Black Pool Productions

Scoundrels And Spitballers: Writers and Hollywood in the 1930s

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Black Pool Productions

Scoundrels And Spitballers: Writers and Hollywood in the 1930s

Sold out
  • Description

Scoundrels & Spitballers transports readers back to an era before Wall Street profiteers took control of Hollywood, when the place was America's last frontier boom town, but not yet a fully fledged industry. Like a determined cultural detective, renowned journalist Philippe Garnier combines years of insatiably curious research with invaluable first-person interviews to provide a richly detailed and ribald excursion through the studio backlots, barrooms, and boulevards that would rapidly grow into the Dream Factory.

Pushing past boilerplate histories produced by PR flaks and scholars alike, Garnier acquaints us with essential, if long-forgotten, characters previously shunted into the shadows of history: you'll meet Wilson Mizner, Achmed Abdullah, John Bright, Robert Tasker, Rowland Brown, Kubec Glasmon, Marguerite Roberts, W. R. Burnett and many more unheralded scribes whose storytelling gifts helped forge Hollywood's Golden Age.

Garnier also explores the impact movies had on this particularly fertile period in American arts and letters.

The long-told tale is that Hollywood callously devoured literary talent and spit out the spent shells of ruined writers. The voices here tell a different story -- one of wit and guile, of ambition and adventure, and profound respect for the power of the written word -- even in the picture-making capital of the world.
About the Author

Philippe Garnier (born 1949) is a veteran French journalist. As cultural correspondent in Los Angeles, he contributed to the daily newspaper Libération for over thirty years, and to the legendary French television show Cinéma cinémas for which he conducted interviews of Hollywood personalities (Abraham Polonsky, Jane Russell, Mitchum, Hathaway, etc.) that one can still see floating around on YouTube.

As a scout and translator, Garnier brought to the attention of French readers such authors as Charles Bukowski, John Fante, Larry Brown, and James Salter. He has published nine books in France, including one (Caractères, 2006) on classic Hollywood character actors, and Retour vers David Goodis (2016), an updated and somewhat different version of his 1984 biography of the author, and the Black Pool Productions English language edition published in 2013. In the fall of 2019, La Rabbia brought out Sterling Hayden, L’Irrégulier, a richly illustrated biography of the actor / sailor / writer, whom the author knew during his last years.

Author: Philippe Garnier
Publisher: Black Pool Productions
Pages: 370pp
Size: 6 x 9
Notes: paperback, b/w
Release Date: October 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0578653693