Description
Hollywood Horrors: Murders, Scandals, and Cover-Ups from Tinseltown by Andrea Van Landingham
Synopsis:
Hollywood Horrors: Murders Scandals and Cover-Ups from Tinseltown. The name “Hollywood” conjures up fantastical images of bright lights, glamorous dreams, and impossible riches. Certainly, from its humble beginnings as a ranch sprawling northwest of Los Angeles in the late 1800s, Hollywood has spanned lifetimes as a factory of dreams, a dazzling place where all things are possible. This collection of stories takes you on a journey into the golden age, illuminating the space between the airy fantasy and the gritty reality of life in Hollywood. In a transient city where nothing lasts, thousands of stories have taken place in their time here. From the offscreen debauchery of the silent era, to countless dramatic and mysterious deaths, to the sinister past lives of world-famous LA landmarks, vestiges of Hollywood’s checkered past can still be found all over the city.
Furthermore, with generations of Tinseltown’s luminaries living and working under the sunny guise of paradisal prosperity, their real stories reveal the sordid underbelly lurking directly beneath the surface. Specifically, a dangerous collusion between the studios, the press, the mob, and the LAPD forms an impenetrable behind-the-scenes network of corruption, power and control, where the truth is always up for sale. As well as a network in which the most glamorous and well-known figures are merely players in this elaborate charade. It’s magical and gritty, it’s ugly and dirty, it’s the land of dreams…it’s Hollywood.
Andrea Van Landingham:
‘TV set dresser, glitter devotee and Hollywood historian based in Los Angeles. Growing up in LA, I’ve always been enamored with the world of Old Hollywood. My young eyes were enchanted by Technicolor: the extravagant sets, the hairstyles and costumes…. I just couldn’t get enough. Watching the films, learning about the icons and their lives, and drawing the connections between them in the elaborate web of the classical Hollywood social scene was like food for my soul. I had an intense curiosity about every facet of life in Old Hollywood: I wanted to know everything that had ever happened, in every establishment and on every street corner in LA. That same level of obsession has carried on into the present day.’
Hollywood Horrors: Murders Scandals and Cover-Ups from Tinseltown – Genre: History, Nonfiction, Film, True Crime.
Goodread’s 4.01 star rating!
Product information:
- 312 pages
- November 1, 2021 by Lyons Press
- 9781493060078
- Paperback
