In May of 2022, the actress, reality-TV star, and lingerie mogul Kim Kardashian arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the annual Met Gala, wearing another woman’s dress. It was sixty years old, made of delicate beige marquisette fabric embellished with more than six thousand hand-sewn rhinestones, and had been worn in public only once before: by Marilyn Monroe, in May of 1962, onstage at Madison Square Garden for a birthday gala honoring President John F. Kennedy. When Monroe put on the gown, made specifically for her by the Hollywood dressmaker Jean Louis (based on a sketch by the designer Bob Mackie, when he was just starting out), she was thirty-five, and in the last year of her short life. She wore the dress in the hope that it would be an event, but, of course, Monroe was by then so famous that she was an ongoing event, no matter what she had on; she was pursued, ceaselessly, by cameras, by journalists, by powerful men, by studio nabobs, by fans and hangers-on.

Even when she was just beginning her career, as a young contract player in the studio system, the amount of fan mail she amassed (several thousand letters a week, by 1952) startled executives to whom she was just another disposable—or, at least, interchangeable—bottle blonde. The outpouring was less shocking to Monroe, who had been aware of her ability to captivate since she was a teen-ager. “When I was eleven, the whole world was closed to me, and I just felt I was on the outside of the world,” she told the Life magazine editor Richard Meryman, in the summer of 1962, during a six-hour conversation that would come to be known as the last interview. “Suddenly, everything opened up. . . . It was just sheer pleasure. Every fellow honked his horn, you know, workers driving to work, waving, you know, and I’d wave back. The world became friendly. All the newspaper boys when they delivered the paper would come around to where I lived, and I used to hang from the limb of a tree, and I had sort of a sweatshirt on. I didn’t realize the value of a sweatshirt in those days.”

Over time, Monroe came to realize not only the value of a sweatshirt (along with a well-fitting sweater, a plunging neckline, a fluttery sundress, a halter top, a lamé gown, and a terry-cloth robe) but also exactly how to make it work for her in pictures: how to befriend the camera, even when she was lonely (and she was often very lonely). She was an uncanny beauty—the sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes, the bobbed bunny-tail nose, the accentuated beauty mark, the overdrawn smile—but that wasn’t what made people rush to send pounds of fan mail. Hollywood was full of beauties. What people fell for was the way Monroe knew how to be photographed; she had the rare ability to seem, at least in still photos, both completely spontaneous and incredibly deliberate.

Take a promotional shot she posed for in 1952, to promote her role in the thriller “Niagara”: she sits on a low stone wall in front of the rushing waters of Niagara Falls, in a red blouse that accentuates her décolletage. She is leaning ever so slightly to one side, smiling as she turns her face into the sun to catch the light. Her hands are clasped in her lap, and she is leaning forward onto one heel, so that the toe of her red pump arcs ever so slightly off the ground. At first, the shot looks like a candid, slyly captured moment of a performer in repose. But look closer: her collarbone is slightly pushed forward, her neck stretched long, her feet deliberately pointed with balletic tension. In Monroe’s best portraits, she seems to be almost pushing through the frame. The photographer Burt Glinn, who shot Monroe at a variety of parties in the nineteen-fifties, said, of this strange quality, that Monroe “had no bone structure—the face was a Polish flat plate. Not photogenic in the accepted sense, the features were not memorable or special; what she had was the ability to project.”

Here we are once more: back to the glory days of the New Hollywood that emerged from the ashes of the old studio system in the 1960s and 70s. Our cast is filled with brilliant hotshots and creative risk-takers, energised by the French New Wave, the American counterculture and the industry’s own amazing entrepreneurial past.

Peter Biskind’s breezy, bleary, cynical book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls ranged freely across the 1970s, with controversial anecdotes about egos and drugs (though maybe the definitive book about the role of cocaine in film production has yet to be written). Mark Harris’s Scenes from a Revolution had the witty idea of looking at the five films Oscar-nominated for best picture in the transitional year of 1968, from the supercool Bonnie and Clyde to the squaresville Dr Doolittle, to see what they told us about America’s cinematic mind at the time.

