Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood

In this slim volume of essays, novelist/screenwriter McMurtry offers his refreshing views on movies, both junk (yea) and art (nay), Hollywood and its populace, the process of filmmaking, the power of money, film audiences, and critics. His experiences and thoughts on screenwriting, adapting novels, adapting one’s own novels (a bad idea), and on the craft itself contain more useful information than a pile of how-to manuals.

As in his novels, McMurtry is by turns witty, acerbic, and thoughtful; the pieces are surprisingly stylish in that the bulk of them (17 out of 21) were spun off on monthly deadlines (for American Film magazine, in 1975-77), and McMurtry admittedly can’t remember writing most of them. A fine collection, from a fine writer.

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. —
Approaching Cheyenne … Leaving Lumet. Oh, Pshaw!. —
Movie-Tripping: My Own Rotten Film Festival. —
A Walk in Pasadena with Di-Annie and Mary Alice