Book Review: How to Become a Celebrity by Charles Hopkins-Thyne

As the title suggests this "How to Become a Celebrity" a practical guide book that promises the reader to help him or her become a celebrity. The author seems to know the showbiz arena inside-out, and has a lot of advice to offer to the young people who are dreaming of making it big in the movie and music scene, and in the arts world in general.

“Anyone can be famous,” we read somewhere, but that doesn’t mean that anyone can be a celebrity. The celebrities, like it or not, seem to serve a purpose in our modern era: they feed our need for gossip, they make us bathe under their limelight and they kill our boredom. But how easy or how hard is it to become one yourself? The truth is that it’s very hard, but thanks to the author the reader gets to know all they have to do to make it happen.

Desire and persistence; these two are the basic elements that one should have in their character to achieve their goals. As we read Abraham Lincoln have fought hard and lost many battles in the process, in order to become the man that now everybody knows, and most people admire. What’s true for politics is also true for the showbiz. Don’t let the rejections and the stonewalling get you down, the author seems to suggest, and as Lincoln did, “Identify exactly what you are good at, exactly what your strengths are,” and work on them.

What makes this the useful book that it is though, is not only the author’s inside knowledge and wisdom, but also the appendix that provides the reader with dozens of names of organizations, links and addresses that can make a hopeful star’s first steps in the glittering world of showbiz much easier.

Thus, if you’re one of those people who dream big, then this is the book for you. Reading it will point you in the right direction; following the advice it offers will most likely lead you to your destination. This is a guide unlike any other out there.

Book Review: Play Him Again by Jeffrey Stone

Play Him Again by Jeffrey Stone is a novel that doubles as a crime story and a movie industry history.

The events take place in the late 1920’s in Los Angeles. The prohibition is in place and the bootleggers make tons of money by supplying booze to the people who can afford it. One of the aforementioned men is Matt Hudson, a street-wise guy, who does big business with the movie crowd and who dreams of shooting the first all-talking-picture ever.

Before doing that though he has to solve a murder. His oldest friend, and great conman, Danny Kincaid has been brutally tortured and killed. Who was it that killed him and why? Did Danny cross roads with someone too clever or powerful for him to handle?

Well, since the police decided to rule his death an accident, now it’s up to him to bring the perp or perps to justice, even though his chances of doing that seem to be quite slim. He has no clue what his friend was up to, he has a business to take care of, and he does have a dream to pursue and a woman to please. Quite the busy man, isn’t he?

Luck though will decide to give him a helping hand, so he’ll soon discover what the latest con his friend’s put into place was. And he’ll be devastated, since it was his idea that he used, and which had probably got him killed.

Now he has more than one reason to investigate the case, while at the same time he’ll have to deal with a local gangster who’s started stealing his booze supplies, and keep trying to convince some studio executives to give him the green light for his movie.

There are a lot of action scenes in this book, but one could also read it as a document of a whole era: the Hollywood in the 20’s, the fabric of a society in its high and lows, the prohibition that made some people rich and led others to death, the corruption inside the police force, the past of a future to be.

The author does a great job recreating that period in history and delivers to the reader a hero with many flaws, who tries hard to find a balance in a world where doing the right thing could land you into trouble. Hud’s psyche is a tortured one. People don’t get him, not the ones that matter the most anyway, and that makes him every now and again question himself and his own motives. He may be a bootlegger but he’s also a man with principles. He may be an honest man but he more often than not has to deal with crooks. He may cherish life but he may have to kill to survive.

Placing this novel under a particular genre is not such an easy thing to do. I can say one thing though: I really enjoyed reading it.