In the century since it produced its first feature film, Hollywood has presented itself as the glamorous home to the beautiful and talented. But, since its very creation, there has been a dark side to Tinseltown.

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Right from the beginning the Dream Factory created a hothouse of excess – too much money, too much adulation, too much expectation and too much ego. Some actors would trade sex in the, often vain, hope of career advancement, mobsters muscled in on the unions and extorted the studios, whose heads kept suspiciously close ties to the police and the Press.

 

Meanwhile, it’s Tinseltown’s accountants who appear to be among Hollywood’s most creative people, managing to ensure that even the Star Wars films don’t show a profit.

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From the setting up of the studios by the movie moguls to the corporations that run them today, from drug addictions to McCarthy-era witch-hunts and on to the Mob, Dark History of Hollywood is the story of sex, murder and suicide, ambition and betrayal, and how money can make almost everyone compromise.

 

Intensively researched, fully illustrated and superbly entertaining, Kieron Connolly’s Dark History of Hollywood reveals that the stories behind the silver screen are at least as gripping as many of those on it.