Best Hollywood Novels

Michael Blowhard writes about Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run, which is one of the best Hollywood novels ever written. There really aren't that many great ones that hold up over time.

My faves include:
Larry McMurtry's All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers, a semi-autobiographical young man's novel about leaving Texas for Hollywood after publishing his first novel, which he adapted for the movies. (It was Horseman Pass By, which became Hud. As a novelist and or/screenwriter, McMurtry has had a long and successful relationship with Hollywood, from Hud to Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove and other TV westerns, and now Brokeback Mountain, with Diana Ossana.)
The Player, by Michael Tolkin (as close to the bone as it comes)
Force Majeure, by Bruce Wagner--the original short story, not the novel. While all his (very funny) novels are set in Hollywood, of his cell phone trilogy (including I'm Losing You and Still Holding), the best is the Dickensian I'll Let You Go.
David Freeman's short story collection A Hollywood Education is also better than his novel, A Hollywood Life.
And F. Scott Fitzgerald's Pat Hobby stories are better than The Last Tycoon.
Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust holds up.
Set in the early days of Hollywood is Queer People by Carroll and Gerritt Graham.
Play it as It Lays by Joan Didion.
The Deal: A Novel of Hollywood, by Peter Lefcourt. Hilarious.
White Hunter, Black Heart by Peter Viertel, a thinly disguised tale of the making of The African Queen, which was made into a movie by director Clint Eastwood, who played the role of John Huston.

I'm sure I've left off some of my favorites. Remind me.

Comments

[Mary Murphy]

All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren

True Confessions - John Gregory Dunne

Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell

The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene

The Third Man - Greene

[Chris Okum]

Hollywood- Bukowski (I always get a chuckle at Bukowski's name changes, i.e., Loppola for Francis; Modard for Jean-Luc.)

[Chris Okum]

I also forgot to mention Blue Movie - Terry Southern and (even though they're not technically 'Hollywood' novels in the sense that they are about How Movies Get Made) any of James Ellroy's L.A. Quartet (The Big Nowhere, White Jazz, L.A. Confidential, Black Dahlia).

[grandcosmo]

"Shadows on a Wall" by Ray Connolly - chronicles what happens when a small play about Napoleon is sold to Hollywood and ends up becoming an out-of-control $100 million Heaven's Gate type disaster that results in numerous deaths among the cast and crew.

[Michael Padgett]

You've come up with a very good list. The only significant addition I can think of is Robert Stone's excellent 1986 novel "Children of Light".

Michael Padgett
Decatur GA

[Exhausted Blood]

"The Deer Park" by Norman Mailer is essential!
I'd also consider "Less Than Zero" but maybe that's a different list.

[wedue]

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