Black Sunset: Hollywood Sex, Lies, Glamour, Betrayal and Raging Egos
Clancy Sigal
(Author)
Description
This a hilarious memoir of Clancy Sigal's escapades as a young Hollywood agent on the Sunset Strip, peddling writers and actors in a blacklist-crazed "golden age" movie industry of the 1950s. Atom bomb tests light up the night sky, and everyone is either naming names or getting named in the McCarthy witch hunt. By day a fast-talking salesman, at night he's the point person of a small circle of anarchistic oddballs. He's dogged by two FBI agents who want to be set up with starlets and have a screen test. They trail him as he goes from studio to studio hustling clients like Humphrey Bogart, Donna Reed, Jack Palance, Peter Lorre and Stanwyck. Barred from a studio he brazenly uses a bolt cutter to break through the chainlink fence to make a deal. Black Sunset's riproaring ribald style belongs to a hardboiled school that includes Elmore Leonard and Raymond Chandler. He is one of the few remaining witnesses and reporters of this absurd and terrifying time.Product Details
Price
$17.95
Publisher
Soft Skull
Publish Date
December 13, 2016
Pages
352
Dimensions
5.9 X 8.9 X 1.0 inches | 0.85 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9781593766573
BISAC Categories:
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About the Author
Clancy Sigal was the child of a love affair between two labor organizers, Jennie Persily and Leo Sigal. Jennie, a single mother, raised Clancy on her own, with a mostly absent father. After an army stint he worked as an entertainment agent. Sigal arrived as an immigrant in Great Britain, where he met and commenced a four-year affair with the writer Doris Lessing. He lived in Los Angeles with his screenwriter wife, Janice Tidwell, until his death.
Reviews
Praise for Black Sunset "The beauty of Black Sunset, for most readers, will be found in the details, lovingly or painfully described, page after page . . . Clancy Sigal brings the innocent and guilty back, once more, at close range, and proves himself the liveliest of literary nonagenarians in the process." --Los Angeles Review of Books "Black Sunset moves with the express swagger of a Hawks or Wellman picture, although it feels like an Ozu once it's all over and the characters linger in silhouette as if they were a fixture of the freeway system at night." --Counterpunch "Black Sunset is, I can attest this time around, an autobiography: a funny, cynical, score-settling romp through blacklist-era Hollywood." --Bookforum
