The 10 Best Stories or Novels About Cinema

"Considering how many writers have lived off or close to filmmaking, the quantity of high-quality fictional writing about the film industry isn't overwhelming. The most obvious reason may be that many of the aforesaid writers had bad experiences, ranging from failing to earn what they hoped, to seeing their efforts discarded or mangled. So the embittered or phlegmatic scriptwriter is a stock figure of 20th-century literary biography, from Faulkner and Fitzgerald to Elmore Leonard. Most of the fiction on this list is by writers who already had firsthand experience, or would later be drawn into the cinema. In general I've tried to keep Europeans in the picture in a genre dominated by Americans, also to avoid mere cynicism (as in Budd Schulberg's "What Makes Sammy Run?" and Evelyn Waugh's "Vile Bodies"), preferring instead stories that reach into the mystery of why movies are so compelling, considering how unrewarding and tedious their making can be." —Ian Christie, 10 Bad Dates w/De Niro