Alys is a wealthy young dilettante, as out of place in 1980s Los Angeles as he would be in the film sets of the 1920s. And yet that is exactly where he ends up, thanks to the intervention of the mysterious time-traveling Nesselrode, who seems to have originated at the dawn of film. Nesselrode and Alys descend into the catacombs of an abandoned movie theater and emerge in in a black-and-white fantasia-a Los Angeles on the verge of becoming itself-where silent films dominate the landscape. Alys soon finds his home in the pictures and falls in love with the seductive siren Moira Silver. But as he finds himself bewitched by old Hollywood, the present proves more and more distant, and Alys ends up lost in time, trapped between here and now. Screenplay is a delirious, erotically charged, and wildly inventive novel of faded glamour and elusive love by a master of the form.

Afterword by: Simon Callow