When movie people knew about movies

Now in his 70s, Bryan Forbes returns for the subject of his new novel, The Memory of All That (HarperCollins, 7th June, £16.99, 0002258323), to the early years of his career. The novel is set in Hollywood in the early 1950s, when television and anti-trust laws were starting to bring about the end of the golden age of the movies. This is when Forbes, who had appeared in a few British pictures, went to Los Angeles as an actor under contract to Universal.

There have been surprisingly few good Hollywood novels. Forbes gives credit to one of the best, What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg, also known for the screenplay of "On the Waterfront". "Schulberg was an insider," Forbes says. "His father, B P Schulberg, ran Paramount for a time.

"A lot of Hollywood novels are written by people who go there once, have an unhappy experience, and then sneer about it."

The Memory of All That is about the corruption of a young writer, Robert Peterson, who lacks the creative talent to succeed on his own merits. The novel does not gloss over the dark side of Hollywood; but there is nostalgia, too, in Forbes' portrait of the town.

"A lot of people deride the old Hollywood system, saying it was like a Ford production line," he says. "In many respects it was. But it's now the staple diet of many television stations, and it produced a lot of films now regarded as classics.

"The studios when I was there were run by some fairly extraordinary characters, like [Darryl F] Zanuck, and Harry Cohn, and the Warner brothers. But they were all film monsters, as opposed to corporate accountants. You could talk film to them.

"Harry Cohn [the head of Columbia] was a foul-mouthed character. I remember going to him to ask for more money on a film, and he told me to get the fuck of out of there; but I stayed and traded blows, and in the end he said, 'Oh, fuck off, you can have it.' Because he wasn't a man to cut corners on films."

There are walk-on parts in Forbes' novel for some of these figures; other characters, like Robert's gay agent Julian, are amalgams. "I was picked up by a gay agent, not on Hollywood but on Broadway," Forbes recalls. "He took me out to dinner, and said, 'Not only are you very talented, you're also very humpable.'

"I said, 'Gosh—no agent has ever said that to me before.' Then he kissed me full on the mouth. I thought, 'Perhaps I won't sign up with him.'"

Forbes moved on from acting to screenwriting, and then to directing; his credits include "Whistle Down the Wind", "Seance on a Wet Afternoon" and "The Stepford Wives". He has also been head of a movie studio, EMI.

In the 1970s he began a new career as an author, writing fiction and non-fiction. Publishing has been through many of the changes he has observed in the film business, he says. "It used to be much more personal. People like Hamish Hamilton, André Deutsch and Victor Gollancz were very individual publishers. Now you can be with editors, and suddenly they're gone."

He has been, too, a bookseller, running for many years a shop in Virginia Water, Surrey, before competition from the chains in nearby larger towns forced him to close. The site is now an art gallery and private printer, which is about to bring out a limited edition of Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

He is still trying to make films. His last project had been in production for 10 weeks when the manager at his hotel told him that the bill had not been paid. "I would love to make another film, but it's more difficult to raise money than the newspapers tell you. But I'm basically a writer, and I can still do that."