Movieland: Hollywood and the Great American Dream Culture - Softcover

Charyn, Jerome

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814715508 ISBN 13: 9780814715505

Publisher: NYU Press, 1996

Synopsis

In Movieland, Jerome Charyn mingles his own life as a moviegoer with the history, romance, and sadness of Hollywood. He meets Paul Newman, Viveca Lindfors, and Mae Clark, the actress who was the original bride of Frankenstein; explores Cinecitta, Mussolini's own Hollywood on the Tiber; recalls his own life as Otto Preminger's house writer (and jester) during Preminger's decline; reinvents the lost years and lost stars of the silent era --Irving Thalberg, Gloria Swanson, and Clara Bow -- and seeks out the hieroglyphics of modern Hollywood; writes of the Nazi officer who saved the Cinematheque Francaise and its library of American films; and pays homage to Hollywood's heroes, victims, goddesses, and neglected lords: Louise Brooks, Raymond Chandler, Carole Landis, Rita Hayworth, Orson Welles, and more.

About this title

About the Author:

A Guggenheim Fellow, Jerome Charyn has taught at Stanford, Rice, and Princeton, and is currently teaching film history at the American University of Paris. Death of a Tango King is his twenty-eighth novel.

From Library Journal:

Charyn, the author of 19 novels, including Metropolis ( LJ 10/1/86) and Darlin' Bill (Donald I. Fine, 1985) explores how movies "recapture for us all the splintered signs of our earliest memories, when past, present, and future had no real distinction . . . ." He ruminates on the blasted Hollywood careers of fellow novelists Raymond Chandler and F. Scott Fitzgerald; he meets Paul Newman and Mae Clark (Jimmy Cagney's grapefruit target); and he recalls working for Otto Preminger when that director's career was in disarray. This is a wildly uneven book whose observations range from banal to touching. Charyn also has the jarring habit of dropping quotes into his text without introduction (although he does provide citations at the back of the book). Libraries with bigger film collections may want this; for others, it is a discretionary purchase.
- Thomas Wiener, formerly with "American Film," Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0814715508
• ISBN 13: 9780814715505
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304