“The Penguin Book of Hollywood”, edited by Christopher Silvester. First edition, 1998.

I picked up this anthology at our church garden fete. It consists of reportage, book extracts (usually from memoirs), accounts of incidents/recordings/castings/pitching a story etc. It is about Hollywood in the twentieth century.

Some of the essays are:
“Eluding the Patent Agents” Fred J. Balshofer
“The growing stature of agents” Howard Dietz
“The producer and the produced” George Sanders, Letter to his father, 16 Oct 1937
“Stravinsky in Hollywood” Miklos Rozsa
“The Ethics of the Industry” Raymond Chandler, Letter to Alfred Knopf, 12 Jan 1946
“The rising cost of production” Darryl F. Zanuck, Memo to Producers, Directors, Executives, 13 June 1946
“Group Life” Jean Renoir to Albert Andre, the painter, 25 Oct 1946
“No, I don’t despise Holywood”, Raymond Chandler , Letter to Hamish Hamilton, 13 Oct 1950
“Pitching a story”, John Gregory Dunne, husband of Joan Didion
“The casting of Al Pacino [ in “The Godfather”]”, Robert Evans
“The stress of Jon Voight”, David Sherwin
“Moral rot” John Huston

And the list goes on.

A quick check on the Internet shows that this book is unavailable. Sad. It seems like a treasure that can easily be updated.

11 Feb 2023