Audiobook4 hours
Hollywood: A Third Memoir
Written by Larry McMurtry
Narrated by Henry Strozier
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry follows up Books and Literary Life with this final installment in his memoir trilogy. Tinged with his wry humor and Texas swagger, Hollywood is McMurtry's anecdote-filled take on Tinseltown from the year his Horseman, Pass By was adapted into Hud (1963) to the year he wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-winning Brokeback Mountain (2005).
Author
Larry McMurtry
Larry McMurtry (1936–2021) was the author of twenty-nine novels, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lonesome Dove, three memoirs, two collections of essays, and more than thirty screenplays. He lived in Archer City, Texas.
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Reviews for Hollywood
Rating: 3.515624984375 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
32 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Need many more McMurtry audio books. Good reader on this. Thanks
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is not so much a memoir as it is anecdotes from McMurtry's movie experiences. They do not move smoothly from one story to another but jump around as thoughts do, and often result in something of a tangle. Still interesting reading and at 146 pages with some "chapters" being a page or even less, it can be read in an evening or two.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I had to chuckle very often during the reading. It's an autobiography where he tells his life as a scriptwriter. It's more a kind of byline which brought him some necessary money to do his writing and especially bookselling. He tells with whom he was writing, about producer and the film industry, about sripts which lay around for years until the were used for a film or never had got a green light to be produced and about how fast he was/is writing his own novels.I had to chuckle very often during the reading. It's an autobiography where he tells his life as a scriptwriter. It's more a kind of byline which brought him some necessary money to do his writing and especially bookselling. He tells with whom he was writing, about producer and the film industry, about sripts which lay around for years until the were used for a film or never had got a green light to be produced and about how fast he was/is writing his own novels.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Larry McMurtry has written more memoirs than most people have written letters home. I have just finished reading "Hollywood" (2010), the third of his literary memoirs, but he has written at least two other books, "Paradise" and "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen," that might be termed memoirs, as well. As sketchy as these books are, the 77-year-old writer may still have a few more memoirs left to write.In "Hollywood," his recollections of his many years as a scriptwriter, McMurtry makes the surprising, at least to me, comment that he works "harder at screenwriting than I do at fiction -- fiction comes to me easily, and scripts don't. I have to work at them; they're a craft I've only partly mastered -- the character part." Much of McMurtry's fiction, like his memoirs, has an easy-going style, as if it were just poured onto a page. Even so, I would have thought any serious novel would be more difficult to write than any screenplay. True, scripts are often written by committee, with the director getting the final say about what actually goes into the movie, which must be frustrating for any scriptwriter. But this doesn't appear to be what McMurtry is talking about.Elsewhere in the book he recalls that after a heart attack in the 1990s, "I could write fiction, which doesn't really require a clear mind: it's a semivisceral experience ... No one can write screenplays in this trancelike state." Fiction doesn't require a clear mind? That seems revealing. I would love to hear other novelists comment on this observation.McMurtry says he's grateful to Hollywood because "it's essentially financed my fiction, my rare book business, and, to a huge degree, my adult life." Besides, he confesses, he just loves Hollywood and numbers actress Diane Keaton among his best friends. He hates movie sets, however, and makes a point to avoid them. Speaking of directors, he writes, "the kindest thing an author can do is stay out of the way and not slow them down."Another surprising thing in McMurtry's memoir is that he believes "Loop Group" a much better novel than "Lonesome Dove." I've read his Hollywood novel "Loop Group," and I enjoyed it, but it seemed slight to me, again as if it were written on the run, while I consider "Lonesome Dove" a masterpiece of western fiction. Most readers and not a few critics seem to feel the same way. It did win the Pulitzer Prize in 1985, while "Loop Group" went largely ignored. McMurtry could be right, however. I would love to read both of those novels again.