Critic Paul Fischer’s book pivots around a different emblematic moment: it’s 16 November 1977, and a private plane is carrying three of America’s megastar directors from LA to Washington DC for a reception, hosted by President Jimmy Carter and first lady Rosalynn, to honour the film industry. On board are Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, aged respectively 30, 33 and 38 – too old to be movie brats, but very young indeed to be the demigods that they had become. Using the diary recollections of Coppola’s wife, the late Eleanor Coppola, who was also disconsolately aboard and feeling thoroughly shut out of the alpha male chatting and joshing, Fischer shows our three dishevelled deities dizzied and stunned and even weirdly depressed by their staggering global acclaim.

Coppola had created an authentic American masterpiece in The Godfather and legitimised the whole idea of sequels and franchises with his masterly follow-up The Godfather Part II. Spielberg had just sent the whole world shark-crazy with Jaws, invented the idea of the event movie, and was about to release Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Lucas was on the point of surpassing him as box office champ with his family-friendly sci-fi adventure Star Wars, formerly entitled The Star Wars. As with The Facebook, he had realised that it sounded snappier without a definite article.

The three zeitgeist emperors dined and feted at the White House, and stayed at the Watergate hotel – reading this, I found myself thinking of those plutocrat uncreatives Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk owning their VIP moment at Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2025. But Fischer recounts that Lucas Eeyorishly put a downer on Spielberg and Coppola’s mood over breakfast the next morning by predicting that “laser discs and cassettes could soon destroy the feature film and enable the audience to watch just short scenes …”

Lucas’s proto-TikTok musings habitually baffled and disconcerted Spielberg. On another day, he was slurping chocolate milk through a straw on the set of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom seated opposite Lucas, who had developed and owned that franchise as well as Star Wars, making him personally richer than anyone thought possible. Lucas pointed at the straw and remarked: “Someday everything we learn, see and hear will come from something that looks just like that.” In 1986, he sold Lucasfilm Computer Division Graphics Group to Apple cofounder Steve Jobs.

No one in the industry worked harder, then, to turn Lucas’s predictions into reality than Lucas himself. Yet perhaps it was the effort of inventing a whole new industry protocol and a whole new world in the Star Wars series that exhausted him and ensured that, strangely, he never directed another film outside that universe, apparently unwilling or unable to think of any other stories to tell – whereas Coppola and Spielberg kept producing varied work from that day to this. Spielberg gave us Empire of the Sun, Schindler’s List, Minority Report and The Fabelmans while Coppola made One from the Heart, Rumble Fish, Dracula and his self-funded folie de grandeur Megalopolis.

Fischer’s study of the period mostly concentrates on these three California film school graduates, but has an adjoining role for New Yorker Martin Scorsese – because talking about this era without him is unthinkable – and a walk-on for Brian de Palma. Other New Wave names like Robert Altman, Elaine May, Hal Ashby, Bob Rafelson and William Friedkin don’t get a look in.

Each suffered exclusion growing up: Coppola and Scorsese were Italian-American immigrants, Lucas experienced depression and what might have been undiagnosed autism, and Spielberg was subject to antisemitism – like ET, he had found himself to be an alien in the American suburbia he loved. That said, they were spared the sexism that stymied their female colleagues. Take Stephanie Rothman, who had worked for shlock-maestro Roger Corman but never managed to emerge from the B-movie world; or Nancy Dowd, the Oscar-winning screenwriter who often had to work under a male moniker or entirely uncredited. Melissa Mathison was the acclaimed screenwriter of ET, but was for many years beforehand in an unhappy extramarital relationship with Coppola. And tough producer Dawn Steel at Paramount, despite her proven track record of developing hits, found herself excluded from test screenings of female leads on account of her alleged inability to gauge how attractive they were.

What united Coppola, Lucas and Spielberg was their yearning for indie freedom. For Coppola and Lucas, that meant longing to set up their own studio outside the system. Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios is depicted by Fischer as an amazing, anarchic place presided over by its boss as mogul-slash-party-giver: a cross between a dissolute Renaissance court and the Beatles’ financially leaky Apple Studios. LucasFilm was, by contrast, a tight ship dedicated to technological innovation, with Lucas’s eye focused on the bottom line. Spielberg also got his own studio, DreamWorks, but it was hardly as storied as the first two.

