Memo to: Filmmakers, Dealmakers, Scribes, Stars, Suits, and Readers Who killed Hollywood? Who's responsible for studios hellbent on assembly-line "event" pictures? Why are production costs so high that no one can take artistic risks? Who decided that the studios should be a development arm of them parks? What happened to putting actual stories with characters onscreen? And while we're at it, what happened to taste? Where are the believable human characters buried? Are all the execs out of control? How does so much money get spent for so little? Who Killed Hollywood? is a passionate love/hate letter to the film industry. In it, Peter Bart pulls together his best columns form Variety and GQ. He groups them, juxtaposes them, and interprets them, outlining in detail the history and inner workings of Hollywood. This could only be done by someone powerful enough to phone an star or head of studio and have his calls taken on the first ring. In story after story, Bart shows how the major studios have diverted their energies away from production of the shrewdly crafted pictures that once made the industry powerful. There isn't, for example, much range or innovation in the movies. There is only a handful of salable subjects-natural disasters, aliens, dinosaurs, ghosts, monsters, or any combination thereof. All the subjects easily parlayed into theme-park environments, action figures, video games, and clothing lines. Similarly, since Jaws twenty years ago, there's been a very short list of acceptable settings. The 1998 Academy Award nominations for best picture all went to films set in Elizabethan times or during World War II. A few years ago it looked as though Pulp Fiction and other independent films were going to save showbiz. Now independent producers like Miramax and New Line have been acquired by conglomerates. Who and what will resurrect Hollywood? Peter Bart has the answers.

Library of America offers the most complete collection ever published of Nathanael West's writings. Along with the four novels for which he is famous, this authoritative collection gathers stories, poetry, essays and plays, film scripts and treatments, and letters. In the Dada-inspired The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), he freely mixes high-flown literary and religious allusions with erotic and scatological humor. Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) presents, in a series of grotesque, starkly etched episodes, the spiritual breakdown of a newspaper columnist overwhelmed by his readers’ suffering. By contrast, A Cool Million (1934) reduces the eternal optimism of Horatio Alger’s novels to a brutal, cartoonish farce. In his last work, The Day of the Locust (1939), West renders with hallucinatory precision the reverse side of the Hollywood dream, as he choreographs a cast of failures, has-beens, and deluded glamour-seekers in what becomes an apocalyptic dance of death. Also included is a generous sampling of West’s other surviving work, ranging from freewheeling improvisations and grotesque comic tales to more mainstream work written with Hollywood or Broadway in mind, and including his anti-war satire Good Hunting and his adaptation of Francis Ile’s famous crime novel Before the Fact. The uncollected West shows him as a writer who embodied the contradictions and crazy-quilt exuberance of American culture—and raises the question of how he might have developed had his career not been cut short. Selected correspondence with William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Malcolm Cowley, Bennett Cerf, and others rounds out the volume and sets West’s literary life in fuller context. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

In the spring of 1937, Brooklyn’s Daniel Fuchs, twenty-seven years old and already the author of three remarkable novels (now collected as The Brooklyn Novels), came to Hollywood to bang out a treatment of one of his short stories. His thirteen-week contract turned into a permanent residence―and a lifelong love affair with the movie business. Fuchs worked with the best: Warner and M-G-M and RKO, Wilder and Huston and Joe Pasternak, Raft and Cagney and Doris Day. He spent his days crafting screenplays, but off the lot he continued to write prose, mainly stories for Collier’s and The New Yorker and non-fiction “Letters from Hollywood” for Commentary. The Golden West collects, for the first time, the best of Fuch’s writings about studio life, from a novice screenwriter’s anxious first impressions to a fifty-year veteran’s mellow memoirs. Fuchs may have loved Hollywood, but he saw life as it is, gold and tinsel both, and described it without falling into easy sentiment or condescending laughter.