From a film critic who has set a standard for depth, poetry, and audacity comes a bravura collection of essays. David Thomson's subject is Hollywood's ghosts, and their tendency to rise from the grave - or descend from the screen - and intimately haunt American lives. Thomson conjures up Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo, Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, and Cary Grant in any of the pictures where he makes every scene look like a lucky accident. With equal aplomb, he imagines a James Dean who survived the car crash and a post-Saturday Night Fever Tony Manero. We learn the "20 Things People Like to Forget About Hollywood" (Number 3: "You Are Their Playthings, Not the Other Way Around"). And on every page of Beneath Mulholland, we are entertained and enlarged by a book as savvy as any Hollywood reportage and as lyrical as the best fiction. | Beneath Mulholland by David Thomson, Paperback | Indigo Chapters