"While early Hollywood worked tirelessly to burnish its public image in the wake of celebrity scandal, several industry insiders turned to fiction as a vehicle to expose the backstage reality of the so-called dream factory. The Last Word argues that the Hollywood novel opened up space for cultural critique of the film industry at a time when the industry lacked the capacity to critique itself. Through the decades of the studio system, these novels sought to expose the invisible machinery of classical Hollywood cinema, including not only the evolving artifice of the screen but also the promotional discourse that complemented it. If the Hollywood novel provided a perspective on film culture unavailable in other outlets throughout the 1920s and 1930s, its relevance gradually declined in the 1940s and 1950s as filmmakers developed the resources necessary to expose the dark side of Hollywood on screen. As a result, in its ongoing quest to deliver the unfilmable, the Hollywood novel by the 1960s devolved into a toothless genre that offered readers little more than erotic fantasy of movie stars behind closed doors. Still, in their unique ability to speak beyond the institutional restraints of their time, these texts offer a window into Hollywood's dynamic creation and re-creation of itself in the public imagination"--