BROOKINGS, Ore., July 12, 2005 (PRIMEZONE) -- Through the pages of Michael Hollister's new novel, Follywood (now available through AuthorHouse), stroll the likes of Bogart, Bacall, Huston and Wyler. It is a fictionalized account of the heyday of Tinseltown: Hollywood in the 1940s and '50s, with a deep focus on directors, writers and movie industry politics.
Ryan Eisley, a 20th Century Fox director, and his wife, Sarah, make independent films adapting American classics. As Sarah tries to overcome Ryan's infidelities with scripts and actresses, they become involved in the Blacklist nightmare.
"Their lives, interwoven with their films, dramatize the dominant moral and aesthetic conflicts in Hollywood," says Hollister. Their first collaboration is a true story of heroism by black tank commanders in WWII, starring Woody Strode. Then Ryan and Sarah scandalize the nation with Women in Hemingway starring John Huston, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn influence them while making Blithedale, Orson Welles takes over their Pierre and Stalin courts Judy Garland in Flowering Judas.
The Eisleys are caught in the crossfire between moviemakers in Hollywood and movers and shakers in Washington, D.C. Their work is boycotted around the country, and they could lose their home to the panic that precipitates the "Red Scare" hearings. As the Cold War heats up, Sarah must contend with the communist forces at work within the Screenwriters' Guild while Ryan fights conservatives who are bent on imposing a blacklist upon the Directors' Guild. Like the nation, their marriage is threatened by disloyalty and the prospect of nuclear war. Sarah meets challenges as a mother, a woman screenwriter trying to adapt faithfully and the wife of an unfaithful director.
In the end, the Eisleys work together as a creative team to blend high art with popular culture and produce films that reveal their own lives along with world history.
Hollister was born in Los Angeles, where his father worked in the movie business. As a boy, the author lived on a ranch in the San Fernando Valley with neighbors including Clark Gable, John Huston and Andy Devine. He served in the U.S. Army, graduated from the University of Oregon and taught fiction writing at Stanford University while earning a Ph.D. The father of three children, Hollister lives with his wife, Judy, in Brookings, Ore. Follywood is the second novel in a trilogy that also includes Holywood (2004) and Hollyworld, which is set for publication in 2006.
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