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Summary
Summary
The real story of Hollywood as told by such luminaries as Steven Spielberg, Frank Capra, Katharine Hepburn, Meryl Streep, Harold Lloyd, and nearly four hundred others, assembled from the American Film Institute's treasure trove of interviews, reveals a fresh history of the American movie industry from its beginnings to today.
From the archives of the American Film Institute comes a unique picture of what it was like to work in Hollywood from its beginnings to its present day. Gleaned from nearly three thousand interviews, involving four hundred voices from the industry, Hollywood: The Oral History, lets a reader "listen in" on candid remarks from the biggest names in front of the camera--Bette Davis, Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Harold Lloyd--to the biggest behind it--Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg, Alfred Hitchcock, Jordan Peele, as well as the lesser known individuals that shaped what was heard and seen on screen: musicians, costumers, art directors, cinematographers, writers, sound men, editors, make-up artists, and even script timers, messengers, and publicists. The result is like a conversation among the gods and goddesses of film: lively, funny, insightful, historically accurate and, for the first time, authentically honest in its portrait of Hollywood. It's the insider's story.
Legendary film scholar Jeanine Basinger and New York Times bestselling author Sam Wasson, both acclaimed storytellers in their own right, have undertaken the monumental task of digesting these tens of thousands of hours of talk and weaving it into a definitive portrait of workaday Hollywood.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The secrets of Tinseltown burn bright in this collection of interviews culled from the American Film Institute's archives and assembled by film scholar Basinger (The Movie Musical!) and author Wasson (Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.). The technical process of filmmaking is expertly explored, and discussions about publicity highlight the work style of individual directors (John Ford "gave in to nobody," says cinematographer Ray Rennahan) and the charisma of legendary stars such as Marlon Brando. A narrative arc emerges from the hubbub, tracing the freshness of the silent era to the grandeur of the golden age studio system--the "beautiful machinery" of MGM is hymned for its excellent production values and nurturing of new talent--to the modern era of independent producers, high-earning leading actors, and summer blockbusters. The commentary crackles with humorous anecdotes and acerbic insights on topics such as screenplays ("There mustn't be too much description, because get bored when they read words," says director and writer Abraham Polonsky) and stunt work ("I used to get $25 every time I jumped a horse off a cliff," says 1920s actor Hoot Gibson). The result is a fascinating conversation about Hollywood's magical blending of art and commerce. Agent: David P. Halpern, Robbins Office. (Nov.)
Guardian Review
The American Film Institute (AFI) is where Hollywood's collective memory lives. Anyone who was (or still is) anyone, from Harold Lloyd to Barbra Streisand, has had their brain hoovered and the results transcribed and deposited in the AFI's vaults for safekeeping. Distinguished film historian Jeanine Basinger and journalist Sam Wasson have been granted access to these treasures, from which they have stitched together what they call "an oral history of Hollywood". In other words, here are 400 cinema insiders, including directors, makeup people and actors, recounting what it has been like to make-believe for a living. The result is fascinating in all the ways you might expect and some you wouldn't. The fact, for instance, that many of the early Hollywood men were first world war veterans (from both sides) who had been trained in aerial photography and wanted to carry on doing something similar on civvy street. They had, of course, also been through hell and yearned to build an alternative moral universe where good trounced evil and there was always a loyal, pretty girl waiting patiently at the end. As for why the West Coast was picked for this new enterprise, Henry Blanke, producer of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, explains: "There was eternal sun here. The lenses were slow. The film was slow. Everything was slow, and you needed sun. Sun. Plenty of it." Later, when sound came in, the fact that Hollywood was a "wilderness" helped enormously. "Sunset Boulevard wasn't even paved", which cut down on the rumble of the