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Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, And Madness At The Dawn Of Hollywood (2014)

by William J. Mann(Favorite Author)

3.54 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0062242164 (ISBN13: 9780062242167)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Harper

review 1: This story has been told before but without the crime solved. It is the story of the murder of William Desmond Taylor a director during the 1920s. There are so many characters and it is so long that by the time you get to the confession and eventual solution to the crime - I didn't care!!!! I read it simultaneously with Tess of the D'ubervilles by Thomas Hardy and quickly grew tired of the Hollywood scene - decadent and sleazy. I cannot recommend any part of it except the pictures; they are interesting and a good pictorial of the times!
review 2: The whimsical vintage cover design of William J. Mann’s Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood is cleverly inviting and promises a rollicking good tale of greed and all those other... more things listed in the sub-title. Mann’s book draws you into its clutches and refuses to let go. A book of this length (424 pages) usually takes me a week or more to read, as I confine my reading to bedtime. But I could not let go of Tinseltown. I found myself stealing time during my day to pick up the book once again and get mesmerized by the murder of director William Desmond Taylor and all the intrigue surrounding it. But this is not only a story of murder; it is a portrait of the Hollywood scene in the 1920s, when much of the country was lawless, and the movie capital was in its infancy, feeling it oats, paying (as it has continued to do) enormous salaries to its stars, which they spent lavishly on furs, cars, prohibited-by-law booze, and a veritable smorgasbord of drugs. In my time, I’ve devoured many, many biographies and histories of Movieland, telling of its beginnings to the present. Never have I read anything as exhaustively researched as Mann’s book, nor have I been as satisfied with the myriad of details given and the conclusions made. Mann grips the reader from the first page, and, weaving a tale of three luscious young movie stars, two or three scandals, lots of blackmail, plenty of ambition and one murder, he never lets you go until he sums it all up with updates on every “character” in the book. I say character, not because they are fictional, but because these very real people are “characters” in the sense that they always give you the unexpected, fly through life with loose morals, and live recklessly, but colorfully. Never have I enjoyed a Hollywood book as much. William J. Mann, with Tinseltown, has proven himself to be a marvel. less

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