Heading to a book party for screenwriter-novelist Tom Epperson’s latest, a South American journalistic thriller called Roberto To The Dark Tower Came, I got to wondering: Will there ever be another great Hollywood book? You know, the kind that makes you catch your breath, slap the beach chair, and gasp, “Did they really do that stuff?”

Mostly, they did—witness the photograph of Robert Towne lounging in the sand with his naked Amazons, as he did some sort of prep for Personal Best, in 1981. The snapshot is tucked in the middle of Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. Published in 1998, it was, for me, the last truly great movie business book. Biskind dished shovel-loads of gossip within a cultural arc, as he told how film greats like Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola and, of course, Towne, reached for...