Hollywood Babylon: The Legendary Underground Classic of Hollywood's Darkest and Best Kept Secrets

I think I first came across this book at the Dawn Treader Book Shop, way in the back where they shelve their Hollywood Film History books, among other popular sections like Science Fiction and Mysteries, like a pharmacy putting their most popular drugs in the back of the store so you have to walk past all their other products to get to what you came there for in the first place. And this is that kind of book - it’s like a drug, addictive, pleasurable, you can’t put it down. I have heard that it suffers from a surfeit of factual inaccuracies, and I can confirm that a cursory googling of almost any chapter of this book will turn up errors. For example, Peg Entwistle didn’t jump off the ‘D’ of the Hollywood sign, she jumped off the ‘H’. Barbara La Marr didn’t have 6 husbands, she had 4. And Thelma Todd’s body wasn’t discovered in a Packard, it was discovered in a Haverhill brown 1932 Lincoln KB Dual Cowl Phaeton. But getting bogged down over whether a starlet was discovered dead in a Packard or a Lincoln misses the point of this book. It is a salacious, well-illustrated, tabloidy counter-history of Hollywood. It’s a crime-scene photo-illustrated, sex and drugs scandal chronicle of the birth and adolescence of Hollywood, beginning in the unstable silent film era and progressing into the studio era when emergencies involving movie stars meant calling the movie studio brass at Paramount or Warner Bros. before calling the police.The style of the book is unique among Hollywood histories. Anger uses a tone and language that is taken from scandal sheets and tabloids and his ample illustrations indicate that he is aiming for an audience that likes to look at pictures as much as or more than they like to read. The sex, drugs, and crime in the text enter into a dialogue with the pictures of naked and dead stars mixed in with a few glossy public relations portraits. The result is a salaciously entertaining book which is a pure joy to read but also fun just to flip through. Every chapter has either some well-known star or some overlooked character from Hollywood’s past, often both, and the stories range from well-known scandals like Fatty Arbuckle to crimes and deaths among obscure Hollywood hangers-on who wouldn’t be out of place in Nathaniel West’s “Day of the Locust”.

Interesting to read

Good read

I wish this didn’t have key changes edits and removals from the original. We can’t trust anyone can we????

Bunch of my friends already borrowed

bad, boring read filled with the life and (mostly) death of some very weird people. As weird as these people are, I found it disgusting the author would mock their deaths/fall from grace and kick them while they were down. Just felt unnecessarily cruel and like it was the devil himself laughing at them. When you look into the type of films and man the author was himself, I'm not surprised he spoke like this.

Some interesting info. Mostly just gossip articles. Like reading a gossip magazine from the 20's. I thought it would be more hard fact based and interesting.

This book is a must read if you’ve ever had questions on the back story of Hollywood. Couldn’t believe some of the truly disturbing lives of these so called Stars.