If there was a battle for the “soul” of Hollywood, then which of them won? Fischer’s book doesn’t make it entirely clear. Probably Spielberg, with his genius for the all-American mainstream. Lucas became the supreme franchise godhead-licencer, of course. But it was Coppola who stuck closest to the rackety ethos of independent film-making – financing the Conradian masterpiece Apocalypse Now himself. He was also incredibly successful in the wine and hotel business, but never hesitated to liquidate assets to make his own films.

He and Lucas evidently took different lessons from a key traumatising moment in their early film-making lives. In 1970 Coppola had presented the first cut of the dark, complex dystopian sci-fi THX 1138, which he had produced and Lucas directed, to the Warner Bros execs who had agreed to distribute it. The result was a disaster – the suits snarled with incomprehension and demanded a re-edit. As Lucas described it: “It was like bringing an audience to the Mona Lisa and asking: ‘Do you know why she’s smiling?’ ‘Sorry Leonardo, you’ll have to go back and make some changes.’”

Fischer has produced a really readable, closely researched account of life at Hollywood’s top table – likably presented with the enthusiasm and commitment of a true fan. But it goes beyond the Great Man theory of history into something more like great men without history, lacking much analysis of the larger determinant forces and external problems. For example: everyone agrees that the catastrophic end to the 70s Golden Age came with the ruinous flop of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate. It crashed the United Artists studio and put paid to execs indulging “genius” directors once and for all. This book mostly behaves as if this bookending event didn’t exist or wasn’t important (and admittedly Stanley Kubrick did carry on being indulged in his Hertfordshire exile – though again, he isn’t mentioned much). Epic as this tale is, it’s in danger of missing the bigger picture.

The title of Al Pacino’s memoir comes from the nickname given to him by his mother when he was growing up. His parents divorced when he was two, after which he and his mother moved in with his grandparents in the South Bronx, where violence and drugs were rife. One day, six-year-old Pacino was playing outside with his friends when he saw an ambulance pull up outside his grandparents’ tenement. He ran towards the building “and there, coming out of the front doors, carried on a stretcher, was my mother. She had attempted suicide.”

Pacino, now 85, is our gravel-voiced narrator and his performance here is wonderful: warm, fitfully jovial and more intimate than you might expect from an actor who has spent much of his life keeping the public at arm’s length. As well as detailing early traumas – Pacino’s mother died when he was 22 from an accidental overdose – Sonny Boy covers the actor’s burgeoning love of cinema (his mother used to sneak him into movie theatres when he was little) and his time as a struggling theatre actor working menial jobs before finding fame with The Godfather.

Though the book is short on details about his recent life, it digs satisfyingly deep into his acting career. While appearing in a stage version of Strindberg’s Creditors, Pacino suddenly had an epiphany: “Words are coming out, and they’re the words of Strindberg, but I’m saying them as though they’re mine. The world is mine, and my feelings are mine, and they’re going beyond the South Bronx. I left the familiar. I became part of something larger.”

Further listening

Dreams: The Many Lives of Fleetwood Mac
Mark Blake, WF Howes Ltd, 12hr 58 min
This wildly entertaining account of the life and loves of Fleetwood Mac is read by David Thorpe.

The Party
Tessa Hadley, Penguin Audio, 2hr 54min
The Free Love author reads her novella, set in the late 1940s, in which two sisters attend a party in the Bristol docks and grapple with the constraints and freedoms of early adulthood.

Al Pacino, whose nickname “Sonny Boy” comes from the Al Jolson song of that title, begins this fine memoir in 1943 when he is three and his mother, Rose, a pretty, sensitive factory worker, starts smuggling him into the local picture house. Together they drink in the stories unspooling from the silver screen, doubly delicious since their own lives are so bleak. Rose’s impossibly handsome boy-husband has already skedaddled to another marriage and Rose has taken little Alfredo back to the South Bronx to live with her parents. Sonny delights in the role of provider and protector, buying his mother Kotex from the drugstore and shouting at the construction workers who dare to leer.

