Pandaemonium1997
a novel
by Leslie Epstein
Pandaemonium is the definitive novel of Hollywood in its most glamorous era, a work that examines the very roots of film itself, and their hold upon the dark, underground forces of instinct and imagination. Narrated by the ever-wise, yet sexually tormented Peter Lorre, this book assembles a huge cast of Hollywood types - moguls, agents, directors, stars and starlets, writers, gossip columnists and mere hangers-on - who converge on Pandaemonium, a Nevada ghost town, on the eve of World War II.
There, they all fall under the spell of a great European film director named Rudolph Von Beckmann, whose secret plan is to turn a routine B western into an extraordinary film of Antigone, and so warn the world of the dictator who would destroy it. But in the heat of the desert and his own fevered...
