Prater Violet

A classic novel about the golden age of film.
It is based on Isherwood's experience of co-writing the 1934 Berthold Viertel film Little Friend.
'A deliberate historical parable. Prater Violet resembles episodes in Goodbye to Berlin and keeps up the same high level of excellence' Edmund Wilson
An impatient phone call from the temperamental Austrian director, Friedrich Bergmann, introduces a young Christopher Isherwood to the film industry. Isherwood's job is to rescue the script of a sentimental love story set in nineteenth-century Vienna, a film called Prater Violet . In the real Vienna of 1934 the Austrian Right crushes a socialist uprising. Bergmann is distraught and his prophecy of the coming war goes unheeded. As tensions on set grow, studio intrigues and competing egos threaten to derail the whole project.