December 31, 2022: I know you don’t care, and I don’t care that you don’t care. I’m still going to supply my list of the year’s five best books about Old Hollywood. Traditionally I end up reading five books about Old Hollywood in a given year if I’m lucky (you know by now that I pretty much read only books that I’ve been assigned to review, right?), so my list ends up being something of a big duh, at least for me. However, this year I actually managed to read six books about Old Hollywood, so there was indeed some winnowing, albeit the kind the takes one-seventeenth of a second. Still: actual winnowing happened. So here, winnowed, are my top five, in alphabetical order. I said winnowed.
The Architecture of Suspense: The Built World in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock by Christine Madrid French
Big Red: A Novel Starring Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles by Jerome Charyn
Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamour of an Icon by Kate Andersen Brower
Inventing the It Girl: How Elinor Glyn Created the Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood by Hilary A. Hallett
Truly, Madly: Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, and the Romance of the Century by Stephen Galloway