Mick LaSalle and Richard Wolinsky will discuss LaSalle’s new book, Dream State: California in the Movies, and answer audience questions.

Dream State is a freewheeling journey through several dozen big-screen visions of the Golden State, with LaSalle’s unmistakable contrarian humor as the guide. His writing, unerringly perceptive and resistant to cliché, brings clarity to the haze of Hollywood’s self-regard.

It hardly needs to be argued: nothing has contributed more to the mythology of California than the movies. Fed by the film industry, the California dream is instantly recognizable to people everywhere yet remains elusive for nearly everyone, including Californians themselves. That paradox is the subject of longtime San Francisco Chronicle film critic Mick LaSalle’s first book in nine years. The opposite of a dry historical primer, Dream State is a freewheeling journey through several dozen big-screen visions of the Golden State, with LaSalle’s unmistakable contrarian humor as the guide. His writing, unerringly perceptive and resistant to cliché, brings clarity to the haze of Hollywood reverie and self-regard. He leaps effortlessly between genres and generations, moving with ease from Double Indemnity to the first two versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers to Boyz n the Hood to Booksmart. There are natural disasters, heinous crimes, dubious utopias, dangerous romances, and unforgettable nights. Equally entertaining and unsettling, this book is a bold dissection of the California dream and how it shaped the modern world.

Mick LaSalle, longtime film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, is the author of three previous books: Complicated Women: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of Modern Man; Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man, and The Beauty of The Real: What Hollywood Can Learn from Contemporary French Actresses. Richard Wolinsky, a veteran radio broadcaster, is the host of Bookwaves and Arts-Waves interviews and discussions on KPFA, as well as his Probabilities series of extended archive interviews on literature, theater, film, and other visual arts from a progressive viewpoint.