Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood

by Larry McMurtry

In this slim volume of essays, novelist/screenwriter McMurtry offers his refreshing views on movies, both junk (yea) and art (nay), Hollywood and its populace, the process of filmmaking, the power of money, film audiences, and critics. His experiences and thoughts on screenwriting, adapting novels, adapting one's own novels (a bad idea), and on the craft itself contain more useful information than a pile of how-to manuals.

As in his novels, McMurtry is by turns witty, acerbic, and thoughtful; the pieces are surprisingly stylish in that the bulk of them (17 out of 21) were spun off on monthly deadlines (for American Film magazine, in 1975-77), and McMurtry admittedly can't remember writing most of them. A fine collection, from a fine writer.

No Clue: Or Learning to Write for the Movies. --
The Hired Pen. --
The Deadline Syndrome. --
The Telephone Booth Screenwriter. --
The Fun of It All. --
All the President's Men, Seven Beauties, History, Innocence, Guilt, Redemption, and the Star System. --
The Screenplay as Non-Book: A Consideration. --
Pencils West: Or a Theory for the Shoot-'Em Up. --
"Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" and the Movie-Less Novelists. --
O Ragged Time Knit Up Thy Ravell'd Sleave. --
The Situation in Criticism: Reviewers, Critics, Professors. --
Character, the Tube, and the Death of Movies. --
The Disappearance of Love. --
Woody Allen, Keith Carradine, Lily Tomlin, and the Disappearance of Grace. --
The Last Picture Shows. --
The Seasons of L.A.. --
The Last Movie Column. --
The Last Picture Show: A Last Word. --
Approaching Cheyenne ... Leaving Lumet. Oh, Pshaw!. --
Movie-Tripping: My Own Rotten Film Festival. --
A Walk in Pasadena with Di-Annie and Mary Alice

Genres: Essays, Film, Nonfiction, Biography, History, Westerns, Short Stories

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Larry Jeff McMurtry was an American novelist, essayist, and screenwriter whose work was predominantly set in either the Old West or contemporary Texas. His novels included Horseman, Pass By (1962), The Last Picture Show (1966), and Terms of Endearment (1975), which were adapted into films. Films adapted from McMurtry's works earned 34 Oscar nominations (13 wins). He was also a prominent book collector and bookseller.
His 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove was adapted into a television miniseries that earned 18 Emmy Award nominations (seven wins). The subsequent three novels in his Lonesome Dove series were adapted as three more miniseries, earning eight more Emmy nominations. McMurtry and co-writer Diana Ossana adapted the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain (2005), which earned eight Academy Award nominations with three wins, including McMurtry and Ossana for Best Adapted Screenplay. In 2014, McMurtry received the National Humanities Medal.
In Tracy Daugherty's 2023 biography of McMurtry, the biographer quotes critic Dave Hickey as saying about McMurtry: "Larry is a writer, and it's kind of like being a critter. If you leave a cow alone, he'll eat grass. If you leave Larry alone, he'll write books. When he's in public, he may say hello and goodbye, but otherwise he is just resting, getting ready to go write."

Reviews

[Peter Tillman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd have sworn I'd written something about this one . . . Oh, wait, that was his SECOND book of Hollywood essays! Well, this one's just as good, and I'm due to re-read it. [looks in library catalog] OK, it's on it's way, from Santa Maria! Don't you love online library catalogs? I'm old enough to remember the physical card catalogs of 3x5 cards, which did the job, but were tedious. Then came the microfilm catalogs . . .

Currently rereading, Jan 2023. So far, as good as I recalled.
Well. Here in mid-Feb, the reread is not, let us say, *gripping*. Though individual essays are brilliant. The one about making a movie of "Ragtime"! "Big money has a way of convincing people they deserve it" !! Truer words were never written, as we are learning once again from the follies of Elon Musk and other foolish billionaires . . .

