13 books like Moviola

I love Martin Turnbull’s writing. He truly knows how to conjure up Hollywood’s Golden Period. He’s gained popularity for his Garden on Sunset series, about the Garden of Allah apartment complex on Sunset Boulevard. However, he has begun to branch out with other series and also with standalone books. 

This book was his second standalone, about producer/boy wonder Irving Thalberg, and it is a remarkable achievement. The characters really hop off the page, including Thalberg, Marion Davies, Norma Shearer, and others. 

The best part for me was how Turnbull really brought Charles Laughton to life, making him incredibly human and letting us glimpse the tortured homosexual behind the portly actor. 

As someone who adores all things Pickford (and has written about Mary’s sister-in-law, Olive Thomas), there’s no way I couldn’t include this book, which covers the association between silent star Mary Pickford and her scenarist Frances Marion. 

I love the dynamic between these two powerful women, and Benjamin does a good job of establishing their relationship. There is a lot to love about this book: the writing, the dialog, and the detail. I love this book!

My only quibble is the picture they used for the front cover. I’d have picked it up long before I did if they’d actually used a picture of Mary and Frances because I would have recognized instantly who it was about.  

I love all aspects of Los Angeles from approximately 1911 to around 1950. This doesn’t just include the actors, directors, and studios but also those working behind the scenes who made the movies come to life. This book involves the writers who composed the scenarios (the early name for screenplays) that ended up becoming the films made by the studios. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald was most famous for his novels in the 1920s, but his personal problems (a wife committed to an expensive mental hospital and a daughter to raise) caused him to have to look for work as a writer for MGM, but he was not successful due to his drinking. 

O’Nan delves masterfully into Fitzgerald’s complicated relationship with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham and his alcoholism, and it addresses his multiple terrifying heart attacks.

This book truly belongs among the top picks for Hollywood literature. 

I gotta love any mystery that features costume mistress extraordinaire Edith Head as a detective! 

I love this book for the frothy, fun adventures (and, of course, the clothes!) of the plucky lady investigators, Lillian and Edith. 

Also, I loved meeting Bob Hope, director Preston Sturges, Barbara Stanwyck, and costume designer Travis Banton over the course of the book!

This novel is hilarious. When I first read it, I was jealous that I hadn't written it—which is a silly feeling to have about a book that came out in the 1920s, I admit. It's a diary written by a blonde showgirl named Lorelei Lee, who uses her feminine wiles to get wealth from the gentlemen callers who want to "educate" her. Loralei isn't very smart—the diary is riddled with misspellings and confused assumptions—but she has a kind of innocence and practicality that keeps you rooting for her throughout. With her friend Dorothy, a brunette, she arranges it so that everything always works out in her favor, which usually includes lots and lots of diamond jewelry. 

Published on the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Naked and the Dead, the book is an overview of Mailer’s entire writing career up to 1998, by way of introductions to and excepts from his decades of fiction and nonfiction. I make this recommendation as a risk because the book is a nearly 1300-page-long anthology. No one is going to sit down and read cover to cover, however, so I offer it as a way of seeing the sweep of a major author’s career; here you can dip in and out as you wish to see what’s up with a given work or topic at any point in Mailer’s publishing life, up to 1998. You can decide then what you want to read in the offered excerpt or in full, either from an included short work of magazine journalism or a short story, or from a whole… show more.

Blonde is a fictional biography of Marilyn Monroe. I tend not to read thick books – and this is over 600 pages – and I only had a passing interest in Monroe before beginning it, but the book was highly recommended so I gave it a go. I’m glad that I did. 

This is a colossus of a book – in size, in scope, in adaptation, in emotion. The mood is tragedy – tragedy on so many levels it hurts to think about them. Oates pitches the 'Monroe' character perfectly. And for me, the book's strength comes from the fact that I'm content with this as a piece of fiction. I don't need to know the 'truth' (however, so much truth can ever be known).

It's also a book that makes me angry. A book that pitches hope against fate, all men against one woman, fame against success. We want… show more.

The Atrocity Exhibition is an experimental novel that reads more like a collection of loosely-linked short stories split into a series of vignettes. Written in 1969 it alludes to many celebrities of the period, focusing in particular on those who met violent or tragic ends. So the (not literal) ghosts of J. F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, and Albert Camus are represented as springboards for themes that are mostly sexual, fetishistic, centred around art and celebrity and the personification of desire and status represented by the automobile. It’s not an easy read – and for some, it might be considered obscene – however, the cumulative effect is to shine an unrelenting arc light on the nature of celebrity and how it bleeds into the everyday lives of consumers, who feel they know their stars inside out but who probably don’t know them at all.

There have been many books written about Marilyn Monroe, and I have paid tribute to her in my own celebrity book but I feel that The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe best explains the complex life of the ultimate sex symbol. Author J. Randy Taraborrelli's biography reveals that Marilyn, whose grandmother and mother were both committed to mental asylums, lived with the fear of possible impending madness.

I was also interested in details of Marilyn's relationship with the Kennedys—Bobby, Jack, and Pat Lawford Kennedy. These could have played a big part in her death.

We call them 'movies' as a nickname for 'moving pictures,' and the immense importance of the 'pictures' part of that phrase is underscored by this lavish and gorgeous book celebrating the work of Hollywood's classic glamour photographers. In brief lives and portfolios of the likes of George Hurrell, Peter Stackpole, Phil Stern, Sid Avery, and Ruth Orkin, we see hundreds of photos of such icons as Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, James Dean, Judy Garland, Marlon Brando, and Shirley MacLaine on the set and off, posed for sumptuous portraits or grabbing coffee and a smoke between takes, in iconic images and remarkable candids. David Fahey and Linda Rich, important photographers themselves, are ideal guides to this gallery, pointing out aspects of the photographers' technique and craft without losing sight of the remarkable subjects of these memorable shots.