Dimensions
152 x 229 x 38mm
In the seminal year of 1920, the movies were pulling in more money than anyone had ever dreamed possible. The unprecedented prosperity of postwar America had turned the tiny nickelodeons of the previous decade into grand cinema palaces. Movie attendance was skyrocketing.
Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Mabel Normand, Douglas Fairbanks, Fatty Arbuckle-these former stock company players, hoofers and hotel clerks became millionaires nearly overnight, drawing more fans than even the biggest stars of the legitimate stage. Never before had a popular art so captured the public's imagination, nor had a medium ever possessed such power to influence. Then everything began to go wrong. One young starlet shot herself in the mouth. A second beautiful actress overdosed. A top comedian was charged with raping and killing a starlet. And then the eminent president of the Motion Picture Directors Association, William Desmond Taylor, was shot to death in his home-leaving nearly everyone in Hollywood as a suspect and resulting in a legendary murder that has remained unsolved for decades. Until now
In the vein of Devil in the White City and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood is the true story behind the deaths that shaped Hollywood, as well as a portrait of an eccentric, lawless town. William Mann follows the labors of those building the studio system, their struggles and rivalries, as well as the many scandals and mysteries that defined the days of the film industry.
With insights into the lives of people like Louis B. Mayer, Mary Pickford, Fatty Arbuckle, and Asa Keyes, and with the truth behind the death of William Desmond Taylor-a murder Gore Vidal called "Hollywood's greatest and most notorious unsolved mystery" - Tinseltown is destined to become a bestseller and a classic.
