One of the wonderful things about owning a Kindle is that it is easy to download and read a book that you might have put off for awhile until the stack of books on the nightstand receded a bit.

One such book is Larry McMurtry‘s latest, Hollywood: A Third Memoir (Simon & Schuster 2010). McMurtry has been writing screenplays for Hollywood now for the better part of 50 years, so he has a wealth of anecdotes to pass along about the movie industry.

And somewhat surprisingly, McMurtry passes along keen insight into the business of how movies are conceived, made and sometimes not made.

For example, after the success of the 1971 film Last Picture Show, which was based on McMurtry’s novel of the same name, McMurtry observed the following about the Academy Award-winning stars of that movie, Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson:

Ironically, but not surprisingly, when Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman won Oscars for their performances, they decided that, by God, they were stars, and acted like stars from then on.

The first thing they did, as stars in their own heads, was price themselves out of the market, which, Oscars or not, assessed them rather more modestly than they assessed themselves.

Refreshingly, despite his obvious affection for Tinseltown, McMurtry candidly admits that he was drawn to it by the money. As he observes:

Money trumped talent, and, in the movie business, that is usually the case.

He even learned how to be a cost-effective screenwriter:

[T]he fact that I came from a generation of cattlemen gave me a slight edge – I learned not to have scenes in my Westerns that would be prohibitively expensive.

One way to achieve that was to reduce the number of animals to the lowest possible figure. Animals are well protected on movie sets, and are very expensive to use. I think they used three sets of the famous pigs in Lonesome Dove, pigs who in the narrative walk all the way from Texas to Montana only to get eaten.

Finally, on the age-old issue of whether a movie is art or a profit center:

[B]ut any thinking based on the conviction that one movie is art and another not is purely speculative. Only time will answer that question.

If you enjoy good writing, insightful observations and Hollywood, then pick up Hollywood: A Third Memoir. You will not be disappointed.