Zeroville
Books / Paperback
ISBN: 1933372397 / Publisher: Europa Editions, November 2007
Vikar becomes a film editor, the job he always wanted, but but the drugs, music, and sexuality, may be more than he can handle.
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A <i>Los Angeles Times</i>, <i>Washington Post</i>, and <i>Newsweek </i>Best Book of the Year<br><br>It is an August afternoon in 1969. A hippie "family" led by Charles Manson commits five savage murders in the canyons above L.A. The same day, a young, ex-communicated theology student walks Hollywood Boulevard, having just arrived in town with the images of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift tattooed on his shaved head. <br><br>At once childlike and violent, Vikar is not a cineaste but "cineautistic," sleeping in the Roosevelt Hotel where he is haunted by the ghost of D. W. Griffith. He has stepped into the vortex of a culture in upheaval: drugs that frighten him, a sexuality that consumes him, a music he doesn't understand. He's come to Hollywood to pursue his obsession with film, only to find a Hollywood that's as indifferent to film as it is to Vikar.<br><br>While the movies have appeared in a number of Steve Erickson's novels, from <i>Days Between Stations</i> to <i>The Sea Came in at Midnight</i>, they dominate <i>Zeroville</i> with the force of revelation. Over the decade of the seventies and into the eighties, as the old studios crumble before the onslaught of a new renegade generation, Vikar becomes an unlikely film editor, possessed of an astonishing artistic vision. Through his encounters with starlets, burglars, revolutionaries, escorts, punk musicians and veteran film-makers, he discovers the secret that lies in every motion picture ever made. Combining an epic scope with popular accessibility in the spirit of its subject, <i>Zeroville</i> is the ultimate novel about the Movies, and the way we don't dream them but rather they dream us.
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