I have a thing about how Los Angeles is portrayed on film and in books. An author who makes me laugh, perhaps because of his dour satiric streak, is Evelyn Waugh. He visited Hollywood in 1947 to discuss a film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, loathed the place, and ended up…
Tag: writers in Hollywood
The erudite Mr. Huxley made his home in the Hollywood Hills. Besides writing a number of seminal works, he wrote screenplays. He also really loved Los Angeles, unlike a lot of writers who made a tremendous amount of money here (working for the film industry) but couldn’t help harping on…
When I was in college I went through a period when all I read was Fitzgerald. I’d forgotten how much I loved the glimmer and precision of his prose, until I picked up a copy of The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western, the novel he was writing when…
They called him “The Boy Wonder” and his filmmaking methods are still in use today. “That man has never written a word, yet he can tell me exactly what to do with a story. I didn’t know you had people like that out here.” George S. Kaufman “Thalberg has always…
That clever, forever young, Anita Loos said a lot of memorable things. She spoke in one hilarious essay about stress relief and what it boiled down to was a suggestion to take up needlepoint or knitting. When I get stressed I like to walk with friends. Lanier of SCENTS MEMORY…
I wonder what he would have made of the Internet? Let’s roll it back a little. Mr. Hecht started as a Chicago journalist, he was lured to Hollywood by easy money, as related in his autobiography: The telegram he delivered on this spring day in 1925 came from the unknown…