The copyright page states, "Portions of this book appeared in different form in Film Culture, London Magazine, Image, and Sight and Sound".
The first edition includes an introduction by New Yorker editor William Shawn, an afterword, "A Witness Speaks," by film historian Lotte H. Eisner, as well as a condensed filmography and illustrations.
In the year 2000, aided in part by a grass-roots campaign led by the Louise Brooks Society, Lulu in Hollywood was republished in an expanded edition by the University of Minnesota Press.
It was expanded to include an eighth essay by Brooks, "Why I Will Never Write My Memoirs,” while Shawn's introduction was replaced by Kenneth Tynan's 1979 New Yorker profile, “The Girl in the Black Helmet”.
Writing in Esquire magazine, James Wolcott described Lulu in Hollywood as "A tart, fleet, gossipy book, a whip-flicking display of wit and spite," adding "In Lulu in Hollywood, Brooks writes about her contemporaries with a darting precision and down-to-earth compassion that make the mythologizing of most movie commentators sound like so much hot wheeze.
Louise Brooks emerges not as a white goddess wreathed in incense, but as a sassy companion, wisecracking, knowledgeable, completely free of cant and coy sentiment.
The appendix states: "The major and minor errors in Lulu in Hollywood cited here have been identified by Kevin Brownlow, William K. Everson, Jane Sherman Lehac, George Pratt, Lawrence Quirk, Anthony Slide, Alexander Walker, and the author, among others."
They're sharp about Hollywood's definitions of success and failure, about how actors are manipulated by their employers and pigeonholed by the press.... Brooks still shimmers as a rare loner who traveled down that road, her life in ruins -- and then came back.
Pabst’s 1929 drama Pandora’s Box, in which her Lulu, a ferocious flapper with a pageboy haircut, seduced and abandoned all men who dared stand in her path.