SPORTING GUIDE

SPORTING GUIDE is brilliantly imaginative, sumptuously illustrated recreation of an 1890s Los Angeles pocket guide, or "Sporting Guide," to the brothels of the day. It is set in the world of prostitution in Los Angeles, 1897. Before there was Hollywood, before movie stars, the real power players operating in Los Angeles—madams, crib-lords, politicians and businessmen—were centered in what is now downtown LA—where industry and vice grew hand in hand.

SPORTING GUIDE is about the creation of Los Angeles and the “American Dream” on the cusp of the 20th Century as seen through the lens of sin, vice and sex. SPORTING GUIDE evokes a lost world of those on the margins of LA, of the hustlers who made it into one of the great cities of the world, and Goldwyn gives a poignant voice to people and stories lost to time. Before he glitz and glamour of Hollywood, Los Angeles was a rough place, building its way out to the global city of today. In the late nineteenth century it was a rapidly growing city filled with pimps and prostitutes, Chinese railwaymen, robbers, smugglers, and corrupt politicians. It was a city where losers and dreamers from all over the world could came to make their fortune. This era of her native city has always fascinated author, fashion icon, and filmmaker Liz Goldwyn. In a series of beautiful, haunting interlinked stories she recreates the Los Angeles of the 1890s through stories of its pimps, politicians, prostitutes—male and females—businessmen, madams and johns. She takes readers inside the bordellos and velvet curtained rooms where sex entices but power and money rule. Based on her original research in the libraries and archives of LA, these fictional stories center around real historical characters—like the famous owner of LA’s grandest brothel, Pearl Morton (whose tombstone Goldwyn discovered). Interspersed in those stories, Goldwyn writes about the historical realities of the time, from fashion to opium drug addiction to sexual practices and birth control. Publisher of Regan Arts, Judith Regan, worked with Ms. Goldwyn on her previous book, Pretty Things: The Last Generation of American Burlesque Queens (HarperCollins); Goldwyn is the writer and director of the documentary “Pretty Things” (HBO, 2005). Goldwyn is a Los Angeles-based fashionista and film world royalty (her grandfather was Samuel Goldwyn). Writer, artist, and filmmaker, her Author Liz Goldwyn is a writer, artist, and filmmaker Her short films include Underwater Ballet (2008), L.A. at Night (2009), The Painted Lady (2012) and Dear Diary (2013), most of which have premiered in conjunction with public installations in Los Angeles, New York, and Paris. Goldwyn was New York Editor of French Vogue from 2001–2002 and had a regular column in Japanese lifestyle magazine Hanatsubaki from 2000–2011. She has contributed to publications including The Financial Times, British Vogue, and Town & Country, whose September 2014 issue she guest edited. She has been commissioned as an artist and designer by M.A.C Cosmetics, Van Cleef & Arpels, and Altamont Apparel, and has designed a jewelry line under her own name as well as for feature films including Running With Scissors (2006). A collector and authority on vintage clothing since the age of 13, Goldwyn was hired as a consultant and curator for Sotheby’s newly created fashion department in 1997 while still in college. Her personal collection spans from 1860 to the present day.