Pacino’s account of New York’s postwar mean streets is startlingly cinematic. He introduces us to his gang of little toughs, kids called Cliffy, Bruce and Petey who bunk off school to play in the derelict allotments or fish in open sewers for anything shiny that they can sell for a dime. They can’t afford to join the Scouts so they beat up the kids who can – the lucky ones with two sober parents and a dad who has a job. It is, says Pacino, only thanks to Rose’s care and attention that he doesn’t end up the same way as his friends, all dead by 30 from being “on the needle”. With her encouragement and his own penchant for declaiming Ray Milland’s speeches from The Lost Weekend around their tenement apartment, Sonny gets a place at New York’s High School of Performing Arts.

He is both a fish out of water and an absolute star. When, after a particularly good performance, someone says “Hey kid, you’re the next Marlon Brando,” he doesn’t know who they are talking about. So, it matters less than you might think when he quits after a year because Rose needs him to start work to pay for the electro-shock treatments and barbiturates she needs for her unravelling mental health. All Sonny’s spare time is now spent in public libraries devouring Chekhov, Hemingway and Odets and feeling as if he has known their worlds for ever. He realises that Rose, “fragile and uncontrollable”, could have stepped straight out of Tennessee Williams. Like Williams, she eventually died of an accidental overdose. It was 1962 and Sonny was just 22.

It gets better, it gets worse. Sonny rooms with Martin Sheen, another juvenile who clearly has the hand of God upon him. He learns his trade on off-off-off Broadway, sometimes earning a favourable mention, but just as often a stinker along the lines of “avoid Al Pacino…he’s the one thing that drags this play down”. What the reader is waiting for, of course, is the moment in 1972 when Francis Ford Coppola plucks him out of the ranks to co-star in The Godfather. The studio had wanted Jack Nicholson but when Pacino learns that his grandfather, Rose’s father, was born in a Sicilian town called Corleone, the whole thing begins to feel like fate.

You could say the rest is history although, in truth, it is hard to say exactly what that history is. Pacino spends more time on the films that didn’t work than the ones that did. While he doesn’t regret turning down the role of Han Solo in Star Wars, he also wonders why he fought so hard to make turkeys like Bobby Deerfield and Hugh Hudson’s Revolution, both of which dented his career.

But, then, career has never mattered much to him, nor has money: at one point he loses $50m without understanding how. Then there’s the alcoholism that he says saved him from the long pain of losing his mother: without the booze he would have followed her into Bellevue psychiatric hospital. AA doesn’t work because he can never be anonymous but therapy, the fancy kind where you go five times a week for decades, does the trick.

It may also explain his surprisingly good choice of romantic partners. A near-marriage with Jill Clayburgh is followed by long affairs with Diane Keaton and Tuesday Weld. And then in 2023 Pacino becomes a father for the fourth time with producer Noor Alfallah. Little Roman Pacino is still in diapers, but his 84-year-old dad is already imagining the day when he will try to explain what it was like to grow up in the Bronx in the 1940s. It will, he reckons, sound as preposterous as the London of Oliver Twist.

To screenwriters in the 1950s, she was a major power player, fighting for pay rises and striking rights. To the Hollywood studio heads, she was “the meanest bitch in town”.

Now, a new book aims to restore Mary C McCall Jr’s reputation as one of the film industry’s most important figures, a trailblazer who was airbrushed from history after getting on the wrong side of movie moguls.

Prof J E Smyth, whose book, Mary C McCall Jr: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Most Powerful Screenwriter, will be published in September, said: “[McCall] was targeted by right-wing men who didn’t like the amount of power she had had during the 1930s and 1940s and they were going after her …

“The Hollywood blacklist cleaned a lot of women out of the industry, and she was one. Then historians and film critics erased her, because all they’ve ever cared about is great male directors … At McCall’s death in 1986, aged 81, archives did not even want her papers, and she has simply been forgotten. Material relating to women was just deemed not worthwhile.”

