c1949. Supposedly loosely based on his own experiences whilst working in Hollywood - I really enjoyed this book. The Encyclopedia Brittanica has the following to say about Mr Robbins,'Orphaned at birth, Robbins was placed in a Roman Catholic orphanage and was given the name Francis Kane. He was raised in several foster homes and assumed the last name Rubins from a Jewish foster family, but he changed it when his writing career took off. At the age of 19, he began speculating on crop futures; he became a millionaire the following year but lost his fortune after speculating unsuccessfully in sugar. After filing for bankruptcy, Robbins took a job with Universal Pictures.' So, he not only wrote rags-to-riches stories - he actually lived one. But there is a caveat - it seems that Mr Robbins was a bit of an embellisher so who actually knows? There are various conflicting bits of information but it does not really matter. The book is great and does not seem to have dated that much at all. "He leaned across the table. "Look, Warren, first of all, this picture will be the real thing. It won't run just twenty minutes, it will run more than an hour. Then there is something new that's just been developed. It's called the close-up."
Robbins was one of the best selling authors of my childhood, a name I heard often while I was growing up, so I thought it was time I read one of his novels and formed an opinion for myself. And all I really learned is that small-minded, sensationalist best sellers were certainly alive and well in the 1960s, when Robbins wrote his self-preening, sexist, gratuitously violent story of the evolution of the film industry. I read it in the context of the self-publishing industry just being born in our era, which was interesting, but at the end when Robbins piously deals out violent rape to a character because, gosh darn it, she's just a damn irritating floozy constantly getting in the protagonist's way. . .yeah, that was the last I'll be reading of THIS muckraker.
What do You think about The Dream Merchants (1970)?
I think that if you like one Robbins' book, you'll like them all. I've read most of them during the high school, and I enjoyed them very much. Maybe because his characters were always so defined; and he had interesting plots. He kept you awake and turning pages. I loved his male characters, always a strong persona, who have had difficult and scary upbringing, they were balancing on a wire between the shades of a good fella – bad fella, but they still ended up being good people. He found a gold mind with his stories and he knew how to develop them and make them readable.
—Jana
