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Larry McMurtry finds a happy ending in Hollywood

BY TIM RUTTEN

BY TIM RUTTEN

Los Angeles Times

"HOLLYWOOD: A THIRD MEMOIR"

By Larry McMurtry

Simon & Schuster

146 pages, $24

In 1941, the visionary German dramatist and poet Bertolt Brecht, newly arrived in Los Angeles, where he hoped to make his fortune as a screenwriter, wrote these lines:

Every morning, to earn my bread,

I go to the market, where lies are bought.

Hopefully

I join the ranks of the sellers.

"Hollywood: A Third Memoir" is the distinguished writer Larry McMurtry's delightfully episodic account of his long, profitable and generally rather enjoyable engagement with the movie industry -- or, to borrow Brecht's phrase, his time among the sellers. The subtitle notwithstanding -- and a writer this accomplished with a Pulitzer and an Oscar to his credit is entitled to call his work whatever he damn well pleases -- McMurtry's 44th book might better have been styled Hollywood sketches. It's less a fully realized third volume of his memoirs than it is a series of terrific vignettes, some less than a page in length. Whatever the form, we're reminded that fine American writing is always reliant on storytelling and that McMurtry stands among our best not only because of his uncanny ability to compress a cogent narrative arc, but also because his eye for the moving detail is infallible.

The standard-issue storyline of literary writers in Hollywood casts the industry as a kind of celluloid Moloch into whose flaming maw talent is cast for no better purpose than ritual sacrifice. Sift through the ashes and something more complex emerges. To start with, there's nothing unique about the way -- or, for that matter, the reasons -- Hollywood consumes writers. A financially distressed Henry James, after all, spent most of the 1890s churning out eminently forgettable but remunerative dramas for the stages of London's West End, which was to that era's theater what the industry is to today's cinema. More recently, the late film historian Tom Dardis has pointed out that William Faulkner survived the war years entirely on checks from Warner Bros.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, the prototype for all great writers ruined in Hollywood, was heavily in debt and living off of handouts from his agent and editor when he landed his first screenwriting contract in the 1930s.

McMurtry's engagement with the film business has been similarly profitable. The unexpected sale of his novel "Horseman, Pass By" -- made into the 1963 movie "Hud" -- brought him $10,000 in 1962, enough to escape teaching world literature to bored kids from the oil patch at Texas Christian University.

McMurtry's memoir is filled with glittering names, engaging anecdotes -- life how intimidating it is to be Barbra Streisand's doubles partner at tennis -- and shrewd observation.

His description of walking Hollywood Boulevard alone after winning the Oscar for "Brokeback Mountain" is the book's climax and highlight.