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readingcities 's review for:
Call me late to the game, but I have been eating up Anne Helen Petersen’s “Scandals of Classic Hollywood” series over at The Hairpin. Petersen has a PhD in media studies, and recently left academia for a full-time writing gig at Buzzfeed (sadly discontinuing her Hairpin series, but luckily for us readers, still churning out great articles on media and celebrity culture.
She adapted and expanded her “classic Hollywood” series into a full-length book, which I read on a recent plane ride (along with Gavin Edwards’s Last Night at the Viper Room). Unless I’m misremembering, all of the chapters are based on pieces from the Hairpin series. The book version felt a little pared down and scanty, and I was disappointed that some of the lesser-known figures (like Pola Negri, Hedy Lamarr, Thedra Barra) were omitted. It seems like Petersen was encouraged to organize the book into thematic chapters, which is fine theoretically but came across as half baked and didactic. The writing style in the book is also much more conventional and straightforward than the chatty, conspiratorial tone of the online columns, which makes sense but also makes for drier reading. Overall, I found the online series to be richer than the book, both in content and style.
She adapted and expanded her “classic Hollywood” series into a full-length book, which I read on a recent plane ride (along with Gavin Edwards’s Last Night at the Viper Room). Unless I’m misremembering, all of the chapters are based on pieces from the Hairpin series. The book version felt a little pared down and scanty, and I was disappointed that some of the lesser-known figures (like Pola Negri, Hedy Lamarr, Thedra Barra) were omitted. It seems like Petersen was encouraged to organize the book into thematic chapters, which is fine theoretically but came across as half baked and didactic. The writing style in the book is also much more conventional and straightforward than the chatty, conspiratorial tone of the online columns, which makes sense but also makes for drier reading. Overall, I found the online series to be richer than the book, both in content and style.