Fourteen inches by 11, and weighing six pounds 13 ounces, David O. Selznick's Hollywood is less a coffee-table book than a coffee table without legs. Its credits ape a blockbuster movie's: 'Executive Producer: Robert Gottlieb - Associate Producer: Martha Kaplan', etc; and its first page opens like cinema curtains on a wider-than-Panavision main title modelled on Gone with the Wind. A good half of the book is pictorial - playbills, posters, designers' sketches, views of Hollywood, facsimiles of memoranda and old newspapers, publicity stills and frame enlargements, pages of shots from David Selznick films. All it lacks is a disc in the binding with a score by Dimitri Tiomkin.

LRB 3 September 1981 | PDF Download