Lulu In Hollywood: Expanded Edition

by Louise Brooks

Overview

The collected writings of this icon of the silent era, in a new, more complete edition.

Louise Brooks (1906-1985) is one of the most famous actresses of the silent era, renowned as much for her rebellion against the Hollywood system as for her performances in such influential films as Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl. These are eight autobiographical essays by Brooks, on topics ranging from her childhood in Kansas and her early days as a Denishawn and Ziegfeld Follies dancer to her friendships with Martha Graham, Charles Chaplin, W. C. Fields, Humphrey Bogart, William Paley, G. W. Pabst, and others. New to this edition is the revelatory "Why I Will Never Write My Memoirs" by Brooks and "The Girl in the Black Helmet" by Kenneth Tynan, which brought about the revival of interest in her work and was the best discussion of Brooks’s film work to appear in her lifetime.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816637317
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	07/05/2000
Edition description:	First edition
Pages:	168
Sales rank:	217,065
Product dimensions:	7.50(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Louise Brooks (1906-1985) is one of the most famous actresses of the silent era, renowned as much for her rebellion against the Hollywood system as for her performances in such influential films as Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl.

Editorial Reviews

These eight essays are selective, nostalgic, poison-tipped and fearlessly smart. They're sharp about Hollywood's definitions of success and failure, about how actors are manipulated by their employers and pigeonholed by the press…This book is as idiosyncratic and magnetic as its author.
—Janet Maslin

The New York Times

A tart, fleet, gossipy book, a whip-flicking display of wit and spite. . . . In Lulu in Hollywood, Brooks writes about her contemporaries with a darting precision and down-to-earth compassion that make the mythologizing of most movie commentators sound like so much hot wheeze. . . . Louise Brooks emerges not as a white goddess wreathed in incense, but as a sassy companion, wisecracking, knowledgeable, completely free of cant and coy sentiment.
— Esquire

James Wolcott

Because the book sustains a high level of insight and giddy entertainment value, Lulu in Hollywood is one of the most painlessly useful books in years. It is also an exhilarating display of the sort of diamond-hard prose whose beauty is inseparable from its precision.

Film Comment

Louise Brooks is a woman of ideas. Her writings‹and this, for an actor, is really extraordinary‹are about something more than just herself. She has ideas about Hollywood, she has ideas about life, and she does not necessarily confuse the two. . . . If Brooks has an Achilles heel, it is her own intelligence: she tends to attribute to others as much self-awareness and analytical power as she has herself.

Sight and Sound