With the public mostly at home thanks to the pandemic, the US trial against Heard attracted so many because it represented a court battle litigating issues much greater than just defamation. “With Depp vs Heard … what began as a salacious celebrity divorce grew into a national occupation, one that created a cultural schism and raised controversial questions,” Loudenberg and Wholey write.

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Hollywood Vampires doesn’t re-deliberate the questions posed by the trials but stresses the difficulty with taking a cut-and-dry view of this opaque legal, political, celebrity – and very human – ordeal. Where the journalists most excel is analysing the Hollywood status of the saga, demonstrating how these two stars “represent[ed] complex social problems” that so captivated public because of the charged political concerns each one came to embody or advocate.

The salacious specifics found elsewhere, however, seem complicit in the “vampiric” culture the book so condemns. Many tawdry details are included that erode the political thrust of its “goal to complicate simplistic narratives and convenient assumptions that have come to surround the Depp vs Heard controversy”. In particular, the poo-in-bed episode is especially drawn out, with unnecessary commentary included such as this: “Johnny was … just obsessed … by the poop. He kept a colour-corrected picture of it on his phone”.

By the end of Hollywood Vampires, the historical record of this turbulent celebrity epic, may be less murky and the political ramifications of the trials much sharper. But the book’s critique of the “celebrity exploitation machine” – one fuelled by new and old media, money and power – proves less compelling when so much luridness is indulged in.