Stars Over Sunset Boulevard, by Susan Meissner. New American Library, 2016

 Violet, Audrey, and Bert are three young people with dreams in 1938 Hollywood, all working at Selznick International studio. Violet wants a husband. Audrey wants to be a film star. Bert wants to go back to college and become an ornithologist. Bert also dreams of Audrey; he has such a massive crush on her he can’t see anything but her. And Audrey and Violet have secrets as well as dreams; secrets that could easily destroy those dreams.

Their lives play out as ‘Gone With the Wind’ gets filmed at the studio, starting with the massive burning of Atlanta scenes. After the movie finishes, Audrey and Bert leave Selznick Studio, but the three remain close friends. The story takes us through WW II and after. Audrey and Violet have times when their friendship threatens to implode, but somehow things work out. The story is framed with short chapters set in 2012, when Violet’s family is cleaning out the bungalow where she and Audrey lived, and a vintage hat accidently gets sent to the consignment store. The hat is one anyone would recognize: it’s the green velvet hat Scarlet O’Hara made out of her mother’s drapes. How did this come to be in Violet’s possession?

I was disappointed. I couldn’t manage to like Violet; she came across as sweet and innocent at first but turned out to be very manipulative. Audrey was okay, but kind of flat. Bert is just a prop for the women to use. They just didn’t seem real and the dialogue is stilted. It’s almost like the book was a first draft, and the author needed to go back and flesh out the people. Not unreadable but only 3 out of 5 stars. I did really enjoy the parts about the filming of GWTW. 

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My First Time in Hollywood, by Cari Beauchamp. Wasashina & Wallace, 2015

This is a collection of short memoirs from some forty people who were in the film industry when it first started in Hollywood. It ranges from famous actors- Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, and Gloria Swanson-to producers and directors (lots of them), to writers, and people who furnished the sets. It even includes the infamous Will Hayes, who was brought to Hollywood to institute censorship.

These first person pieces are gleaned from various sources- magazine articles, autobiographies, oral history, letters, and lectures. They are all about the very first time each of these people set foot in Hollywood, back when Hollywood was not even really Hollywood. The dates range from 1909 to the 1929, during the time in which Los Angeles and Hollywood exploded and grew exponentially, going from deserted semi-desert to built-up phenomenon.

All but one person entered Hollywood via rail. All remember the vast, boring plains they had to travel through. All remember being rather bemused by the lack of buildings in Hollywood. It’s as much a history of the town and the industry as it is memoirs, and I found it fascinating because of that (I grew up in Los Angeles). It includes lots of  photographs, too. 

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West of Sunset, by Stewart O’Nan. Viking, 2015

It’s 1937, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of ‘The Great Gatsby” and golden boy of the 1920s, is washed up. Not only is his work not in demand, he has trouble getting it bought at all- his tales of the glamorous rich don’t sell in the grim 1930s. He’s an alcoholic who has been relying on loans to support his wife Zelda in a mental institution and their daughter Scottie in private school. He’s looking for a new life in Hollywood as a screen writer. It seems like he’s got a good start; he’s been hired by a studio and given an office and a weekly paycheck whether he is writing anything or not. He reconnects with old friends: Hemingway, Bogart, Dorothy Parker. It’s a hard drinking crew and they party hard.

But the studio doesn’t seem to like anything he gives them. He wants to write quality and they want happy endings-whether the movie makes sense or not. Fitzgerald is drinking heavily. This leads to more debts, health problems, and tremendous stress on his budding relationship with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham-a relationship already stressed by the fact that Fitzgerald is still married to Zelda.

This is a sad story. Fitzgerald was a hard worker and talented writer, but he could be his own worst enemy when it came to drinking and smoking. Having to pretend to his wife and daughter that everything was okay was incredibly stressful. The ill health that had plagued him for years was getting worse. But he started working on what would become ‘The Last Tycoon’, determined to make a comeback. The author does a good job of recreating the golden age of Hollywood, while also giving the flat effect that stress and depression give to a person struggling like Fitzgerald did- the story is from Fitzgerald’s POV in the third person. While it dragged in a few places, overall it’s a good story. 

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