Beneath Mulholland

This collection of essays on Hollywood films explores a sort of twilight zone in which film actors and the characters they play become part of our reality - as living beings and as ghosts, residing on or buried beneath Mulholland Drive, and wandering among us.

Thomson writes about James Stewart in "Vertigo", Jack Nicholson in "Chinatown", Cary Grant, and Greta Garbo.

He imagines what Tony Manero, as played by John Travolta in "Saturday Night Fever", might have become in real life, and what James Dean's career might have been like had he survived. And he examines Hollywood's preoccupation with love, sex, death, money and glory.