Hollywood Boulevard. Een Eeuw Filmsterren, Steven de Foer (ISBN 9789463101516, Uitgeverij Polis)

This book came out in 2016 and I bought it after reading a review in the paper De Standaard. The author is a journalist that worked and wrote for De Standaard covering among other things American politics for quite a while. He is also a film enthusiast and he wrote numerous movie reviews for De Standaard as well. This book is his own short history of American movies based on his selection of the most important movie stars, starting with Charlie Chaplin and ending with Leonardo DiCaprio. The book is split chronologically in a number of sections, each representing an ‘era’ in the movie history, like silent movies, early big studio movies, the method acting school and so on. Although your own personal favourite star may well not be included in the book, it is already almost 600 pages thick, the stars included in the book do give a good overview of many of the most important movies. Each chapter covers a movie star and it includes a mini biography, why the actor was important in the history of film and acting and what their most important were according to the author. It is light reading and almost unavoidably, with movie celebrities, the biographies contain quite a bit of gossip. Some of it is relevant to show how stardom arose and evolved but some of it is superfluous in my opinion. What I didn’t like too much is the tendency of the author to mention his own encounters/interviews with a number of the stars in the book. Worse I found his snobbish tone about what a good movie and actor is supposed to be and some of the comments he makes about various actresses. I do not need to know which actress from past and present attracted the author’s sexual fancy. Even though the bulk of the book was good reading, these negative points lead to an overall negative impression and I have in mind to get rid of this book to make room on my shelves for new additions.