Hard-Boiled Hollywood

Crime and Punishment in Postwar Los Angeles

Jon Lewis author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of California Press

Published:12th May '17

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Hard-Boiled Hollywood cover

The tragic and mysterious circumstances surrounding the deaths of Elizabeth Short, or the Black Dahlia, and Marilyn Monroe ripped open Hollywood's glitzy facade, exposing the city's ugly underbelly of corruption, crime, and murder. These two spectacular dead bodies, one found dumped and posed in a vacant lot in January 1947, the other found dead in her home in August 1962, bookend this new history of Hollywood. Short and Monroe are just two of the many left for dead after the collapse of the studio system, Hollywood's awkward adolescence when the company town's many competing subcultures-celebrities, moguls, mobsters, gossip mongers, industry wannabes, and desperate transients-came into frequent contact and conflict. Hard-Boiled Hollywood focuses on the lives lost at the crossroads between a dreamed-of Los Angeles and the real thing after the Second World War, where reality was anything but glamorous."

"Jon Lewis's range as a film scholar is vast... He leaves us with the conviction that the movie business is even more complicated and dangerous than we ever suspected, but never without great plots." National Post

ISBN: 9780520284319

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 18mm

Weight: 499g

248 pages