Industry tales of epic despair

I’m a screenwriter by trade, but I came to the novel about Hollywood long before I started writing screenplays. I grew up in Hollywood. My parents were both writers, and “The Day of the Locust” and “What Makes Sammy Run?” took me into my city in other times, into the city in which my parents had worked and met and fallen in love. When Marlowe visited Mavis Weld on the lot in “The Little Sister,” I half expected him to run into my father. Just around the corner. Just out of reach.

I still read Hollywood novels all the time. Sometimes, still, to look for my parents, but more often because I find an odd, if often chilling, comfort in the fictional mirrors of my town and of my life. In the 20-some years that I’ve been writing for a living there have been many times when only a careful rereading of “The Player” could make me feel that I was not alone.

Let’s assume you’ve read “Locust” and “Sammy” and hopefully Joan Didion’s brilliant “Play It as It Lays,” and Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby stories. Maybe Bruce Wagner’s modern spin on Pat, Bud Wiggin, caught your fancy in “Force Majeure,” or you’ve run into any of the myriad D-girl comic novels, which seem to come out once a week. Maybe you just need something to read until the next season of “Entourage” starts. Well, here are 10 less-well-known books I would like you to read.

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Queer People

Carroll and Garrett Graham (1930)

I know it’s always on everyone’s list of overlooked Hollywood, but that’s because it’s so funny and because in many ways it presents the form that most of the great Hollywood novels would follow.

An outsider (sometimes cynical, sometimes innocent and, in the best books, a bit of both) comes west and is nearly drowned (or in the case of “The Day of the Locust,” trampled) by the desperation, insanity and senselessness of our little dream factory.

In “Queer People,” it’s an alcoholic reporter named Whitey, who shows up from Chicago without a cent, gets blind drunk at a Hollywood party and wakes up in the morning with a hangover and a contract as a screenwriter at Colossal Pictures.

After that, It All Goes Terribly, and hilariously, Wrong. I’ve read that Howard Hughes owned the rights to this book and threatened to make it whenever any Hollywood big shot ticked him off.

I Should Have

Stayed Home

Horace McCoy (1938)

Possibly the bleakest noir I’ve ever read and even better than McCoy’s more famous “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” Struggling, out-of-work actors living in a bungalow near Fountain and Vine in the 1930s, lucky to get extra work ... and It All Goes Terribly Wrong. When one of them commits suicide, reporters want a shot of her body with the “instrument of death.” Her friend puts a bunch of movie magazines in her hands. Fantastic!

The Squirrel Cage

Edwin Gilbert (1947)

Here’s one that follows the form religiously. Our hero is a New York playwright. He follows his big play out to the coast. His play is rewritten. He’s accused of being a communist. It All Goes Terribly, if predictably, Wrong. There’s a point after which I can get tired of people coming to my hometown and trashing it, particularly when they were doing just fine where they were. Why don’t you just stay there in the theater, where there are federal laws against changing a comma? Why not write another Booker-winning novel? Go back to New York or London, you self-righteous creeps, I’m making a living here....

But this one gives such a vivid impression of life in a writers’ building at a studio in the late ‘40s, and the writer hero is getting so royally screwed by such venal screwers, that it’s the perfect “bitter Hollywood” novel.

Dirty Eddie

Ludwig Bemelmans (1947)

Almost the same plot, and yet the flip side of Gilbert’s book. A New York elevator operator is brought to Los Angeles to become a star, and a lefty writer from New York comes to write her movie. Once again, that fabulous form. It All Goes so Terribly Wrong that Dirty Eddie, a pig, becomes a huge star. This book is very funny, very witty and, somehow for all that, quite sweet, and I love telling people that the guy who wrote the “Madeline” books wrote one of the best novels about Hollywood.

