Hollywood Days, Hollywood Nights: The Diary of a Mad Screenwriter

Rating:
Summary: I kid you not - the best book ever on Hollywood.
Review: Before Ben Stein because the famous voice or commercial pitchman or game show host, he struggled around the fringes of the film business. Because, in addition to being lured out to Hollywood by Norman Lear (All in the Family, Maude, The Jeffersons, for those of you too young to remember), he graduated at the top of his class at Yale Law School, was a speechwriter for Richard Nixon, worked as a lawyer for the FTC, and is the son of well-known economist Herbert Stein (also an excellent writer), Stein's diaries about life in Hollywood are not the usual fare. The book is hilarious, informative, and also tells - back when it really happened without the perspective of later history - the story about how Ben Stein was "discovered" by Hollywood. It was purely by accident that he got his break in Ferris Buehler's Day Off, but those accidents are part of the fabic of Hollywood. Stein does a wonderful job putting it all in perspective.