Q. how did you come to write Stardust?

A. When I was writing The Good German, a novel about a city (Berlin) physically and morally devastated by the war, I became interested in what happened to the people who'd managed to get out-- the exiles who were part of the great intellectual diaspora of the 30s. I was particularly interested in the emigres who ended up in Los Angeles (Thomas Mann, Brecht, Schonberg, Stravinsky, an endless, impressive list), partly because so few of us know about their time there and partly because it seemed to me an anomaly, an inherently dramatic collision of cultures: the keepers of the High Culture of old Europe suddenly adrift in a city of soda fountains and Betty Grable movies. I also thought their perspective would be a unique way of looking at Hollywood-- which, of course, was the real subject of the book. Stardust started with the Germans, but ended up as a book about the studio system at the very height of its success (in 1946 more Americans went to the movies than would ever go again), just before it came under siege by politicians determined to use some of its stardust for their own purposes.