Books by Jon Lewis

The tragic and mysterious circumstances surrounding the deaths of Elizabeth Short, or the Black Dahlia, and Marilyn Monroe ripped open Hollywood's glitzy faade, exposing the citys ugly underbelly of corruption, crime, and murder. These two spectacular dead bodies, one found dumped and posed in a vacant lot in January 1947, the other found dead in her home in August 1962, bookend this new history of Hollywood. Short and Monroe are just two of the many left for dead after the collapse of the studio system, Hollywood's awkward adolescence when the company town's many competing subculturescelebrities, moguls, mobsters, gossip mongers, industry wannabes, and desperate transientscame into frequent contact and conflict. Hard-Boiled Hollywood focuses on the lives lost at the crossroads between a dreamed-of Los Angeles and the real thing after the Second World War, where reality was anything but glamorous.

An intriguing look at how the American film industry imposed the rating system upon itself to control competition from films independently produced and distributed.

This 1984 study of South African trade unionism traces the history of the TLC from its origins in the 1920s to its demise in the early 1950s. It shows how divisions within the labour movement were bound up with the development of production processes, rather than being the inevitable outcome of racial antagonisms.