By Cari Beauchamp

Film Historian and author Cari Beauchamp has assembled a terrific line-up of Hollywood legends for her latest book, My First Time in Hollywood. Utilizing a wide array of archives, she has traced back to the beginning days of Hollywood and the siren call that brought so many people westward to find their fame and fortune in the movies. 

Actors, directors, screenwriters, cinematographers and editors--half of them women--recall their initial impressions of Hollywood, their struggle to find work and the love they had for making movies that kept them going. From Herbert Marshall to Noel Coward, she covers the first twenty years of the western migration that brought the cinematic pioneers to the sleepy little sun-kissed community that would become internationally known as Hollywood. 

Throughout the book, legends such as Mary Pickford, Harold Lloyd, Lillian Gish, Myrna Loy, Cecil B. DeMille and many others talk about what inspired them to come west and their first impressions of the dusty roads and orange groves that dominated the landscape of the future home to the dream factories. 

Drawn from letters, speeches, oral histories, memoirs, and autobiographies-and with over sixty vintage photographs and illustrations, each story is intimate and unique but all speak to our universal need to follow our passions and be part of a community that feeds the soul.