(price-clipped) [moderate wear to book, top corners bumped; jacket is missing large pieces at several corners, and about 1/4 of the top of the rear panel (front panel illustration is mostly unaffected)]. 18 humorous stories of Hollywood agent "Benny Greenspan," most of which had originally appeared in The New Yorker, and an introduction which discusses the place of the agent in the movie business, with particular reference to screenwriters. (The author had done a stint in Hollywood himself, and of course was also the one-time husband of Lillian Hellman.) Each story includes its own bri... View More...
(no dust jacket) [dent at bottom of front cover, moderate edgewear, minor water-spotting at spine top and bottom rear, spine turned, a little dusty on top; inside clean, pages white]. View More...
[nice solid book, minimal shelfwear, very faint dampstain at top left-hand corner of front cover, small bookseller's label at bottom of rear pastedown (Brown Book Shop, Houston TX); jacket has matching dampstain (internal) at upper left of front panel, moderate wrinkling along top edge (front and rear panels), triangular chip at top of spine (taking away part of first T in book's title)]. Not quite a novel -- really six individual stories, "interlinking" per the dust jacket (but not terribly so) -- and not entirely about Hollywood per se, although it's certainly a highspot in the Holl... View More...
[nice tight copy, apparently unread, fading to boards at top/bottom edges, light browning to top page edges, no significant shelfwear; jacket has minor wear along top edge, light paper-clip indentation at top of front panel]. Hollywood meta-fiction, you might say: "A major Hollywood studio decides to make a movie about itself. The studio is a city unto itself and will be its own movie set. It has its tyrants and courtiers, fools and pretenders, its glamour and debauchery, waste and extravagance, its struggles for power." (And yet the jacket copy denies "any resemblance to a typ... View More...
[good tight copy, tiny dents at top and bottom of rear cover, minor smudging to bottom edge, minor diagonal crease at bottom corner of one page, previous owner's address label on ffep; jacket shows light surface wear, minor wrinkling and one tiny tear at top of rear panel, wrinkling at top of rear flap]. "This novel rips the lid off modern Hollywood in presenting the day-to-day drama of the making of a television series. It is a story that no one has told before [oh, please...] about the secrets of success and failure of the men and women who sell their souls daily to get a show in the t... View More...
Very Good+ in Very Good dj [good solid copy, minor soiling at edges of endpapers, top edge browned; jacket mildly edgeworn, soiling to rear panel and edges of jacket flaps]. Hollywood novel which takes place during a premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theater (depicted on front panel of jacket), with alternate chapters telling the stories of various individuals in attendance. View More...
[spine slightly turned, light shelfwear; jacket is bright and attractive despite some laminate-puckering on the front panel and scuffing/rubbing to rear panel; it is, however, about 1/8" shorter than the book itself, for some reason]. "Can an ex-Hollywood starlet find happiness writing a dirty book?" asks the cover blurb. It's "the story of what happened when Bonnie Erlich signed a contract with Dave Shmeer, publisher of bestsellers, and made use of his formula C = 2BS+N (Chapter = 2 Bedroom Scenes + Narrative)." This was the author's second book, and apparently her only ... View More...
[solid copy, light shelfwear, mild browning to page edges, previous owner's possession stamp on front pastedown; jacket edgeworn, minor paper loss at top of spine (no text affected)]. SIGNED by the author (signature only) on the ffep. The novelist-and-sometime-screenwriter's only Hollywood novel -- although some think his 1960s biographies of Jean Harlow and Rudolph Valentino have their share of fictional content -- "built around the fascinating, complex character of an evil genius," and informed by the novelist-screenwriter's "intimate knowledge of how producers, directors, writ... View More...
(no dust jacket) [nice clean copy, very light wear at extremities]. Second (and last) Hollywood-set mystery novel by this author featuring the "Martini-gargling, cutie-chasing, fast-talking reporter and super-sleuth" Joe Medford, introduced in "The Corpse Came C.O.D." In this story, he investigates the homicides of a trio of midgets. Starr (1904-1990) was a noted Hollywood gossip columnist and radio commentator. View More...
(no dust jacket) [minor soiling to red cloth, a few tiny tears in cloth at spine ends, but generally in better shape than this cheaply-produced volume is usually found]. "This story tells of a young film actress at Hollywood, who, in taking the part of the slave attendant on Cleopatra, has to apply the poisonous snake to the breast of a famous star. In doing so, she pierces her with a syringe containing a deadly dose of morphia. Breathless incidents follow...." First published in 1927. I personally have always cherished this book for the hysterical (and geographically-challenged) o... View More...
[book is Fine but for remainder mark; jacket has some laminate wrinkling at edges]. Modern classic of the Hollywood novel, memorably filmed by Robert Altman in 1992, from a screenplay by Tolkin. View More...
(no dust jacket) [ex-library book with minimal interior markings (library stamp on front pastedown and copyright page, pencilled call number on copyright page) but a big white call number label glued to spine; some dust-soiling to top edge, minor fraying at spine ends, generally a tight solid copy]. INSCRIBED and SIGNED by the author, in the year of publication. Much better known as a Broadway producer/director, active from the 1930's through the 1970's, Traube spent time intermittently in Hollywood, although his handful of credits are all subsequent to the publication of this book, which wo... View More...
[ex-library book, ffep removed, library stamp on top edge, "withdrawn" stamp inside, tape stains on covers and rear endpaper; the jacket is pretty nice-looking, minimal wear, spine has slight residue from removed call number label]. (Crosscurrents/Modern Critiques) Analysis of the major "Hollywood novels" of the 1930s (and 1940s), considered through the lens of regional fiction. Books discussed in detail are the usual suspects of the genre: "The Postman Always Rings Twice" (James M. Cain), "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" (Horace McCoy), "Hope of Heaven... View More...
[tight & apparently unread, but one page has a diagonal crease due to slight binding/trimming error; DJ just mildly rubbed]. "A live, flesh-and-blood, on-stage, real novel about the wild and woolly early days of TV, when bloopers went out over the air and bad words could not be bleeped." View More...
[faint dust-soiling to top of text block, otherwise a solid clean copy with no significant wear aside from a tiny bumping to the bottom rear corner; jacket very slightly age-toned, no chips or tears]. Follow-up to the author's earlier novel "Come On Out, Daddy," continuing the tale of Hollywood writer Gordon Rengs, who returns from a sojourn to an island in the Aegean to find the movie business much changed. He can only find work ghostwriting for TV until he's inveigled by a beautiful young revolutionary (who's also a wannabe soft-core porn author) to teach a college course in litera... View More...