50 WAYS TO GET TO HOLLYWOOD
IT ’ S B E E N S A I D that Hollywood is more an idea than a place, and no task punctuates the notion quite like asking people to choose the best Hollywood book of all time: “What do you mean,” they inevitably ask, “by ‘Hollywood’?”
The list that follows, compiled from a sur vey of experts in the worlds of publishing and entertainment and written by regular contributors to The Times’ film and books coverage, answers that question more astutely than I ever could. In fiction and non-, across genres and decades, these 50 titles compare Hollywood to an assembly line, a criminal enterprise, a high-seas expedition and much, much more — a penchant for shape-shifting that might explain its hold on the cultural imagination.
Yet any entity that can simultaneously be described as an industry, a society, even a style, is liable to collect more detractors than it would had it remained simply a real estate development, and if there’s a through-line in the great Hollywood books it is the conviction that creating magic must come at a cost. Sometimes comic, more often tragic, they chronicle disappointments, humiliations, botch-jobs and flops of every conceivable variety, personal and professional, creative and economic, individual and institutional; even the more rose-colored perspectives still make it seem as if producing a single movie, much less a good one, qualifies as a miracle.
But that, I suspect, is why we keep coming back, self-flagellants before the altar of motion pictures. This place, this idea, demands of its adherents what religion does any pilgrim — devotion, sacrifice, faith that all will be worth it in the end — and supplies in turn the same benefits — ritual, community, comfort. You simply have to take it on trust: If watching movies is heaven, and living without them is hell, then Hollywood is the purgatory in between.