traffic, remembers one old-time agent. This attitude of making the best of things extended in all directions. There's a section on the coming of the Hays code in the late 1920s - that censorious set of rules designed to purge Hollywood of its incipient bathtub-gin sleaziness. Now no one could get naked on screen, kiss with tongues or impugn someone else's mother. To make matters even trickier, the rules were applied differently in each state, with the result, says Blanke, that "you never recognised the picture you had made from one state to another. It was terrible." Billy Wilder, on the other hand, recalls the Hays code fondly: "There are times when I wish we still had it because the fun has gone out of it ¿ We had to be clever. In order to say, 'You son of a bitch,' you had to say, 'If you had a mother, she'd bark.'" A word about the methodology. The intention behind Basinger and Wasson's cutting-and-pasting is to produce the impression that all these interviewees are in the same room at the same time, bouncing off one another. So that, for instance, Wilder and Blanke are chewing the fat about the Hays code over an after-dinner drink in Romanoff's. Whereas, in fact, the two men were interviewed on different occasions and with no knowledge of what others might say. Some of the time this careful splicing and intercutting works in the way that the writers want it to, so that the effect is of a high-level symposium of Hollywood's great and good. At other times the result is disjointed and resembles a scene in which acquaintances keep on mishearing each other in a noisy restaurant. Nonetheless, the revelations keep coming. There's Meryl Streep kvetching about how she likes to get done in four takes while Robert De Niro just goes on and on. Michael Ovitz mourns the fact that Hello, Dolly! was a huge disaster: "I mean, it cost $25 million. That would be like three or four hundred million bucks today. I mean, it almost sank the company." Director George Seaton remembers Montgomery Clift, that anguished soul who longed to be a method actor rather than a matinee idol. During the shooting of The Search, Clift insists on bringing his Russian acting coach to the set, which freaks everyone out. Then there is Gene Kelly, the man who put brawn into modern musical masculinity, confessing that he would love to have had the boneless body of Buster Keaton: "I often wish I did. He was a complete genius, and there was a lot of dance inherently in his movements. They were balletic." Inevitably, at times the pseudo-conversation can start to seem like a lot of old men grumbling. Ismail Merchant complains that executives are here today and gone tomorrow. Mike Nichols says that the only plot "they" want these days is Cinderella or Rocky. Jack Nicholson pops in to say that the pancakes at the International House of Pancakes on Sunset are not what they once were. In among the grouchiness, though, there are a few positive souls who are determined to look on the bright side. Fay Wray, who in 1933 squirmed in the sweltering paw of King Kong, is happy to reflect that at least now the studios have air conditioning, which is a complete joy and a wonderful protection against that eternal, necessary sun.
Kirkus Review
More than 300 film professionals tell the story of the world's most prominent movie industry. In 1969, the American Film Institute began the Harold Lloyd Master seminars, "intimate conversations between Hollywood professionals and AFI conservatory students," named for its first participant. For this book, Basinger and Wasson "were granted total and unprecedented access to the AFI's seminars, oral histories, and complete archives" to make what they call "the only comprehensive firsthand history of Hollywood." This massive book contains thousands of quotes from producers, actors, directors, composers, and other professionals that span the earliest days of flammable celluloid and the studio system to the current freelance world of digital filmmaking and special effects. The authors only intermittently provide historical context and avoid commenting directly on speakers' recollections. Consequently, readers must take the stories on faith, a fraught prospect when dealing with luminaries such as Fritz Lang, who was notorious for embellishing facts, or elderly director Tay Garnett, who began a reminiscence with, "I'll never forget one D.W. Griffith picture, I'm not sure what the title was." For a comprehensive history, important details are missing, revealing the perils of letting people speak without providing perspective. Prominent figures offer praise of Griffith's contributions to early cinema--he "discovered the