Zeit-bites: When Hollywood does Hollywood

Not many folks can get paid to talk about themselves, but Hollywood sure can. Movies, books and podcasts about Tinseltown might seem a little selfindulgent, but there’s something about getting to peek behind the great and powerful Oz’s curtain that’s mesmerising.

If you’re interested in the ‘‘secret and/or forgotten history of Hollywood’s first 100 years’’, check out Karina Longworth’s podcast.

Every season is a treat, but one of the best is

which blends true crime with cinema history.

Longworth’s taking a deep dive into the marvellously gauche font of all gossip, Hollywood Babylon, and her own book Seduction, about the women who surrounded Howard Hughes at the moment. All the seasons are available online.

Speaking of Kenneth Anger’s wildly risque expose of the gossip stories they didn’t dare print,

is worth a read all on its own, if only for the glee with which it details the rise and fall of the famous.

Longworth’s a more measured affair, is a no less compelling read.

If it’s visuals you’re after, you’re spoilt for choice, if you access iTunes.

Try worth it for Channing Tatum’s cheeky dance sequence alone. Then there’s

for crime, for pathos and for more Hughes.

However, if the classics are more your speed, try stardom on the rise in and on the fall in (1950).

Want comedy? is probably the best – ‘‘I’m the dude, playing the dude, disguised as another dude’’, but I don’t know why no one’s made a movie about making movies with Alan Arkin and John Goodman’s cynical movie producers from

because their scenes in that film are comedy gold.