[8] The book details alleged scandals of Hollywood stars from the silent era through to the 1960s, including Charles Chaplin, Lupe Vélez, Mary Nolan, Rudolph Valentino, Marie Prevost, Mary Astor, Wallace Reid, Olive Thomas, Jeanne Eagels, Thelma Todd, Errol Flynn, Frances Farmer, Juanita Hansen, Mae Murray, Alma Rubens, John Gilbert, Barbara La Marr, Ramon Novarro, Jean Harlow, Carole Landis, Lana Turner, Judy Garland, and Marilyn Monroe.

For example, it claimed that Clara Bow engaged in sex with the entire USC football team, including a young John Wayne, a fallacy which has been debunked several times.

[10] The book also claimed that Lupe Vélez was found drowned in her own vomit with her head in a toilet after she committed suicide by swallowing more than 500 sleeping tablets.

[12] Other debunked urban legends started by the book include claims that impoverished film star Marie Prevost's body was partially eaten by her dachshund after she died in her Hollywood apartment in 1937, and that Jayne Mansfield was decapitated in her fatal 1967 car accident.

[13] Anger acquired the "lurid, grotesque, and often surreal" images that populate the book from a variety of sources such as Hollywood still gallaries, newspapers, magazines, police archives, or his own photography collection.

For years Anger said he intended to write a Hollywood Babylon III,[8] and in a 2010 interview he claimed that the book had been finished but was placed on hold, explaining, "The main reason I didn't bring it out was that I had a whole section on Tom Cruise and the Scientologists.