Picture A Story About Hollywood [Hardcover] and 50 similar items

Light wear on the edges. Shipped the next business day! We own a small family book store and sell our extra books and media that have been on our shelves for too long. Additional Details ------------------------------ Product description: Ever since Hollywood began, writers had been trying to get it down on paper, but none of them had succeeded except fragmentarily. With this book, Lillian Ross accomplished superbly what others could not do at all. On the surface, Miss Ross wrote a precise, marvelously detailed account of how one motion picture, ?The Red Badge of courage,? was made. Beyond that, exuberant, she presented everything any sane person should want to know about how a big film studio functioned at that time, and in effect how the entire American motion picture industry functioned. And beyond that, she wrote what must be called, for lack of a more appropriate word, the definitive book on the Hollywood community ? its language, its manners, its preoccupations, its ideas. Last but not least, she told a dramatic story about some extraordinary people, and, in a triumph of interlineation, wrote a treatise on human nature. Employing methods of her own invention, Miss Ross demonstrates that although truth is not necessarily stranger than fiction, it can at times arrange itself more artfully. Unimpressed by glamor, undismayed by barbarism, she looks on impartially and, without passing judgment, coolly sets down what she sees. She possesses a dual gift for invisibility and observation, so that not only does she see, and see profoundly, but people tend to act out their dramas in her presence. Another of her particular gifts is the ability to catch facts on the wing, to describe people in action, to report not on something that happened somewhere before she arrived but on something that was happening while she was there. As if that were not enough, she accomplishes all this with grace, with tact, with humor, even with gaiety, but, most importantly, with understanding. To quote S.N. Behrman, ?It is the funniest tragedy I have ever read.?