Mercury Pictures Presents - Anthony Marra Audiobook

Written by Anthony Marra
Read by Carlotta Brentan
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Books on Tape
Release date: August 2, 2022
Duration: 14:10:02

Like many before her, Maria Lagana has come to Hollywood to outrun her past. Born in Rome, where every Sunday her father took her to the cinema instead of church, Maria immigrates with her mother to Los Angeles after a childhood transgression leads to her father’s arrest.

Fifteen years later, on the eve of America’s entry into World War II, Maria is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional lives from falling apart. Her mother won’t speak to her. Her boss, a man of many toupees, has been summoned to Washington by congressional investigators. Her boyfriend, a virtuoso Chinese American actor, can’t escape the studio’s narrow typecasting. And the studio itself, Maria’s only home in exile, teeters on the verge of bankruptcy.

Over the coming months, as the bright lights go dark across Los Angeles, Mercury Pictures becomes a nexus of European émigrés: modernist poets trying their luck as B-movie screenwriters, once-celebrated architects becoming scale-model miniaturists, and refugee actors finding work playing the very villains they fled. While the world descends into war, Maria rises through a maze of conflicting politics, divided loyalties, and jockeying ambitions. But when the arrival of a stranger from her father’s past threatens Maria’s carefully constructed facade, she must finally confront her father’s fate—and her own.

“Carlotta Brentan gives a fine narration of this saga of Hollywood in the ’30s and ’40s. With her father in prison for anti-fascist activities in Italy, Maria, along with her mother, moves to an Italian neighborhood in Los Angeles. …. Brentan slips easily in and out of a variety of accents. She keeps the family’s secrets well hidden and underplays the occasionally florid text. But the story is familiar, and the characters are stereotypes, especially Feldman, who behaves like every wheeler-dealer producer from every old Hollywood movie about Hollywood.”—AudioFile