Burroughs’ Hollywood Exposé Still Resonates

Best known as the creator of Tarzan of the Apes, Edgar Rice Burroughs also wrote other books, including a seedy tale about Hollywood.Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc., the licensing company of the late author, is releasing a centennial edition of “The Girl From Hollywood” this spring. The book, last published in 2012, will be available in both a limited-edition hardback and in paperback.Burroughs considered the novel to be among the finest he had written.

Originally published in 1921, the story line was inspired by Burroughs and his family’s move to Tarzana Ranch in the San Fernando Valley with the movie business just on the other side of the hill.

Jim Sullos, president of Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc., said that early on Burroughs saw two sides of Hollywood – the place with hard-working people in a new art form but also an industry with unscrupulous agents who did what they needed to get performers under their influence.

“Apparently, there were a few who used drugs to corral these people into their sphere,” Sullos said in a phone interview. “How the dependency was created became the story of this particular book.”Shannon Burke is described in marketing material for the book as an “innocent Midwestern girl” who moves to California to seek fame and fortune. She becomes known by the stage name Gaza De Lure and has become an icon of the silver screen and the epitome of success for every aspiring actress dreaming of becoming a Hollywood star.

But Burke has a dark secret … “one so dreadful, so shameful, that she can never hope to escape its grasp.” Into her orbit comes the Penningtons, a wholesome ranching family who may become forever trapped “in the tangled web of Hollywood corruption, drug peddling, addiction – and murder.”But in Hollywood itself, “The Girl from Hollywood” didn’t turn out to be a very popular book, Sullos said.People took it as a sensationalistic exposé, which wasn’t Burroughs intent at all, Sullos said.

“He was just trying to portray the contrast of the life that was taking place in Hollywood and the life that they had created on their ranch here in the San Fernando Valley, which was still very rural – the life not unlike he described for the Pennington family in the book,” Sullos added.“The Girl from Hollywood” differs from Burroughs other novels, particularly the well-known Tarzan series and the “John Carter of Mars” books in that it encapsulates what the author saw going on around him.

“All of his books were creating new adventures, going to new places and creating things that people had never thought about before,” Sullos said. “But this was a little bit different. This was more of a commentary on what he saw in Hollywood.”  It is a story that still has relevance and would make for a good television series, he added.

The licensing company is currently in a shopping agreement on the book in which the rights are being reviewed and attempts to market it are taking place, Sullos continued.

“We hope something comes from those talks,” Sullos said. “It is exciting that something might happen with this story line after 100 years.”