Top 10 books about Hollywood

From Joan Didion to James Ellroy, novelist and director Wayne Holloway picks his favourite writing about California’s dream factory

The idea for my novel Bindlestiff riffs on my own experiences of Hollywood as a director; the place, the machine, the people, the elusive enigma that is the “City of Angels”. A place that is as much about not having money as being rich. The desperation of so many bit players and their proximity to fortune is the true tragicomedy of a city out of which, in spite of everything, so many great stories come.

Hollywood is a factory that feeds our addiction to story, gossip, celebrity, fame and fortune. It also supplies the schadenfreude we enjoy when all of the above crash and burn. As Judy Garland once mused: “We cast away priceless time in dreams, born of imagination, fed upon illusion and put to death by reality.”

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