A novel that takes us into the back room of glamorous Hollywood. A fiction about the fictional lives that parade down the red carpet. A close look at the wispy stars where everyone wanted to be reflected.
In this book Genius, the writer Patrick Dennis, closely linked to the cinema of the 50s and 60s, dismantles the farandulian myth and presents the lives of actors, directors, producers, screenwriters and other pleiades, turning them into a bunch of beings clinging to the fleeting brightness of the premieres and glory.
To laugh at everything, nothing better than starting with yourself. Patrick Dennis himself is represented in his novel with his own name and his role as a writer condemned to a creative jam. The great director Leander Starr, fled to Mexican lands to escape women and tax inspectors, recruits him to write the script for his brilliant new film.
As if it were Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, both characters move in a satire on the world of cinema. With its eccentricities and its weaknesses, with its vices and its megalomanias. The mythical world of the most splendid of the known Hollywoods makes landfall in this novel. But in a way it is for the better. Mythologizing is easy enough. Knowing the realities behind emblematic characters who occupy positions of honor in the popular imagination, lowers the matter a bit with soda.
Although in the end, getting to know miseries and baseness, laughing with the noise and madness of those actors during those years, ends up increasing the myth. It is something without a doubt curious, which has more to do with nostalgia for the past than with the harsh reality of the daily lives of the stars on the red carpet.
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