McMurtry has been to Hollywood and back—here he takes a funny and penetrating look at the movie industry and uncovers the truth about the moguls, fads, flops and box-office busters.

A noted screenwriter himself, Pulitzer Prize-winner Larry McMurtry knows his Hollywood. In “Film Flam, ” he takes a funny, original, and penetrating look at the movie industry and gives us the truth about the moguls, fads, flops, and box-office hits.

With successful movies and television miniseries made from several of his novels — “Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show, Lonesome Dove, ” and “Hud” — McMurtry writes with an outsider's irony of the industry and an insider's experience. In these essays he illuminates the plight of the screenwriter, cuts a clean, often hilarious path through the excesses of film reviewing, and takes on some of the worst trends in the industry: the decline of the Western, the disappearance of love in the movies, and the quality of the stars themselves.

From his recollections of the day Hollywood entered McMurtry's own life as he ate meat loaf in Fort Worth to the pleasures he found in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, “Film Flam” is one of the best books ever written about Hollywood.

Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-nine novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Lonesome Dove.” His other works include two collections of essays, three memoirs, and more than thirty screenplays, including the coauthorship of “Brokeback Mountain,” for which he received an Academy Award. He lives in Archer City, Texas.