The 12 best novels about filmmaking, Part 2

6. Blue Movie, Terry Southern (1970)

Award-winning director Boris Adrian 'a film-maker - in the tradition of Chaplin, Bergman, Fellini' decides to make a stag film 'that's really good', in this Hollywood satire from the co-author of Candy (1958). 'I've got to find out… how far you can take the aesthetically erotic… suppose the film were made under studio conditions - feature-length, colour, beautiful actors, great lighting, strong plot… how would it look then?' Flown to Liechtenstein by his producer, Adrian gets his chance to fulfill an urge that's overtaken directors from Stanley Kubrick (Southern worked on the script for Dr Strangelove) to Lars von Trier.

5. The Day of the Locust, Nathaniel West (1939)

'West's Hollywood is made up of degeneracy and brothels, of failure and sexual desire, of cock-fighting and third-rate boarding houses,' says Alan Ross in his introduction to Picador's collection of the one-time screenwriter and contemporary of Scott Fitzgerald's work. Locust follows aspiring actress Faye Greener and the men who flock around her: set painter Tod Hackett, a cock-fighting Mexican and his cowboy extra friend, and a hapless clerk - Homer Simpson. It may have served as inspiration for AM Homes's This Book Will Save Your Life (2006).

4. The Last Tycoon, F Scott Fitzgerald (1941)

Hollywood loves films about filmmaking, so it was never going to forego the chance to shoot a script based on a work by one of America's greatest writers, even if Fitzgerald's novel was unfinished on his death in 1940. Robert De Niro and Theresa Russell were among the stars for Elia Kazan's 1976 movie set in Hollywood's golden age of the 1930s, inspired by MGM mogul Irving Thalberg. Fitzgerald had also worked in Hollywood, and previously mined the territory in his Pat Hobby stories.

3. The Book of Illusions, Paul Auster (2002)

American author Auster is rightly celebrated for his early novels, notably the New York Trilogy, but hopefully not at the expense of this powerful, more recent work. Grief-stricken professor David Zimmer receives an invitation to visit the elderly subject of Zimmer's film studies monograph, The Silent World of Hector Mann. For the last 50 years, Mann has been making films in secret on his New Mexico ranch, all of which are due to be incinerated within 24 hours of Mann's death. In an imaginative tour de force, Auster - who's made films himself - creates a shimmering back catalogue for his and Zimmer's mutual subject.

2. Remainder, Tom McCarthy (2005)

What happens when movie fiction becomes more real to us than our own experience, the brilliant Tom McCarthy asks in his debut novel (cf news events that are described as being like a film). Following a freak accident, Remainder's narrator lands an enormous amount of money, which he uses to create ever more elaborate sets and scenarios to bolster his sense of authenticity; 'Even before the accident, if I'd been walking down the street just like De Niro, smoking a cigarette like him… I'd still be thinking: Here I am walking down the street, smoking a cigarette, like someone in a film.'

1. Flicker, Theodore Roszak (1991)

History professor Roszak's book is tremendous: a student investigating the films of German B-movie director Max Castle uncovers a plot involving Orson Welles, Cathar knights and subliminal messages planted in films, which are portrayed as encapsulating the perpetual battle between good and evil (black and white/light). An unsurpassable mix of fanboy thrills and the sort of playful erudition espoused by Umberto Eco, it has long been rumoured to be a project for director Darren Aronofsky.

Part one is here

Darren Aronofsky's parents terribles

The only sustained negative response to Darren Aronofsky's storming Black Swan has come from ballet practitioners, taken to screenings by journalists who thought this would be a ripping wheeze. It's a trick that could be applied to most movies: get a mountain climber to review 127 Hours, council-estate drug-dealers on Trainspotting or Princes Charles, William and Harry to hold forth on The King's Speech, as if all that matters in filmmaking is its veracity.

Dancers have been particularly vexed by Natalie Portman's shining performance as the lead, Nina, in Black Swan, though they give the impression of protesting too much. One group you wouldn't want to analyse Aronofsky's oeuvre too closely is parents, and certainly not mothers, who are routinely portrayed as mad-eyed bags of unrestrained neuroses.

Barbara Hershey, as Nina's mother in Black Swan, never rose beyond the corps de ballet, we're told, instead channeling her ambition through her daughter. She's domineering, emotionally manipulative and bent on infantilising her sweet-voiced child. In Requiem for a Dream (2000), Ellen Burstyn is the unhappy mother addicted to daytime TV who becomes hooked on a weight-loss drug that first inspires horrifying hallucinations and ultimately reduces her to human jelly.

The one redemptive figure is Marisa Tomei's stripper-with-a-heart-of-gold (pictured) in The Wrestler (2008) but here, again, parenthood doesn't get an easy ride. In the eponymous central role, Mickey Rourke - skin as taut as Hershey's in Aronofsky's latest - is a failed father to daughter Stephanie, who he repeatedly lets down and also still sees as a child. Clearly on the side of Philip Larkin parents-wise, Aronofsky would be a revelation at the helm if the world is forced to endure yet another Meet the Fockers spin-off: They Fock You Up.