Lost Hollywood - Hardcover

Wallace, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312261950 ISBN 13: 9780312261955

Publisher: L.A. Weekly Books, 2001

Synopsis

The movie business may have been born on the East Coast, but it created Hollywood in its own image. LOST HOLLYWOOD is a rich trip back into a vanished place and time-25 chapters that use lost structures as a launching point to tell the history of the movie business in the last century. Many of the subjects Wallace covers will be unfamiliar to even the most knowledgeable film buffs: from Marian Davies' extraordinary playpen Ocean House, known as"Xanadu by the Sea" to the development of Whitley Heights and its now-iconic Mediterranean architecture. Other chapters include new and fascinating details on classic Hollywood institutions, like the Hollywood Canteen, the Garden of Allah, the Brown Derby, the Copacabana and the legendary Pickfair.

About this title

About the Author

David Wallace is a journalist who has covered celebrities and the movie industry for over twenty years. This is his first book. he lives in Los Angeles.

From Publishers Weekly

Forget about the Internet Americanizing the world it was film, from the silent days forward, that began cultural globalization, claims Wallace at the outset of this short, quirky take on Hollywood's impact on world culture. Using famous architectural structures the glamorous Garden of Allah apartment complex, the Hollywood sign, the Hollywood Bowl as jumping-off points, he sketches a free-wheeling history of the industry through its triumphs and failures, great and petty. While his anecdotes and thumbnail sketches won't impress serious film historians with fresh insights, casual readers will find them deliciously entertaining. Wallace is at his best when he assumes the tone that Kenneth Anger perfected in his legendary Hollywood Babylon books a tone of malicious gossip rendered with jaundiced irony though Wallace maintains a more respectable aura. Known for his celebrity interviews, Wallace covers such Hollywood scandals as the Thomas Ince murder and Peg Entwistle's suicidal leap from the H in the above-mentioned sign, while also dishing dirt on lesser-known figures, such as Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, who founded one of the largest churches in America, the Angeles Temple, before she was consumed by scandal. Wallace is careful to warn that some of his information may be more folklore than established fact (in relating how John Barrymore's corpse was reputedly employed in a practical joke on Errol Flynn, he includes varying versions and denials). But he is less concerned with veracity than with how Hollywood rumor becomes American myth. (Mar.)
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: L.A. Weekly Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0312261950
• ISBN 13: 9780312261955
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256