5/26/2023 0 Comments Kenneth angers hollywood babylonHollywood Babylon is 400 pages of false equivalences, of allegations of heinous acts, all delivered with a jocular and “you won’t believe this, omg omg omg” red top gurn. The three things I suppose the book relies on are thus fiction, verifiable/evidence-based research, or that mantra of the English, the fact that “you can’t libel the dead”. It’s a tabloid-style, gossip columnist, movie hack look at a particular period of history, with a focus on celebrity, glamour, violence and sex. This book was originally published in the 1970s – allegedly the sleaziest decade of all time – and purports to be a photograph-filled collage of rumour, anecdote and gossip about America’s own movie industry, from its beginnings before even the invention of sound recording (is that right?) through until a decade or so prior to the book’s publication. Would the same thing in a book about movies reel me in and keep me reeled? Visually interesting and also sleazy – exactly what I look for in a movie. I was given this very strange paperback book by a lover (I say “a lover” not because I have more than one (ewwwww, can you imagine?) but because I feel “my lover” sounds both possessive and also provincial (provincial in the pejorative sense rather than as descriptive of decentralised government organisation)) and they gave the book to me because it looked like an interesting object, as well as a sleazy one.
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