Smyth, professor of history at the University of Warwick, discovered material in the archives of Warner Bros, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Writers Guild Foundation, as well as private collections, that shed new light on McCall, who became the first female president of the Screen Writers Guild in 1942.

Smyth unearthed letters and an unpublished memoir that McCall wrote for her children about her career, as well as records of the work she did for female screenwriters who were having difficulty maintaining credit, or getting paid equally by producers. She said: “The material was there, but … none of the people who were writing about the Hollywood studio system wanted to actually deal with it.”

Smyth added: “We’re so wedded to the narrative of the golden age of Hollywood being about gorgeous women who do what they’re told, and the male moguls who were running the show, that between 1920 and 1960 women were only ever talked about if they were objectified on screen … There was also an assumption that most of the scripts were written by men. “But it’s total rubbish. Half of all cinematic employees within Hollywood were female and they could do just about anything in the business, including being producers. A quarter of all screenwriters were women – more than now.”

As a screenwriter, McCall wrote for Warner Bros, Columbia Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Her films included Craig’s Wife, a 1936 box-office success about a woman who marries for money not love – a nuanced critique of marriage and sexual inequality – and she was friends with actors including Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart.

She also launched the successful Maisie series in 1939, writing or co-writing eight of the 10 films about a wise-cracking working-class showgirl, played by comedian Ann Sothern, a role that turned her into one of the biggest stars of the 1940s.

Smyth said: “It was an early franchise that became really popular. While major Hollywood films – for example, Gone with the Wind from 1939 – played primarily in lavish cinemas in big cities, Maisie played primarily in small-town cinemas and had a loyal fanbase, driven by women who finally were seeing a woman on screen who was like them.

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“Maisie didn’t wear designer clothes, she didn’t have a top hairdresser, she didn’t have perfect makeup. She had to put up with a lot of crap from men – and women loved it.” McCall also campaigned for fellow writers, said Smyth.

“She [led] a fight to unionise the industry’s writers and secure the first contract guaranteeing a minimum wage, credit protection and pay raises, as well as the right to strike. She was a power player. To studio heads she was, in the words of Jack Warner, ‘the meanest bitch in town’.”

In a legal case against mogul Howard Hughes, the head of RKO Pictures studio, McCall defended a writer he had fired for being subpoenaed to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which conducted investigations during the 1940s and 1950s into alleged communist activities.

McCall said: “I did not intend to permit Mr Hughes to trample on a labour agreement with muddy tennis shoes.” But in 1979, she spoke of her belief that Hughes had played a part in destroying her career, persuading other producers not to hire her. “As a consequence … I was unable to find work.”

Smyth hopes to put McCall back in her rightful place in the history books. “Historians that started to write about Hollywood in the 1960s were the ones who really cut women out of the story of Hollywood,” she said.

For those less well-versed than me in the world of high 1980s Hollywood and its various satellites – or do I mean parasites? – it may be useful if I begin this review with a brief biography of the book’s author. Griffin Dunne: does the name ring any bells? It probably should, but let me elaborate anyway. Dunne is an actor (An American Werewolf in London) and a producer (Baby It’s You, After Hours). His father was Dominick Dunne, Vanity Fair’s star reporter in its pomp under Tina Brown, and his mother was Ellen “Lenny” Griffin, an heiress who was close to Natalie Wood. His uncle was John Gregory Dunne, another writer, who in turn was the husband of Joan Didion, the celebrated author of such nonfiction classics as The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Elizabeth Montgomery from Bewitched was his babysitter. Truman Capote was a guest at his parents’ 10th wedding anniversary party. Carrie Fisher was his best friend.

But The Friday Afternoon Club, a memoir of Dunne’s life until, at 34, he has his first (and only) child, isn’t just another celebrity Rolodex. For one thing, there’s the way it’s written, so honest and funny and smart. Dunne handles everything – and everyone – with the scabrous aplomb of the outsider, something that he most definitely is not; his tone is a little bit Holden Caulfield (The Catcher in the Rye), and a little bit Benjamin Braddock (The Graduate), with a few icy chips thrown in – picture me now, jiggling a delicious aperitif in my hand – that might have come straight from one of the notebooks of his late aunt Joan (more on these frozen shards later). What I mean is that on the page, he’s both adorable and exasperating: if he’s Tigger-ish and easily bored, he’s also nobody’s fool. Always the first to laugh at himself, he is utterly lacking in self-pity.

