A fascinating novel of the friendship and creative partnership between two of Hollywood's earliest female legends--screenwriter Frances Marion and superstar Mary Pickford--from the New York Times bestselling author of The Swans of Fifth Avenue and The Aviator's Wife It is 1914, and twenty-five-year-old Frances Marion has left her (second) husband and her Northern California home for the lure of Los Angeles, where she is determined to live independently...

City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s opens with the movie industry at the pinnacle of its success, the banner year of 1939, which gave us Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and Ninotchka, and ends 10 years later with the chaos of the HUAC hearings, the rise of television, and the Supreme Court's antitrust decision definitively ending the golden age of Hollywood as a vertically integrated monopoly.

A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, Babylon traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity in early Hollywood.

"In the summer of 1933, a man named Adolf Hitler is the new and powerful anti-Semitic chancellor of Germany. But in Los Angeles, no-nonsense secretary Liesl Weiss has concerns much closer to home. The Great Depression is tightening its grip and Liesl is the sole supporter of two children, an opinionated mother, and a troubled brother. Leon Lewis is a Jewish lawyer who has watched Adolf Hitler's rise to power--and the increase in anti-Semitism in America--with...

"West of Eden, a work of history both grand in scale and intimate in detail, tells the stories of five larger-than-life individuals and their families, each one representing different aspects of Los Angeles and the American dream. There is Edward Doheny, the Wisconsin-born oil tycoon whose corruption ruins the reputation of a United States president and leads to his own son's violent death. Jack Warner, the son of Jewish Polish immigrants, joins with...

Lighting performs essential functions in Hollywood films, enhancing the glamour, clarifying the action, and intensifying the mood. Examining every facet of this understated art form, from the glowing backlights of the silent period to the shaded alleys of film noir, Patrick Keating affirms the role of Hollywood lighting as a distinct, compositional force. Closely analyzing Girl Shy (1924), Anna Karenina (1935), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), and T-Men...

"From the New York Times bestselling author of the Maggie Hope series comes a tantalizing standalone novel about a mother and daughter who stumble upon an underground Nazi cell in Los Angeles during the early days of World War II--and find the courage to go undercover. June 1940. France has fallen to the Nazis, Britain is next--but to many Americans, the war is still something happening "over there." Veronica Grace has just graduated from college;...

"The little-known story of screenwriter Salka Viertel, whose salons in 1930s and 40s Hollywood created a refuge for a multitude of famous figures who had escaped the horrors of World War ll. Hollywood was created by its "others"; that is, by women, Jews, and immigrants. Salka Viertel was all three and so much more. She was the screenwriter for five of Greta Garbo's movies and also her most intimate friend. At one point during the Irving Thalberg years,...

"From Rodeo Drive to the French Riviera, Karin Tanabe's The Sunset Crowd is a tale of survival and reinvention, of faking it until you make it, and the glittering appeal of success and stardom, as it seeks to answer that timeless question-who gets to have the American dream? Money and fame: in 1970's Los Angeles, everyone is fighting to reach the top, but very few have the talent, ambition, and luck to get there. Meet LA darling Evra Scott. The daughter...

Juliette Fay--"one of the best authors of women's fiction" ( Library Journal )--transports us back to the Golden Age of Hollywood and the raucous Roaring Twenties, as three friends struggle to earn their places among the stars of the silent screen--perfect for fans of La La Land and Rules of Civility. It's July 1921, "flickers" are all the rage, and Irene Van Beck has just declared her own independence by jumping off a moving train to escape her fate...