Tales From Hollywood is an ambitious and witty, yet tragic, story of emigre writers working behind the “silver screen” of Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s. The story hinges on the ingenious premise that if the popular Hungarian writer Odom von Horvath had not been killed in a freak accident in Paris in 1938, on his way to America, he might have joined the band of prominent European artists who fled from the Nazis and ended up working in the back hallways of Hollywood.

The play imaginatively creates 13 years of von Horvath’s stay in Los Angeles. Through his eyes we meet Bertolt Brecht, Helene Weigel, Thomas Mann, Salka Viertel, Heinrich and Nellie Mann, Lionel Feuchtwanger, and some of the screen greats of that remarkable era—Johnny Weissmuller, the Marx Brothers, Garbo, and others.