Bad Boy Drive by Robert Sellers

David Lynch’s 2001 film added much to the surreal and schizophrenic nature of Mulholland Drive, a long and winding beauty spot outside Hollywood, and home to many of the movie industry’s iconic characters. These included legendary lotharios Warren Beatty, Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper (the latter didn’t actually live anywhere near, but this is but one tenuous link featured in the book) thus, allegedly, lending the stretch of road the star-struck sobriquet ‘Bad Boy Drive’.

Sellers is in no way subtle about setting the scene, with a seeming endless supply of quotes from (often anonymous) Hollywood insiders leading him to declare early on that this was the “epicentre of the era’s drug-soaked social scene” and that the aforementioned were “men for whom rules did not apply".

The book does provide entertaining back stories, shedding, for example, new light on Brando's early career struggles, but the purpose of the whole thing seems to be to strongly reinforce perceptions of the men that we already had (womanising drink and drug fiends… applause). Sellers' prose is generally lowest common denominator, rendered in this case as sycophantic hero-worship. Ultimately, a bit dull. [Paul Mitchell]