"By illuminating a vast collection of characters, the noble + ignoble alike, Lewis revises standard industry narratives in important + suggestive ways, widening the scope of Hollywood history."
“You can tell a lot about a society by looking at its suicides. That off-handed comment from Emile Durkheim becomes the animating principle for Jon Lewis’s Hard-Boiled Hollywood, which studies, as the surrealists would have it, the “exquisite corpses” of those left behind by the collapse of the studio machine. . . . The writing in this book is, in the Surrealists’ terms, exquisite as well: a combination of penetrating analysis of the decline of the industry and jaunty, laconic, and funny description of the fish swimming in this infested sea.”
“The strength of Hard-Boiled Hollywood . . . is its detail. Lewis meticulously details each of the case studies he approaches, drawing from an impressive array of articles in trade journals and the popular press. Unearthing details that even those familiar with the era might have missed, Lewis affords us a portal into a Hollywood often overlooked.”
"This book is a fascinating on-location excursion down the mean streets of a metastasizing metropolis and the shuttered backlots of a sputtering studio system, an anthropological thick description of the gangsters, stars, hustlers, hookers, and hangers-on in the lonely place that is Hollywood."—Thomas Doherty, Professor of American Studies, Brandeis University
"Where previously Lewis focused most on top-level power plays and money grabs, he now trenchantly probes Hollywood's underworlds: grifters, gossip-mongers, and gangsters, loners and losers—bodies 'left by the side of the road.' A fascinating rewriting of Hollywood history, especially around production culture, including cultures of failure and despair." —Dana Polan, Cinema Studies, New York University