Update 3/22/23: I just tried and skimmed 3 more essays. I guess I'm just not that much of a movie guy, to read these twice. Not sure if I will continue . . . But it won't be a 5-star re-read!
DNF re-read. Still out, but I will return my library copy.

[Tyler McGaughey · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you take him at his word, Larry McMurtry once witnessed the accidental suicide (Russian roulette!) of a fellow patron in a grindhouse theater, and stayed to watch the rest of the movie. He then follows that essay with a puff piece about taking a walk with Diane Keaton and her grandma. Absolute freak/legend.

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

McMurtry's essays, largely from the seventies, reflect Hollywood during what's thought of as one of its most exciting eras. But the essays remind us that it was still an era of transition - where the studios were still flailing away, trying to find what the audience wanted, willing to give control to directors in hopes of stumbling on the formula. At the same time, he laments the death of small town movie houses with second run fare, and the rise of 70s porn in taking over those old theaters. It's a reminder of what Jaws, Star Wars and the blockbusters did not just for films, but for the places they are shown. Most people now go to multi-screen theaters, even in small towns.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent collection of Mr. McMurtry's experiences in Hollywood - both good and bad. He's actually had pretty good luck with the films made from his terrific novels - Horseman Pass By into the film HUD, the excellent adaptations of LAST PICTURE SHOW, TERMS OF ENDEARMENT, LONESOME DOVE, etc. Mr. McMurtry is a great writer & I enjoy his non-fiction & memoirs just as much as I do his novels.

[Jackson rabbit Warrener · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good one Larry!

[Rickeclectic · Rating 2 out of 5]

Larry McMurtry essays on film. He has a good pedigree to talk about it, since he has many years as a writer and as a screenwriter. He has some good things to say about the craft of screenwriting. The book was from 1987. The essays start well and gradually peter out. He even has an essay near the end which is called The Last Movie Column and pretty much says he is tired of writing about film. Then we get several more essays.

Nonetheless, here are a few gems from the earlier essays (and remember this is 1987):

"An industry that seems to have concluded that its best hope is to dramatize the comic-strip literature of an earlier and more vigorous era is one whose fevers have finally destroyed its nerve."

"I believe to this day, that the creation of accurately motivated characters is apt to be the most important contribution a novelist-screenwriter can make to a movie script."

"By and large Hollywood is a town with a good sense of humor. Everyone jokes about sex, and a few of the more rebellious types joke about fame, but noone I know in Hollywood ever jokes about money."

"... The Last Picture Show was exactly the kind of book from which good movies are made -- that is, a flatly written book with strong characterizations and a sense of period and place."

"...working in Hollywood is like working in a city filled with immensely attractive children .. who .. also have the attention span of two year olds."

"The screenplay is only secondarily a written thing; it is an elaborate notation... a kind of codified visualization."

"...in our time TV has replaced the oral tradition, upon which, for so long, the transmission of myth depended."

"I would hate to see popularity pushed too far as a criterion for significance."

"Obviously, where art has it over life is in the matter of editing."

These are good nuggets, from the highly readable first half of the book.

[Jess Lessa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fascinating view of Hollywood and screenwriting. Sometimes depressing, sometimes sad, but entertaining enough for me to read it cover to cover.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of columns and essays printed in the 70's and early 80's. Insightful at the time, both prophetic and nostalgic now.

[Jade Dove · Rating 4 out of 5]

Larry McMurtry was many things. Novelist, essayist, critic, cultural observer, bookseller, avid reader, professor, and a screenwriter. And its his experiences as both a screenwriter and an avid moviegoer that color these short essays on Hollywood, cinema as storytelling, and his own adventures in working in movies.
Being an outsider in both circumstances and personality to Tinseltown’s narcissistic, fast-paced self-aggrandizement, he offers some witty and astute observations on the state of movies, directors, actors, audiences, and the relationship between film and the novel, as well as some well thought-out observations on the type of roles various actors or movies have taken on in culture.
These essays were written as columns for American Film in the 70s, so they are dated in some ways, but relevant still in others. I was especially interested in his takes not only on popular and forgotten movies from that era (anyone remember movies like Latitude Zero?) but on his notes on the fading of moviehouses across more rural areas across the U.S. and the waning days of little cinemas and the drive-in, once cultural staples in the time when going to the movies was a treat everyone got to do even in tiny little towns in rural Nebraska, Texas, Iowa, and Kansas, before theaters made their way into the multiplexes in urban areas they are now. Spooky how his own novel The Last Picture Show—itself turned into a movie—seemed prophetic.
Overall, I really enjoyed this one. Much as I love McMurtry’s fiction, it’s his nonfiction that I’ve read most of and which lingers most in my mind long after I finish reading.

