100 books like Musts, Maybes, and Nevers

The dutiful daughter of one studio mogul and devoted wife of another, Irene Selznick was Hollywood royalty throughout the 1920s to 40s, the Golden Age of American cinema. Her father, the tyrannical Louis B. Mayer, steered MGM, Hollywood’s most successful studio, discovered Greta Garbo and victimized Judy Garland. Her husband, David O. Selznick made the first A Star Is Born and Gone with the Wind before self-destructing from drugs and megalomania. Irene escaped the shadow of overpowering men to become the respected Broadway producer of A Streetcar Named Desire, a woman to be reckoned with and—in this powerful memoir—a first-class storyteller.

Okay, it’s more of an autobiography than a memoir, but Kazan’s 826-page volcano is the most explosive and mesmerizing show-business book I’ve ever plunged into. From his salad days as a struggling actor with New York’s Group Theatre to his conquest of Broadway as the hottest, most pugnacious stage director of the mid-20th century (Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), to his Oscar-winning films (Streetcar, Gentleman’s Agreement, On the Waterfront), Kazan vividly recounts his triumphs, missteps and misdeeds, his mistreatment of his wife and many lovers, and his betrayal of former friends and comrades, in a voice overflowing with self-laceration and self-justification. With a supporting cast that includes Tennessee Williams, Vivien Leigh, Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, and James Dean.

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.          

Besides being superb novelists and essayists, Dunne and his famous wife, Joan Didion, were screenwriters who banked sizable incomes and endless frustrations doctoring scripts for nearly two dozen movies. Still, no matter what their glittering reputations, most writers are viewed as hors-d’oeuvres at the bottom of the Hollywood food chain, and Dunne spares no one, including himself, in this wickedly witty account of developing a screenplay about the life of TV news anchor Jessica Savitch. What started out as a gritty, cautionary story of a talented young woman who succumbed to drugs and alcohol was transformed into a feel-good fairy tale of love and redemption after Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer got attached to the project. Dunne captures every wrong turn with a writer’s sharp eye and ear for Hollywood hypocrisy.

Another fun bit of psychedelic folk horror, combined with a really cool history of the experimental films of Canada.

The narrator is compelling, and the whole time you feel the pull of her obsession to the film she’s looking into, even if it unsettles her and terrifies her at the same time. Love that pull of danger, wanting to look, to see, but knowing that doing so will probably kill you…

It's like horror novel catnip.

Wasson and Basinger are two other authors where you simply want to read everything they’ve written.

The reason I picked Hollywood: The Oral History for this list is that you have several hundred pages of Hollywood players telling their own stories. What could be better?? We get the scoop from stars, grips, screenwriters, carpenters, producers, directors, publicists, and everything in between.

What was it like to work in Hollywood in 1949? This book has your answer. What was the transition from Old Hollywood to New Hollywood like, this book has the goods. 

Biskind takes us right inside the boardrooms, movie shoots, and parties, oh, so many parties, that produced one of the biggest change movements in American cinematic history, the auteur wave of the 1970s. 

From the shocking success of Easy Rider through the tsunami of modern classics such as The Godfather, Chinatown, and Taxi Driver, as well as crowd-pleasers like Jaws, Biskind tells the story of how the likes of Scorcese and Coppola, DeNiro and Pacino, and other giants of modern film came to be.

Biskind was among the first to prove that Hollywood history could be as engaging and as serious a subject as presidential politics or world wars while remaining outrageously entertaining.

A massive influence on my own cultural approach to understanding cinema and intersectional representation, hooks offers acute analyses of the way films can affect us on a personal, political, and communal level, for better and for worse.

Hooks is smart, sharp, and switched on to how misogyny and racism can adversely affect the treatment of female characters of colour, especially.

There have been so many books about George Lucas’s most famous creation, the Star Wars saga, and about the man himself.

As far as biographical accounts are concerned, Dale Pollock’s volume (initially published in 1983, and updated in 1990 and 1999) has to be given a lot of credit for being the first to properly introduce this unique filmmaker, whose life and career have been so full of unexpected twists and turns, to the world – and to me!

Pollock’s well-researched and very readable book set a high standard for all the writers following in his footsteps.

Marissa doesn’t label herself but seems to deal with Autism Spectrum Disorder. In her words, “The best way I can think to describe it is that there’s a beehive in my chest, and most people upset the bees. The nearer they get, the worse it is—and direct contact makes them swarm.” Marissa is more than a diagnosis. She is a film editor struggling to verbalize to producers her inner creative process. I was a film editor for many years and Little’s description of the creative process was spot on. Marissa is trapped on a movie set full of mayhem and murder. How she presents makes it hard for anyone to believe her when she discovers a killer amongst them. The book is a powerful statement on looking beyond how someone presents the truth they are speaking.