The Diva Review:
Legs McNeil is one of those writers whose work I will read the instant I can get my hands on it. He's an amazing storyteller and he's got some incredible stories. Like Please Kill Me, the most lauded book on the history of Punk, The Other Hollywood is an oral history. It tells the story of the pornography industry.
Regardless of how you may feel about porn, the history and evolution of the industry is fascinating. And the great thing about an oral history is that you get to hear the story from the people who lived it. You've got sex workers, mobsters, FBI agents, police, prostitutes, porn stars, producers and photographers all talking about what happened - and how it all happened. My favorite part of this format is that sometimes you get conflicting versions of events and you get to decide which of the people is the more credible.
It's really only been since the early 1970s that porn became an industry. Before that, people were cranking out really poor quality nudist camp films. No sex, and almost no real nudity. At the time any kind of pornography was illegal, but it was the late 1960s and society was changing. People were feeling really expansive and experimental. Plus, they were taking a lot of drugs.
In The Other Hollywood, you meet a uniquely interesting group of people whose lives and adventures are probably pretty removed from the life of the Average Joe.
The true brilliance of the book is how McNeil and his co-writers mange to weave together a sequential story, filled with really interesting anecdotes and inside information, from thousands of hours of interviews with hundreds of people.
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