial portrait of the pop music industry in all its wild, ruthless glory: the insatiable greed and ambition; the enormous egos; the fierce struggles for profits and power; the vendettas, rivalries, shakedowns, and payoffs. Chronicling the evolution of America's largest music labels from the Tin Pan Alley days to the present day, Fredric Dannen examines in depth the often venal, sometimes illegal dealings among the assorted hustlers and kingpins who rule over this multi-billion-dollar business.
Lessing was the rare woman among Britain’s pack of Angry Young Men in the late Fifties and early Sixties, and, among her primary targets, was Hollywood’s sometimes thin, hyper-sentimental, maudlin version of love.
The centerpiece of this collection is the gut-punching title story, all about an aging theater actor who tries and fails to rekindle an old flame and then ends up with a brash actress half his age.
His new lady’s view of romance is contemporary—which is to say, ice cold. After sleeping with him, she says, “You know what, George? You’ve just got into the habit of loving. You just want something in your arms, that’s all. What do you do when you’re alone? Wrap yourself in a pillow?”
Woody made fun of movie novelizations in Manhattan, but they have a special charm, especially when written by the director.* Tarantino’s gripping novel captures the changing of the guard in Hollywood ’69 as only a native son could, with special attention paid to Manson’s floppo music career.
The book also features some intense scenes that aren’t in the flick. For instance, in one chapter, Manson Family acolyte “Pussycat” creepy crawls into an elderly couple’s home at midnight and strips naked in their bedroom while they sleep and then…yeah, well, try not turning the pages, I dare ya.
*(Another fine example is The Last Days of Disco, With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterward by Whit Stillman.)
THE DELUXE HARDBACK EDITION FEATURING NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN PHOTOS, BONUS MATERIAL & AN EXCLUSIVE BOUNTY LAW SCRIPT BY QUENTIN TARANTINO
Quentin Tarantino's long-awaited first work of fiction - at once hilarious, delicious, and brutal - is the always surprising, sometimes shocking new novel based on his Academy Award-winning film.
The sunlit studio back lots and the dark watering holes of Hollywood are the setting for this audacious, hilarious, disturbing novel about life in the movie colony, circa 1969.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood tells the story of washed-up actor Rick Dalton. Once Rick had his own television series, a famous western…
In Adam’s second adventure, his beloved former piano teacher makes a deathbed request: he wants Adam to prove his son’s innocence in a decades-earlier murder case. There doesn’t seem to be much hope of solving such a cold case—until Adam stumbles onto a test pressing of a never-released vinyl LP. The recording is of a high school garage band lost to the tides of the Paisley Underground, the acid-fueled early ’80s music scene that spawned the Bangles and the Three O’Clock.
Down the psychedelic rabbit hole Adam falls, tracing the band’s journey from the middle-class garage to the precipice of fame—a twisted tale marked by crooked DJs, elder scammers, wellness hucksters, a teen cult, and the woman who held the key to the band’s triumph and ruin.
James Malloy is a ferry captain--or used to be, until he was unceremoniously fired and replaced by a "girl" named Courtney Farris. Now, instead of piloting Brenton Island’s daily lifeline to the glitzy docks of Newport, Rhode Island, James spends his days beached, bitter, and bored.
When he discovers a plan for a private golf course on wilderness sacred to his dying best friend, James is determined to stop such "improvements." But despite Brenton's nickname as "Cooperation Island," he's used to working solo. To keep historic trees and ocean shoreline open to all, he'll have to learn to cooperate with…
Loner James Malloy is a ferry captain-or used to be, until he was unceremoniously fired and replaced by a girl named Courtney Farris. Now, instead of piloting Brenton Island's daily lifeline to the glitzy docks of Newport, Rhode Island, James spends his days beached, bitter, and bored.
When he discovers a private golf course staked out across wilderness sacred to his dying best friend, a Narragansett Indian, James is determined to stop such "improvements." But despite Brenton's nickname as "Cooperation Island," he's used to working solo. To keep rocky bluffs, historic trees, and ocean shoreline open to all, he'll have…
