Books like Hollywood by Larry McMurtry

A sweeping late‑nineteenth‑century cattle drive from Texas to Montana follows former Texas Rangers Augustus McCrae and William F. Call as they confront the American West's myths, love, and violence in this epic of adventure and friendship.

A compilation of essays that examine the film industry’s moguls, trends, failures, and triumphs.

An insider look at Hollywood's filmmaking process, William Goldman details how his short story "Da Vinci" rose from page to screen.

From the back cover: This seminal book restores the screenwriter to his true place in the history of American films. The brilliant young critic Richard Corliss aims to correct the imbalance of the auteur theorists, who make the director solely responsible for the film as a work of art. Seeing the writer as a vital, though much ignored, link in film creation, Corliss surveys a hundred motion pictures written by thirty-eight screenwriters, from Ben Hecht, Preston Sturges, and Dalton Trumbo to Terry Southern, Buck Henry, and Jules Feiffer. “The films that receive the highest praise in this book,” he says, “are those whose writers and directors — in creative association with the actors and technicians — worked together toward a collaborative vision.” Because it covers so much ’so well, *Talking Pictures* is an indispensable cinematic reference work. it also deserves to rank among the very few books that have revolutionized the way we look at films.

In the fall of 1997 some of the biggest names in show business filled the Motion Picture Academy theater in Beverly Hills for Hollywood Remembers the Blacklist, a lavish production worthy of an Oscar telecast. Left untold that night, and ignored in books and films for more than half a century, was a story not so politically correct but vastly more complex and dramatic. Using long neglected information from public records, the personal files of key players, and recent revelations from Soviet archives, Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley uncovers the Communist Party's strategic plan for taking control of the movie industry during its golden age, a plan that came perilously close to success. He shows how the Party dominated the politics of the movie industry during the 1930s and 1940s, raising vast sums of money from unwitting liberals and conscripting industry luminaries into supporting Stalinist causes. Communist writers, actors, and directors, wealthy beyond the dreams of most Americans, posture as proletarian wage slaves as they try to influence the content of movies. From the days of the Popular Front through the Nazi-Soviet Pact and beyond World War II, they remain faithful to a regime whose brutality rivaled that of Hitler's Nazis. Their plans for control of the industry a shambles by the mid-1950s, the Party nonetheless succeeded in shaping the popular memory of those days.

A funny account of life in the Hollywood movie industry, focusing on the making of the screenwriting script Up Close & Personal.

A compendium of memoirs and observations tracing the evolution of the American motion‑picture industry from its inception through the 1980s, spotlighting Hollywood’s social dynamics and industrial milestones.