David Wurtzel ’70 has just published his second novel, The Chosen City: Hollywood in the 1930s, with Discript Ltd. (available on Amazon). Having been born in Hollywood himself, David has taken inspiration from his own family’s involvement in the motion picture industry over the last century. The narrator, Bobby, is the outsider member of a Jewish family who own and run a studio. After four years at Yale keeping up with a smart, moneyed set of amoral young men, he takes a lowly job at the studio. But his past catches up with him thanks to a novel written by a friend in which the protagonist is a thinly disguised Bobby and which the studio plans to turn into a major motion picture. Catapulted into the role of writer and then director, he nevertheless finds it impossible to escape his past. Thanks to the experience of his junior year abroad, David went to live in England, studied law at Cambridge, and became a barrister and a Bencher of his Inn of Court.
