KARINA LONGWORTH discusses her film book SEDUCTION with MARK OLSEN

Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood (Custom House)

In this riveting popular history, the creator of You Must Remember This probes the inner workings of Hollywood's glamorous golden age through the stories of some of the dozens of actresses pursued by Howard Hughes, to reveal how the millionaire mogul's obsessions with sex, power and publicity trapped, abused, or benefitted women who dreamt of screen stardom.

In recent months, the media has reported on scores of entertainment figures who used their power and money in Hollywood to sexually harass and coerce some of the most talented women in cinema and television. But as Karina Longworth reminds us, long before the Harvey Weinsteins there was Howard Hughes--the Texas millionaire, pilot, and filmmaker whose reputation as a cinematic provocateur was matched only by that as a prolific womanizer.

His supposed conquests between his first divorce in the late 1920s and his marriage to actress Jean Peters in 1957 included many of Hollywood's most famous actresses, among them Billie Dove, Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, and Lana Turner. From promoting bombshells like Jean Harlow and Jane Russell to his contentious battles with the censors, Hughes--perhaps more than any other filmmaker of his era--commoditized male desire as he objectified and sexualized women. Yet there were also numerous women pulled into Hughes's grasp who never made it to the screen, sometimes virtually imprisoned by an increasingly paranoid and disturbed Hughes, who retained multitudes of private investigators, security personnel, and informers to make certain these actresses would not escape his clutches.

Vivid, perceptive, timely, and ridiculously entertaining, seduction is a landmark work that examines women, sex, and male power in Hollywood during its golden age--a legacy that endures nearly a century later.

NOTE: As with all Skylight Books in-store events, this reading is free and open to the public (first come, first served). But because we're expecting a large crowd at this event, we'll be giving out numbered tickets to the signing line to keep things organized:

• To get a ticket to the signing line, you must purchase a copy of Seduction here at Skylight Books. Tickets will be available starting September 25th. 
• For all website orders for this event, be sure to leave a note in the Order Comments field that you would like a ticket and plan to attend the event.
• Skylight's Friends with Benefits members get priority signing line tickets (and 20% off this and all other event books each month), so be sure to mention your membership (or join) when you order the book.

CAN'T MAKE IT TO THE EVENT BUT STILL WANT A PERSONALISED SIGNED COPY? CLICK HERE!

Karina Longworth is the creator, writer, and host of You Must Remember This, a podcast on the secret and forgotten history of twentieth-century Hollywood. A former film editor of the LA Weekly and critic for the Village Voice, she is the author of Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood, as well as four previous books. She lives in Los Angeles.

Mark Olsen writes about all kinds of movies for the Los Angeles Times as both a feature writer and reviewer. He creates a regular series on independent, documentary and foreign language films under the banner of Indie Focus, also curating and hosting the Indie Focus Screening Series. His work has also appeared in Film Comment, the New York Times, LA Weekly, Sight & Sound and other publications. He is from Kansas.