Tinseltown Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood |
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| Author:
| Mann, William J. |
| ISBN: | 978-0-06-224216-7 |
| Publication Date: | Oct 2014 |
| Publisher: | HarperCollins Publishers
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| Imprint: | Harper |
| Book Format: | Hardback |
| List Price: | USD $27.99USD $27.99 |
Book Description:
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Who killed Billy Taylor, one of Hollywood's most beloved men
For nearly a century, no one has known.
Until now.
In the early 1920s, millions of Americans flocked to movie palaces every year to see their favorite stars on the silver screen. Never before had a popular art so captured the public's imagination, nor had a medium ever possessed such power to influence. But Hollywood's glittering ascendancy was threatened by a string of lurid, headline-grabbing...
More Description
Who killed Billy Taylor, one of Hollywood's most beloved men
For nearly a century, no one has known.
Until now.
In the early 1920s, millions of Americans flocked to movie palaces every year to see their favorite stars on the silver screen. Never before had a popular art so captured the public's imagination, nor had a medium ever possessed such power to influence. But Hollywood's glittering ascendancy was threatened by a string of lurid, headline-grabbing tragedies, including the murder of William Desmond Taylor, the handsome and popular president of the Motion Picture Directors Association-a legendary crime that has remained unsolved since 1922.
Now, in this fiendishly involving narrative, bestselling Hollywood chronicler William Mann draws on a rich host of sources, many untapped for decades, to reopen the case of the upstanding yet enigmatic Taylor and the diverse cast that surrounded him-including three loyal ingenues, a grasping stage mother, a devoted valet, a gang of two-bit thugs, the industry's reluctant new morals czar, and the moguls Adolph Zukor and Marcus Loew, locked in a struggle for control of the exploding industry. Along the way, Mann brings to life Los Angeles in the Roaring Twenties: a sparkling yet schizophrenic town filled with party girls and drug dealers, newly minted legends and starlets already past their prime, a dangerous place where the powerful could still run afoul of the desperate.
A true story re-created with the thrilling suspense of a novel, Tinseltown is the work of a master craftsman at the peak of his powers.