Hollywood Babylon: The Legendary Underground Classic of Hollywood's Darkest and Best Kept Secrets

This book is about the beginnings of Hollywood. The dangerous underbelly of the film world. It has murder, intrigue, and the dark secrets into which Hollywood was founded.

My Mom and I enjoyed this book. Must read.

Great book on this creation and inside stories of the famous of the famous in the 1920's through the 60's. All the booze and drug filled parties the lavish tastes, the famous cocktail and dinner joints. And - all the hookups! Marriages, divorces, mistresses and gigalos its all there with gorgeous (and gruesome) pictures.surely Hollywood is best kept behind the scenes because the careers are cut short- violently- and sadly by their own hand

Haha “prince of whales has been harpooned” But as other reviews have said they removed some details so I removed a star

Hollywood really has a long history of chaos. Be careful about the things you ask for because you might get it.

Very hard to read. Incoherent writing style. Couldn't get past the first few chapters.

I think I first came across this book at the Dawn Treader Book Shop, way in the back where they shelve their Hollywood Film History books, among other popular sections like Science Fiction and Mysteries, like a pharmacy putting their most popular drugs in the back of the store so you have to walk past all their other products to get to what you came there for in the first place. And this is that kind of book - it’s like a drug, addictive, pleasurable, you can’t put it down. I have heard that it suffers from a surfeit of factual inaccuracies, and I can confirm that a cursory googling of almost any chapter of this book will turn up errors. For example, Peg Entwistle didn’t jump off the ‘D’ of the Hollywood sign, she jumped off the ‘H’. Barbara La Marr didn’t have 6 husbands, she had 4. And Thelma Todd’s body wasn’t discovered in a Packard, it was discovered in a Haverhill brown 1932 Lincoln KB Dual Cowl Phaeton. But getting bogged down over whether a starlet was discovered dead in a Packard or a Lincoln misses the point of this book. It is a salacious, well-illustrated, tabloidy counter-history of Hollywood. It’s a crime-scene photo-illustrated, sex and drugs scandal chronicle of the birth and adolescence of Hollywood, beginning in the unstable silent film era and progressing into the studio era when emergencies involving movie stars meant calling the movie studio brass at Paramount or Warner Bros. before calling the police. The style of the book is unique among Hollywood histories. Anger uses a tone and language that is taken from scandal sheets and tabloids and his ample illustrations indicate that he is aiming for an audience that likes to look at pictures as much as or more than they like to read. The sex, drugs, and crime in the text enter into a dialogue with the pictures of naked and dead stars mixed in with a few glossy public relations portraits. The result is a salaciously entertaining book which is a pure joy to read but also fun just to flip through. Every chapter has either some well-known star or some overlooked character from Hollywood’s past, often both, and the stories range from well-known scandals like Fatty Arbuckle to crimes and deaths among obscure Hollywood hangers-on who wouldn’t be out of place in Nathaniel West’s “Day of the Locust”.

I’m not so hot in this book, but I decided to give it a read because of Candace Owen‘s recommendation. It ties into some bigger conspiracy narratives I can see, it has some interesting photos in it. Just not for me personally.

Ótimo.

Great read .

All good

Read this book many years ago and lost it so wanted copy . Smaller than orginal book though

LIBRO CHIESTO DA MIA FIGLIO X UN REGALO CONTENTA CHE ARRIVA FINO A CASA COSI NON PERDE TEMPO ED E' FELICE.