I never tire of watching High Noon. Unlike most films from the 1950’s, it seems to me clean, sleek. The tensions are perfectly paced, the music (and the classic song Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darlin’) lope along until they too escalate with the action. The intricate relationships of the characters play across the screen with understated grace and intensity.

You can see Trumbo at the Pickford–one night only–May 2nd at 6 PM. I will introduce the film and talk about its connections to my novel. Your ticket also entitles you to a glass of champagne in a nod to old Hollywood glamour. Hope to see you there.

You’ve written “The End.”  Bravo.  Celebrate! Buy champagne, dance in the streets! But inevitably after that glorious moment, you drag yourself to your desk, open a new folder called Version 2, or Revision, or New Draft. Whatever.  You’re thinking: oh shit, here we go again.

Cyrano de Bergerac—brilliant wit, exquisite poet, undefeated cavalier—is unredeemably ugly. His nose, a giant, disfiguring schnoz, renders him unfit to play the lover to any woman, much less the lovely Roxanne. She is in love with the handsome soldier, Christian. To help his tongue-tied rival win Roxanne’s love, Cyrano speaks his own words, immortal protestations of love. beneath her balcony. She believes Christian is speaking to her from his heart, and replies rapturously. The young couple elopes. Then it all goes to hell.

My many books have been dedicated to a few close friends and to supportive agents, but mostly to my sons, my sister, and my mother. THE GREAT PRETENDERS has a unique dedication.

Juicy, sometimes salacious, full of glamorous details or outrageous incidents, the memoir–with its whispered invitation, “This is true!”–far more than the novel, is the literary genre ideally suited to Hollywood.

Hollywood novels offer different fictional perspectives on that cocktail of hope and despair, sex and ambition that has always flourished amid the land of high stakes make-believe. The Great Pretenders follows in these classic footsteps.   

Some moments in American history are embedded forever in the national imagination, our collective memory.

“Writing a book, seeing it published, why that must be the most wonderful feeling in the whole world. To hold it in your hand, a book that began just as an idea in your imagination!” So says a character in a novel of mine that is still under construction. It’s not an...

Offscreen roles for women have changed over the years. In 1948 women made up some 25% of the writers in Hollywood. By 1974 that number had fallen to 14%.

Despite a longstanding love of film and the darkened theatre, I had never given much thought to the Hollywood blacklist until the 1999 Oscars when the Academy gave a special award to Elia Kazan, the legendary director – and cooperating witness to the House Committee on Un-American Activities.