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Hollywood Babylon
448 pages
A lurid, gleefully wicked tour through the rotting foundations of the world's most glamorous company town.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like flipping through a cursed scrapbook in the back booth of a dimly lit, velvet-lined lounge. It is a brisk, breathless descent into the macabre, trading the manufactured sunshine of the silver screen for the neon-lit sleaze of its shadows. The prose is unapologetically purple and dripping with sardonic wit, treating tragedy and scandal with a campy, voyeuristic glee that is impossible to look away from. You are immersed in an atmosphere of rotting decadence, where the glittering facade of fame constantly gives way to exploitation and ruin. It will absolutely delight readers who crave the sordid, unvarnished truth behind cultural myths, offering a deliciously wicked indulgence in the dark underbelly of the American Dream.
- Mood
- decadent
- sleazy
- macabre
- glamorous
- Tone
- cynical
- campy
- sensationalist
- sardonic
- gleeful
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- the facade of glamour · corrupting nature of fame · myth-making and destruction · the dark underbelly of the American Dream
- The writing
- Breathless, purple, and dripping with venomous wit, reading like a tabloid written by a decadent poet.
- The arc
- A voyeuristic plunge from the glittering heights of manufactured stardom into the tragic, sordid depths of human frailty.
- Who it's for
- Devotees of pop culture history and camp aesthetics who revel in the morbid reality behind glittering facades.
Content notes
- suicide
- drug addiction
- murder
- sexual violence
- graphic imagery
About the book
WHITE ELEPHANTS-the God of Hollywood wanted white elephants, and white elephants he got-eight of 'em, plaster mammoths perched on mega-mushroom pedestals, lording it over the colossal court of Belshazzar, the pasteboard Babylon built beside the dusty tin-lizzie trail called Sunset Boulevard.
Description from Open Library.
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