It’s a literature of dimming stars, smoggy drives through flammable chaparral, frequent benders, prostitutes. Flash periods of productivity where somebody bangs out a script in a week. There’s at least one genre-disorienting tour through the facades of a studio lot, like the masterpiece sequence in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, and plenty of languid musing about the vicissitudes of fame, often delivered poolside.