[Justin Jayne · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5.

Wanted to like this more than I did. What started as an interesting perspective on breaking into Hollywood before it was New Hollywood quickly devolved to "Larry giving very long, cynical, meandering, detailed opinions or reviews of very specific things/movies that were prominent 60 years ago."

There's some gold in here, don't get me wrong. I kept a highlighter close by for much of the book. But I just didn't end up finding it as useful or informative as initially expected, and kinda couldn't wait for it to be over by the final few chapters.

[Beelzefuzz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this at first and found it an interesting snapshot of its time(s), but it soon got repetitive and started to reveal its underlying "old man yells at cloud" nature.

[Keith B · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not his best collection of essays.

[Vel Veeter]

Because I read Hollywood, this collection is only so good. He repeats himself here, or rather there, but I read that one first. One thing he does really well is talk about the nature of being a writer in Hollywood and how that has a kind of stepchild relationship to film. He himself states that the ideal situation would be for directors to write their own scripts. But I know from reading Sidney Lumet’s Hollywood memoir that not every director is an “artist” or that concerned about that kind of control. Lumet claims in his book that having scripts more or less ready-made allowed him to move faster and produce more. And the result is that sometimes the movies are great (12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, The Pawnbroker) and the rest are mostly just ok. He talks about making plenty of movies for the paycheck. I bring in Lumet because McMurtry references a couple of those films, these essays occupy about the same time period, and because McMurtry says that not only was Hollywood a paying for gig for him he also faced a lot of sentiment that writers should write for art and not worry about money. This coming from both producers who don’t want to pay that much and from writers who want to hegemonize the idea of writing. I also thought about Lumet because McMurtry spends one essay thinking through difficult novels to film. Most of McMurtry’s books are very filmable…he mostly writes in third-person, the writing is cinematic and spare, he uses conventions in plot from time to time, and the characters are well-realized and so easily filmed. He offers up EL Doctorow’s novel Ragtime as a novel that Doctorow was hired to adapt and who turned in a 350 page draft, about three times too long. He also mentions another Doctorow novel The Book of Daniel, about the orphaned son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, as a potentially unfilmable novel. Lumet DID make that movie, and it’s merely ok. All of this also because Sidney Lumet made a version of McMurtry’s second novel Leaving Cheyenne and McMurtry hated it.

Another interesting essay in this collection which I feel has connections to Netflix and Moviepass is about the emotional toll of watching a long list of bland and sentimental movies on one’s psyche. I thought it had a funny connection to how many schlocky mediocre films get watched now as a result of these services.

[Paul Parsons · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this only because I'm working my way through McMurtry. It was interesting to see the author's take on Hollywood and moviemaking 25 years ago. More interesting perhaps was his personal reactions to being swept into the Hollywood scene when some of his books were adapted to the big screen. McMurtry also lived through the time of television coming into competion with movie theaters. More of interest to history buffs than recreational readers.

[allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pretty swell collection of essays about screenwriting (in the first half of the book) and film in general (second half). The writing is smart and entertaining, and he's got an interesting vantage point--he manages to be both an insider and outsider in the movie biz. His honesty about the craft and business of writing was very comforting to me. I liked it!

[John Majors · Rating 2 out of 5]

Had to skim last quarter of the book. Became far too tedious. Only pick it up if you're a huge fan of films from the 70s.