In Hollywood Mad Dogs, Shrake deftly satirizes a world where a screenwriter is supplied with a bag of cocaine and given a week to write a script, a star demands that a pet cat be his sidekick on the trail, and two competing box office titans square off on a golf course, “each of them armed with a putter.”
This rollicking new novel, discovered among Shrake’s literary papers at the Wittliff Collections, provides a hilarious and insightful look at the Hollywood meat grinder. It is a story only Bud Shrake could tell, and it is a worthy addition to the author’s celebrated career, which includes some of the most highly praised novels written by a Texan.
EDWIN “BUD” SHRAKE (1931–2009), dubbed “lion of Texas letters” by the Austin American-Statesman, was a member of the Texas Film Hall of Fame and a recipient of the Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Texas Institute of Letters. He was a founding member of Mad Dog, Inc., a notoriously unruly and irreverent gathering of writers. A screenwriter with credits including Tom Horn (Steve McQueen), Kid Blue (Dennis Hopper), and Songwriter (Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson), Shrake was also the author of Blessed McGill and Strange Peaches.