100 books like My Wicked, Wicked Ways

When a New York Times correspondent and Yale Fellow sits down to write a book about the making of Casablanca for its 50th anniversary, one expects quality, and Harmetz delivers by detailing the times and people who created and marketed the timeless classic.

This book served as a primary source during the writing of my book. The extensively researched and footnoted book was repackaged in 2002 as The Making of Casablanca: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II and remains in print more than 30 years after its initial release.

Leonard Maltin shot to prominence as a youth publishing the annual Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide, with each new edition becoming an instant New York Times bestseller. Maltin also served a long stint as an on-air correspondent for Entertainment Tonight, where he earned backstage access to generations of movie stars.

His recently published memoir details his early obsession with the movies and then his slow but steady rise as one of Hollywood’s leading historians. I love this book most for its insights into the old stars that Maltin met—stars who knew him from his books and TV work and opened up about their own histories, making this book a valuable resource for film scholars.

The year before Errol Flynn blew into Hollywood, the “pre-Code” era ended. What was the “pre-Code” era? It was the period in the early 1930s when Hollywood rode the cliff, making movies about sensational topics like adultery, pay-for-play, drug use, and more. Many of the pictures included a scene or two with leading ladies scantily clad and even braless. Leading men were often scoundrels.

This book entertainingly details both the point of view of studios struggling to remain relevant in the depths of the Great Depression by creating salacious products and the outcry from alarmed parents who took their kids to the movies only to cover their eyes and rush them back out again.

The author backs up his narrative with eye-popping photos illustrating just what was so shocking about the pre-Code era. This interesting period of Hollywood history ended abruptly and, unfortunately, with the puritanical “Production Code” that ushered… show more.

The author was one of a platoon of young, bicycle-riding male messengers that roamed the sprawling Warner Bros. studio in Burbank before World War II, delivering scripts and memos to directors, writers, and stars like Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, and yes, Errol Flynn (who got a big thumbs-up from the messenger boys).

Jerome pulls no punches on the stars he liked and those he detested and provides graphic details to back up his rankings. This book shows the stars as real people, for better or worse, while also providing an invaluable look at the inner workings of one of the most successful studios of old Hollywood.

The opening, hook, if you will, of this book is exactly why I loved it. She is an attorney.

He is a huge over-the-top movie star whose next role is in a courtroom. When he is late, she blows him off and he can’t believe it. I love love love how she stands up to him and basically, puts him in his place. But when he sees her in action, he’s stunned. And, that is what I love!

It’s convincing and I know that in the end things will work out. That’s the joy of Romance. The journey to the ending you know you’ll love.

He is a fictionalized account of the comedian Stan Laurel's life. Being a massive fan of Laurel & Hardy, whose films remain irrepressibly funny to this day, and having read several factual books about Stan and his sidekick, it was a no-brainer to pick this up and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Whilst at times it feels like a ‘tick box’ situation regarding some of the events that an aficionado of Laurel would expect to be covered, at other times it provides an acute insight into the man behind the films. The similarity of the process on show here is so close to Blonde that a comparison is inevitable, and whilst he doesn’t provide the same emotional impact and is quite clinical in the telling, it nevertheless remains an important work in its own right and therefore is highly recommended.

Martin Turnbull is somewhat of an expert on Old Hollywood and I found his incredible website in my research for Honey Black.

His website is full of original photos of LA throughout the decades and these were invaluable for me when I was writing certain scenes. I then discovered he had written a series of books based in Hollywood, following three friends who come together to navigate their way through the movie business, starting with The Garden of Allah set in the late 1920s. It’s a fascinating look at the seedier side of Old Hollywood. 

I stumbled across this beautiful non-fiction hardback while I was searching for books that would immerse me fully into Honey Black’s world, when I first started writing my novel.

This is an excellent book recounting the scandals of Old Hollywood – Clark Gable and Errol Flynn included – complete with an impressive amount of authentic photographs that bring every story to bright, technicolour life. A lot of the scandals referred to in my novel were discovered through reading this book!

LaSalle’s book made me fall in love with Pre-Code Hollywood despite having been in film and media studies for 20 years.

His in-depth study of many famous actresses during this era such as Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, and Jean Harlow, shows how freer women could be on screen for their life choices. 

The later chapters address the lasting impact of the Code era on the representation of women and their agency, even on contemporary movies. As he discusses it, the Code caused the decline of “socially responsive women’s pictures.”

Though her style has always struck me as danger-close to tabloid and disjointed, nobody ever said those traits couldn't result in coffee-through-nostrils hilarity and knockout via punchline.

Fisher's particular brand of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll certainly didn't help with her bipolar management. All the same, her unhinged lifestyle did deliver a bevy of dramatic and somewhat instructive anecdotes.  

She captures the chaos with such wit and bite in Postcards from the Edge and Shockaholic, but if you have to choose just one book, go with Wishful Drinking.