The Disenchanted

Budd Schulberg (1950)

I love this book even more than “What Makes Sammy Run?” As a young screenwriter, Schulberg was assigned to “co-write” a college musical with F. Scott Fitzgerald. The true nature of the job was essentially to keep Fitzgerald from drinking. And It All Went Terribly and Irrevocably Wrong. This novel is the fictionalized account of that “collaboration.” Beautifully written, it is one of the most heartbreaking stories I’ve ever come across.

The Deer Park

Norman Mailer (1955)

I consider Mailer’s widely panned third novel something of a guilty pleasure. It was rumored to be about Elia Kazan’s troubles with Congress and to lampoon Samuel Goldwyn, with whom Mailer had had one extremely miserable meeting. (I wonder if it was the one where Goldwyn said, in answer to a novelist asking, “Have you even read my book?”: “A book this good, you don’t even have to read.”)

An arty director and an aspiring writer meet in Desert D’Or, which is Palm Springs as sure as Chandler’s Bay City is Santa Monica. It All Goes Terribly, almost ludicrously, Wrong. This is an odd, rambling book, but you get to go to Palm Springs in the early ‘50s and get lectured on the blacklist, and Mailer’s got the gall to actually have a hero who’s impotent from a war wound. Weirdly, he kind of pulls it all off.

Hollywood Heart -- Hollywood Whore

Don Carpenter (1969)

My friend the screenwriter Bill Kerby once told me that Don Carpenter’s “Turnaround” was the best novel ever written about Hollywood and that Carpenter was one of the best American writers of all time. Read him any time you need to be reminded of the awesome power of honest prose. This two-part novella is as good and as honest as it gets. I could easily have picked “Turnaround” or “A Couple of Comedians” or “The Life Story of Jody McKeegan.”

But this account of a successful novelist who is brought to Hollywood is paired with a story of the mogul who brings him -- and, even when It All Goes Terribly Wrong, it is the mogul who comes off sympathetic, ruthless and fascinating. There are no easy targets in Don Carpenter, really no targets at all. After the success of his first novel, “Hard Rain Falling,” Carpenter did come to Hollywood, and he saw things here that I don’t think anyone else has seen. Somebody’s Darling

Larry McMurtry (1978)

Because someone has to come to Hollywood and not be bitter and cynical, and McMurtry is better at not being bitter and cynical than anybody. A three-sided love story. You get Texan transplants in 1970s Hollywood who live in Tujunga Canyon, you get a location section where they go to shoot a Western in west Texas, and you get a McMurtry heroine who is about to become a major director. Yes, It All Goes Terribly Wrong, but in McMurtry’s hands, you somehow feel that this is all right.

American Hero

Larry Beinhart (1993)

This is the book that “Wag the Dog” was based on. You know -- Hollywood big shots help a president (George the First) put on a war (Gulf War the First). As I’m sure you’ve noticed, It All Goes Terribly Wrong.

Lucky Wander Boy

D.B. Weiss (2003)

Amazing! The hero is writing an encyclopedia of obsolete games, and the chapters open with long treatises on the existential dilemma posed by Frogger, or the history of how Mario and Luigi got their names. The hero is looking for a game called Lucky Wander Boy, which he played in an arcade in his youth. He goes to work for a company that does cheap exploitation movies based on games, and through them, he tracks down the genius who created the greatest game of them all. Along the way, you catch a sideways glimpse of modern Hollywood that feels much more real to me than a lot of “How CAA Stole My Baby” Hollywood novels that seem to have been published regularly since the success of “The Player.”

But wait -- there’s more

Right there, 10 of my favorites, and I could I give more: “The Slide Area” by Gavin Lambert, “Karoo” by Steve Tesich, “The Velvet Knife” by Irving Shulman, “Bicycle on the Beach” by Peter Viertel, “It’s All True” by David Freeman, and in these books too, it All Goes TW. We seem to need to retell this hopeless version of the hero’s journey again.

No matter how terribly wrong it all goes, there will always be someone willing to come out here and stare into our bright and indifferent sun.

Leslie Bohem is a screenwriter in Hollywood. His credits include “Dante’s Peak” and “Taken.”