Film Flam

Essays on Hollywood

Larry McMurtry

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780743216241
• eBook ISBN:
  9781439129708
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A noted screenwriter himself, Pulitzer Prize–winner Larry McMurtry knows Hollywood—in Film Flam, he takes a funny, original, and penetrating look at the movie industry and gives us the truth about the moguls, fads, flops, and box-office hits.

With successful movies and television miniseries made from several of his novels—Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show, Lonesome Dove, and Hud—McMurtry writes with an outsider's irony of the industry and an insider's experience. In these essays, he illuminates the plight of the screenwriter, cuts a clean, often hilarious path through the excesses of film reviewing, and takes on some of the worst trends in the industry: the decline of the Western, the disappearance of love in the movies, and the quality of the stars themselves.

From his recollections of the day Hollywood entered McMurtry's own life as he ate meat loaf in Fort Worth to the pleasures he found in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, Film Flam is one of the best books ever written about Hollywood.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Coming Attractions
• Foreword
• No Clue: Or Learning to Write for the Movies
• The Hired Pen
• The Deadline Syndrome
• The Telephone Booth Screenwriter
• The Fun of It All
• All the President’s Men, Seven Beauties, History, Innocence, Guilt, Redemption, and the Star System
• The Screenplay as Non-Book: A Consideration
• Pencils West: Or a Theory for the Shoot-’Em Up
• “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” and the Movie-Less Novelists
• O Ragged Time Knit Up Thy Ravell’d Sleave
• The Situation in Criticism: Reviewers, Critics, Professors
• Character, the Tube, and the Death of-Movies
• The Disappearance of Love
• Woody Allen, Keith Carradine, Lily Tomlin, and the Disappearance of Grace
• The Last Picture Shows
• The Seasons of L.A.
• The Last Movie Column
• The Last Picture Show: A Last Word
• Approachiny Cheyenne... Leaving Lumet. Oh, Pshaw!
• Movie-Tripping: My Own Rotten Film Festival
• A Walk in Pasadena with Di-Annie and Mary Alice