A Hollywood motel humming with the comings and goings of strivers and the lost. A cop bar teetering on the edge of a notorious police scandal. A drugged-out teenage literary "It Girl" played by an increasingly panicked 30something fabulist. These very real characters, with their tenuous grasp on reality, are the human energy fueling L.A.’s dream factory, and the objects of journalist Nancy Rommelmann’s observant, empathetic, Faye Dunaway-sized eyes. Forty Bucks and a Dream captures the surrealism of 1990s and 2000s Los Angeles, with such archetypical figures as the Beverly Hills bikini waxer nostalgic for her pageant days, the Mexican gardener eating soft-shell tacos on the plush hillside he cultivates for a movie star, and the skeezy producer with an allegedly enormous penis. All have come to Los Angeles through different paths but almost always on the same quest: to transform from a nobody into someone worthy of adulation and love. Through her affectionate and sometimes hauntingly painful portraits, Rommelmann captures a city in transition, powered as ever by the intoxicant of fame, and populated by people finally having their stories told by someone with eyes big enough to take them in and then, bring them to us. "Right about the time that Joan Didion packed her bags and left LA, Nancy Rommelmann arrived and picked up the story. Here are the residents of Saharan Motor Hotel, and the star struck young people who still arrive in waves with dreams that are almost always crushed before they find a studio apartment. Here are the cop bars and the audition rooms and what counts for daycare at the Playboy Mansion. With a great sense of what makes a story an LA story, with tremendous style, and lots of shoe leather reporting, this book is a winner from the first page to the last. I loved it."- Caitlin Flanagan, author of Girl Land and To Hell With All That "Reading Forty Bucks and a Dream I felt, once again, what it is to be young and new to a city: alive to every conversation, open to each encounter, ready to worm yourself into the innermost room and watch the world unwind. Rommelmann lets her subjects talk , and as they work themselves out on the page we see the kind of layered complexity lesser essayists are apt to deny us. This book is entrancing, accomplished, and edifying, a deep burrow into a city that likes to think it stays on the surface." - Kerry Howley, author of Thrown and Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State " Forty Bucks and a Dream: Stories from Los Angeles , by Nancy Rommelmann, is a harrowing, wistful, funny, disturbing, and ultimately transcendent anthology by a journalist who cracks words onto the page like Barbara Stanwyck cracked the whip in Ball of Fire --you feel the sting and the excitement of being alive. Her Hollywood is filled with nameless emigres, bigshot poseurs, and regular folks like you and me; irresistibly promising but always just a few short hours away from the sort of inevitable, blinding dawn that kills dreams along with vampires... Highly recommended."- Nick Gillespie, Reason Magazine