BOOKS

9780679735939-Children-of-Light

Curator Reviews

Jon Robin Baitz

Stone captures a Los Angeles where dissipation was still a passion as powerful as lust for money, wherein a dissolute, sodden and spiraling screenwriter on the way down starts on a journey to a film set in Baja California where his screenplay of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is being shot, starring his great love, another crazy madwoman, Lu-Ann Verger, cousin to Nicole Diver of Tender is the Night is trying to hide the hallucinations that have come with not taking her meds in order to be ‘present’ for the camera, so her eyes are ‘there’. The reunion is a perfect admixture of chaos, debasement, and a race to oblivion for both of them, to the dismay of everyone watching; director, producer, husbands, wives, supplicants, stuntmen, crews, etc. It is a brutal and hilarious book, a picture of all the dreams that go wrong when the dreams all come true and look nothing like the George Hurrell glamor shots that stand in for truth in show biz.

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