City of Nets

A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940's

By: Otto Friedrich, Glen David Gold - foreword

Narrated by: P.J. Ochlan

In 1939, 50 million Americans went to the movies every week, Louis B. Mayer was the highest-paid man in the country, and Hollywood produced 530 feature films a year. One decade and five thousand movies later, the studios were faltering. The 1940s became the decade of Hollywood's decline: anticommunist hysteria excommunicated some of its best talent, while a 1948 antitrust consent decree ended many of the business practices that had made the studio system so profitable.

In this masterful work of cultural history, the legendary Otto Friedrich tells the story of Hollywood's heyday and decline in a vivid narrative featuring an all-star cast of the actors, writers, musicians, composers, producers, directors, racketeers, labor leaders, journalists, and politicians who played major parts in the movie capital during the turbulent decade from World War II to the Korean War.

Friedrich draws on sources from celebrity biographies to trade-union history, mingling lively gossip with analysis of Hollywood's seedier business dealings and telling the stories of legendary movies such as Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, and All About Eve.

©1986 Otto Friedrich; Foreword copyright by Glen David Gold (P)2021 Tantor

The history of old Hollywood is always fascinating!

I loved the stories about various Movie Stars, their lives, careers, marriages, movies they were in, as well as all the little side notes, overall a very enjoyable book!

Entertaining book AWFUL NARRATOR!

Loved this book when I was reading it on my own but the narrator on this audiobook read this interesting and often humorous book like it was the most dull writing he had ever read!

Difficult to listen to

I have loved this book since I first read it in hard cover. Friedrich's unique storytelling and marvelous anecdotes are a joy to read; especially about the refugees like Brecht and Lorre.
But my GAWD. The narrator is loud, brassy, yet flat and emotionless. The humor is lost, the jokes heavy- handed and unpleasant. In a word, yuck.

Some Deep Dives into Hollywood People and Events

There’s one bad mistake in the telling of the demise of a star of of the twenties and it makes me wonder what else the author got wrong

Disjointed and flawed

A rather entertaining book but the style made it hard to follow. I was surprised at the inaccuracies that were presented as fact. These were so prevalent that it made me doubt the validity of the rest of what the author presented. It just felt more like you were listening to gossip told by someone who heard it from their cousin's sister's boyfriend.