What makes all this the more remarkable is the fact that at the heart of his book lies near-unimaginable pain and suffering. With huge daring, Dunne gives the reader a detailed, highly intimate account of the circumstances surrounding the death in 1982 of his 22-year-old actor sister, Dominique, who was strangled by her abusive ex-boyfriend, John Sweeney, without ever allowing it to derail the picaresque adventures he describes elsewhere. It should be as clunky as hell, this combination, but somehow it never is, perhaps because Dunne has known ever since he was a young man (he’s 69 now) that even when people are in darkness, they are still apt to make jokes, and sometimes to cry with laughter – and he won’t shy away from it. Doubtless the reader does exist who will find it strange and bewildering that as Sweeney’s trial proceeds, Dunne spends the hours when he’s not in the courtroom doggedly making a movie and almost cheerfully working his way through a sheet of LSD prepared especially for him by Timothy Leary (a present from an ever-thoughtful Fisher). But most will find it both bracing and incredibly human. I know that I did. What a guy, I kept thinking, as I wolfed his book down. And: what would his publicist think if I asked to take him out for lunch the next time he’s in London?

Dunne seems to like lunch, in the same way that he likes almost everything: if character is destiny, his nature is generous and grateful. But this doesn’t mean that he isn’t also clear-eyed. His account of Dominick Dunne’s fall from grace in Hollywood, where he worked first as a producer, is straightforward to the point of briskness, and all the more loving for it (this descent, which saw him selling all his possessions and living in a cabin in Oregon, was born of alcoholism and, perhaps, of his secret gay life); nor does he hide how uncomfortable it makes him that his father’s second act, as the kind of journalist who was never off the TV talkshows, came about only because he covered Sweeney’s trial for Vanity Fair. Fame, as he makes plain, is corrosive: it changes friendships; it feeds narcissism. His pen portraits of everyone from Sean Connery (who once saved him from drowning) to Tennessee Williams (who groped him at a dinner party) are as deft on this score as his accounts of his own disasters; of the public scrapes and hilariously bad decisions that trail him as a cloud of dust does Pig-Pen in Peanuts (yes, he really did star in a film about a man whose penis chats to him).

He doesn’t forgive his sister’s killer – to the horror of the Dunnes, Sweeney was convicted only of voluntary manslaughter, for which he served just three and a half years in prison – but his hate burns itself out in the end; that, or he somehow lets go of it. Elsewhere, though, forgiveness becomes a theme. I hadn’t realised that Dominick Dunne was on such bad terms with his brother, an enmity that only grew when John elected to take Joan and their daughter, Quintana, to Paris for the duration of Sweeney’s trial on the grounds that they didn’t want Quintana called as a witness – a decision that puts a new light on them entirely, I think (especially Joan, who was so praised in the last years of her life for her stoicism after the deaths of both John and Quintana, she began to take on the air of a medieval saint). There’s something horribly gelid here – later, John makes the situation worse by writing in the New Yorker of his unaccountable disdain for those who attend the trials of those accused of murdering “their loved ones” – and yet, somehow, Dunne finds a way past his, never quite falling out with his aunt and uncle himself.

Perhaps, it occurs to me now, this is why his 2017 documentary, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, is so good: even as it honours its subject, a chill rises from it, as if from a lake in wintertime. Certainly, it’s what makes The Friday Afternoon Club (named after the gatherings Dominique held at her pool house in LA) so much more than the book you feared it might be. He doesn’t spell anything out, save for his own ridiculousness. But he doesn’t need to. The reader draws her own conclusions: feasting on the glamour, laughing at the absurdity, shivering as the icebergs float silently into view.

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• The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir by Griffin Dunne is published by Grove Press (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply