Hard-Boiled Hollywood (e-book) (used book) | Jon Lewis | bookbook.eu

Description

The tragic and mysterious circumstances surrounding the deaths of Elizabeth Short, or the Black Dahlia, and Marilyn Monroe ripped open Hollywood s glitzy facade and exposed the ugly underbelly of a city teeming with corruption, back alley transactions, crime, and murder. These two spectacular dead bodies, one found dumped and posed in a vacant lot in January 1947, the other found dead in her home in August 1962, bookend this new history of Hollywood s postwar transition. Short and Monroe are just two of the many left for dead after the collapse of the studio system, Hollywood s awkward adolescence during which the company town s many competing subcultures celebrities, moguls, mobsters, gossip mongers, industry wannabes, and desperate transients came into frequent contact and conflict. Hard-Boiled Hollywood focuses on the lives lost at the crossroads between a dreamed-of Los Angeles and the real thing after the Second World War, whose reality was anything but glamorous."