Show Business: Tall Tales from Tinseltown

A new anthology burnishes old movie legends

Does any real American ever get tired of listening to Hollywood stories? Apparently not: year after year the movie books roll off the presses. The newest -- and one of the best -- is Hollywood Anecdotes by Paul F. Boller Jr. and Ronald L. Davis (Morrow; $18.95).

Boller and Davis seem to have mined every shiny nugget in the Hollywood Hills. Could any screenwriter have written funnier lines, for instance, than those of Lewis J. Selznick, one of the pioneer moguls? A victim of anti- Semitism in his native Russia, Selznick nonetheless had a forgiving nature. When Czar Nicholas II was...

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