Will there ever be a great book about the film business as it is now?
Hot, sassy insider moviebookswere truly a grand tradition, as integral to film culture as the pictures themselves.
Half the fun was on-screen.
Flatiron Books
A bit extreme, sure.
But it was plumbing depths they well knew.
I can even remember studio interns in the 1990s readingWhat Makes Sammy Run?as an instruction manual.
Filmland was almost as feral as its novelists said it was.
It was all there.
Most of it was great reading.
But with time, the stories diminished.
Meanwhile, the better Hollywood books took on a noticeably historical cast.
Tom EppersonsMake Believewas actually a nostalgia trip.
(And its hard to make literature out of green-screen antics and a growing horde of VFX workers.)
So maybe its better this way.
The movie colonys good-to-be-bad ethic was never actually a good thing, at least by any conventional measure.
But it sure made good reading at the beach.
