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Ava Barry was a script reader for Bold Films and Intrigue Entertainment, and an editorial assistant for Zoetrope: All-Story, Francis Ford Coppola's literary magazine. Windhall is her first novel. She lives in Australia.
Ava Barry's website
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You've lived in Australia for several years. Was it a challenge to write about Hollywood, both old and contemporary, from such a distance?
I'm actually a native Californian who lived in Los Angeles for three years after college in Santa Cruz. On my days off I would drive around and visit all these famous sites: the Witch House in Beverly Hills, filming locations for Chinatown, Westwood Memorial Park where Marilyn Monroe's crypt is. I'm obsessed with both present-day Los Angeles and the city's rich history.
What is it about the golden age of Hollywood that grabbed you to begin with?
It contained the perfect balance of incredibly talented people and a limited amount of authority or oversight. Even in the '40s, Hollywood was still considered by some to be the Wild West. Adventure and new frontiers have always appealed to me, and Los Angeles in its infancy was kind of the last American frontier. It grew to become this chaotic adult playground. The craziest story I read is probably the one about the corpse of John Barrymore: director Raoul Walsh borrowed his friend's dead body from a funeral home and took it to Errol Flynn's as a prank. Events like that were the norm. There was a haunting element to many of the stars' lives, which...
Howard Blum is the author of, the national bestsellers Wanted!, The Gold of Exodus, and Gangland. Currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, Blum was also a reporter at the New York Times, where he won numerous ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Windhall
Try:
American Lightning
by Howard Blum
Agatha Christie is the most widely published author of all time, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Her books have sold more than a billion copies in English and another billion in a hundred foreign languages. She ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Windhall
Try:
And Then There Were None
by Agatha Christie
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