To understand Hollywood, you need these 50 books

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50 books to understand Hollywood

What is Hollywood? An idea? A place? An in-between?

What if it was a dazzling cocktail? A whiff of glamor combined with a huge splash of disillusionment, a dose of romance, an ounce of heartbreak and maybe a tablespoon or two of comedy.

So the great thing about this cocktail is that anyone can order it: the aspiring actor, the director, the cinematographer, the videographer, the screenwriter, all eager to capture a part of the human experience and to be recognized for it.

Writers also enjoy taking a sip of this magical drink. Over many decades, they recreated it, emphasizing its liminal quality through stories of dashed hopes, disagreements, and controversies.

Before our annual edition Book Festival, the editors of Times Entertainment & Arts embarked on a project to answer the question: What is Hollywood? by finding the 50 Best Hollywood Books of All Time.

The list, compiled from a survey of experts in the publishing and entertainment world and written by regular contributors to The Times' film and literary coverage, explains the cocktail's appeal and why many have it ordered again and again, despite its tangy aftertaste.

These 50 headlines compare Hollywood to an assembly line, a criminal enterprise, a high-seas expedition and much more, my colleague Matt Brennan wrote.

Take a look at our ranking. Did we leave your favorite Hollywood book off the list? What's on your ultimate Hollywood bookshelf? Tell us this survey before Monday April 15.

In the meantime, here are some of the books that remake and refute Hollywood glitz:

(The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.)

Number 39: Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Grannies and Bucks

At the time of its publication in 1973, Donald Boogles' novel was the only text to investigate the stereotypes systematized in American cinema about black characters such as the servile slave, the mixed-race victim or the violent black brute.

Bogles' book virtually marked the birth of the field, wrote Chris Vognarindependent cultural writer and former Nieman Arts and Culture scholar at Harvard University.

[The book] also sought to save the humanity of those artists who usually had no choice but to play the roles assigned to them.

Number 9: Easy riders, raging bulls

It's hard to pinpoint Hollywood's biggest year. But 1974 is a safe bet: The Godfather II, Scenes from a Marriage and Chinatown come out.

Novel by Peter Biskind provides an addictive encyclopedic account of the people who explain why 1974 was such a great year in American cinema history.

If you're looking for anecdotes about the screenwriters who made these brilliant images possible, you might be disappointed. Because, as David Kipen, author of The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History, wrote, Biskind adheres to the pervasive and pernicious auteur theory, which insists that even directors who don't do not write are the authors of their films.

Number 1: Play it as it is

Joan Didion's novel is an avant-garde study of a decaying Hollywood, saturated with copied films, predatory men, hackers and parasites. Mast. The most remarkable aspect of Didion's portrait is not the ruthless precision with which it captures the film industry then, but the clarity with which it corresponds to the film industry today.

If your agent wasn't present at a crucial meeting or you attended an exclusive party as a guest of a guest, you've already encountered Didion's broken Hollywood romance.

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Have a great weekend, from the Essential California team

Defne Karabatur, comrade
Kevinisha Walker, Multiplatform Editor

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