Hollyworld

Book excerpt: Hollywood’s global influence from the 1960s to the present age of terrorism. The team of Sarah and Ryan Eisley film Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, then divorce, but stay in touch. Ryan directs studio pictures for Universal, takes up with a much younger actress, attends the Woodstock festival and turns countercultural in his Beverly Hills mansion. Inspired to film a documentary of the black civil rights, hippie and anti-Vietnam War movements, he encounters President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Manson gang. Their son Davin goes to Vietnam as a medic and their daughter Karen leaves her husband and disappears with her three kids. Living apart from Ryan in San Francisco, Sarah goes back to graduate school and tries to hold their family together while earning a doctorate at Berkeley. She becomes a film critic, then moves to Portland and becomes a teacher in the Hollyworld of higher education. The story of the Eisley family is interwoven with major films, including Billy Budd, Dr. Strangelove, The Graduate, Woodstock, Easy Rider, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters, Apocalypse Now, Reds, The Big Chill and The Player. The novel also exposes Communist propaganda movies such as Fail-Safe, The Way We Were, The Front and Coming Home. It deflates the show business Blacklist myth, satirizes political correctness and ridicules Marxist movie stars and professors. Third in trilogy including Holywood (2004) and Follywood (2005).