close-up" and gave film "the form and grammar it has today"--yet not a word about the jaw-dropping racism in films such as The Birth of a Nation (1915). For cinephiles, however, this volume is a gold mine of production details, backroom deals, and inside gossip. There are surprising revelations--e.g., Joan Crawford was more beloved than her reputation for derangement would have one believe--and memorably graphic stories, as when Billy Wilder noted that during the filming of Greed (1924), Erich von Stroheim "stopped shooting for three days because there wasn't enough horseshit in the streets" and forced staff to collect more for him "because that's what he wanted. Plenty of good horseshit." Fun firsthand accounts from 100 years of Hollywood history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
For fans of film history, this is an event: film historians Basinger and Wasson teaming up to take us through the history of Hollywood (and, by extension, the American motion picture industry). Drawn from the files of the American Film Institute, assembled from nearly 10,000 hours of conversations with more than 3,000 people from the early days of motion pictures right up to the present day, this magnificent oral history features contributions by such luminaries as directors Raoul Walsh and Steven Spielberg; screenwriters Nunnally Johnson and Nora Ephron; editors Dede Allen and Verna Fields; cinematographers Stanley Cortez and László Kovács; composers Elmer Bernstein and John Williams; actors Henry Fonda and Jeff Goldblum; and dozens of producers, composers, critics, art directors, costume designers, studio executives, film historians, and so forth. It's all here: the rise and fall of the studio system; the evolution from a place where virtually anyone could get a job just by banging on the door to a rigidly controlled industry; the shift of control from producers to actors; the increasing power wielded by the agents; the backroom deals, the behind-the-scenes intrigue, and the transformation of an entire nation. As close to a comprehensive Who's Who of American film as we're likely to see, and as close to a definitive history of American cinema as we've seen so far. An absolute must-read for industry pros and fans alike.
Library Journal Review
Film writers Basinger (The Star Machine) and Wasson (The Big Goodbye) synthesize (for general readers and cinema cognoscenti) their sleuthing of primary sources--nearly 3,000 transcripts of interviews with hundreds of movie people found in the American Film Institute's archives. Ranging from the silent film era (an ongoing recollection project began in 1969 as the Harold Lloyd Master Seminar series) through the present, this compilation includes actors, directors, and producers as well as essential, often overlooked support personnel--agents, editors, writers, makeup and wardrobe artists, musicians, and publicists--forming a more perfect picture of the entertainment enterprise. While underscoring too frequent stereotypical gender expectations (fewer, surprisingly, during the early days), there is little mention of actual sexual harassment. This edited, conversational retrospective contains much on changes in the industry as experienced by those in it, such as the transition to sound, the waning of censorship after the Production Code and McCarthyism, the use of digital technology, and the challenge of immediate reviews through the blogosphere. VERDICT Recommended for the large audience of popular culture enthusiasts for whom knowledge of the Hollywood past will enable them better to appreciate occurring and anticipated industry changes.--Frederick J. Augustyn Jr.
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. ix |
| The Speakers | p. x |
| Chapter 1 Beginnings | p. 1 |
| Chapter 2 Comedy | p. 37 |
| Chapter 3 Silent Directors | p. 54 |
| Chapter 4 Silent Actors | p. 84 |
| Chapter 5 Sound! | p. 100 |
| Chapter 6 Studio Heads | p. 129 |
| Chapter 7 Studio Style | p. 183 |
| Chapter 8 The Studio Workforce | p. 202 |
| Cameramen | p. 211 |
| Writers | p. 221 |
| Editors | p. 233 |
| Costume | p. 238 |
| Makeup | p. 250 |
| Music | p. 259 |
| Art Direction | p. 275 |
| Studio Personnel | p. 282 |
| Directors | p. 296 |
| Stars | p. 351 |
| Chapter 9 The Product | p. 464 |
| Chapter 10 The End of the System | p. 485 |
| Chapter 11 Identity Crisis | p. 517 |
| Chapter 12 New Hollywood | p. 551 |
| Chapter 13 The Creep Up | p. 592 |
| Chapter 14 The Deal | p. 627 |
| Chapter 15 Packaging | p. 660 |
| Chapter 16 Everybody's Business | p. 690 |
| Chapter 17 Monsters | p. 711 |
| Afterword | p. 741 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 743 |
