“It certainly spread falsehoods and misconceptions about the people in the book. I discovered the book when I was 20 years old and in college. I had this idea that it was truer than other books. One of the reasons it gets away with that is the stories are interspersed with these photographs, and some of them are crime scene photos. There are photos of stars dead on their bathroom floor. There are photos of elderly Judy Garland with no makeup. The imagery is having this veneer of accuracy and authenticity. It makes it seem like you’re seeing the real shit. Once you actually start doing research it’s easy to see mistakes — silly mistakes, like if he’d had access to IMDb he would’ve been easy to fix — but then when you think about the ethos of the book, would he have? Would he have wanted to fix them? The whole aesthetic of the book is more gossipy than that. You’re getting the cocktail party anecdote rather than the footnoted version. There are no footnotes in Hollywood Babylon.”