Hollywood: The Oral History

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the times of their young lives (while birthing the nascent art of cinematic storytelling on the fly), 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. This is a tremendous set of AFI interviews with directors, producers, stars, cinematographers, composers, you name it. It's a wealth of information from the people who were involved in American cinema from the very beginning until now. Know that these are interviews, and people don't always tell the complete truth in interviews, but whether they are or aren't being honest with us, the material is fascinating. COHEN In Emeryville! I remember it so clearly. It was the week that Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor came out…

Standout, classic and influential films (for better or worse) that are captured include: "Gone With the Wind", "Citizen Kane", "The Magnificent Ambersons", "The Godfather", "The Wizard of Oz", "Jaws", "Star Wars", "Kramer vs Kramer", "Casablanca", Westerns by John Ford; films of Martin Scorsese, George Stevens, and a whole slew of pictures made from the 1970s, as Hollywood shifts from the studio system into what it is today. Also, I was glad to read about the breakdown of the studio system through an extensive interview with actresses Bette Davis, (who attempted to) and with Olivia de Havilland, (who succeeded) in making it possible to break the way studios employed actors. And so we’re used to seeing the steady, pained smile and middle-distance gaze of a moviemaker being told by a movie lover how movies are made: we praise the dazzling dialogue of the screenwriter (whose draft was never used, but who won the credit through arbitration, while all the good lines were written the night before by the director’s pet script doctor) and the mastery of the film editor (though the scene of the helicopter swooping down the canyon of buildings was storyboarded by the second-unit art director, while the editor’s real work was managing to excise the cough of the leading man without damaging continuity) and how sensitive the director was with the women leads (whom he could barely stand to be in the same room with). In truth, we don’t know who did what. That’s why we are so drawn to the kind of guild knowledge that oral histories sporadically supply. There were other fascinating points in the book, but listing them would take too much time. Eventually, we exit the Silent Era and find Hollywood in the 1970s and 1980s. We find interviews with people I recognize, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Roger Corman, Clint Eastwood, Quentin Tarantino, and more. As primary sources for a book *on* Hollywood, these interviews would be useful. Pitched as an "oral history", this confuses in the way only pandemic projects do. This isn't so much an "oral" history as it is an edited compendium of a very, very limited cache of interviews. To fill in the gaps, authors Sam Wasson and Jeanine Basinger awkwardly introduce their own "voices", as if they are a part of the oral "conversation" (i.e. "Sam Wasson: And this was really saying something, because for the next 10 years, so-and-so would produce sixty-two films with Metro...")

SIMMONS I didn’t know what they wanted from me. There was the American Idol template at the time of the nice judge and the mean judge. That was about it. I just tried to be honest and a little provocative.

ANDY COHEN (FORMER SENIOR VP PROGRAMMING, BRAVO) We didn’t want it to be a rip-off, but we wanted to do for food what we had done for fashion with Project Runway. “An elevated food competition,” that was my mandate. Beyond that, it was pretty open as to what the show could look like — though it was obvious we’d do it with Dan Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz at Magical Elves [the production company] because of their work on Runway.This is a wonderful treasure trove of anecdotes about Hollywood, from its beginnings until today. Except, I actually found this book to be more reflective and accurately represent Hollywood from the 1920s until the 1970s (some anecdotes are in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s-22). Basinger and Wasson have painstakingly taken interviews from Hollywood luminaries, business and production insiders, directors, producers, actresses, actors and screenwriters who have created indelible, unforgettable art, captured forever on celluloid. Therealstory of Hollywood as told by such luminaries as Steven Spielberg, Frank Capra, Bette Davis, 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. MINOPRIO That first season was just relentless. I don’t think I had a day off for three months. Everyone involved was, in retrospect, really overworked. LAKSHMI They’re already sleep-deprived. They don’t have phones or access to the internet. It is still a very intense and controlled existence. I don’t know that I would put myself through it or even recommend it to friends.

SIMMONS Food Network is almost exclusively dessert and baking competitions now — so I have to believe, if we made Top Chef: Just Desserts again today, 10 years later, it would be received differently. It is a dream come true that such a volume would be written or, rather, meticulously pieced together. The editors did a masterful job creating a century-long conversation. It is unfortunate that with some major stars, negatives outweighed the positives. Did I learn that Judy Garland could take one look at a script and have it memorized? That she could hear director’s notes and incorporate them all impeccably into the next scene? What made her one of the brightest stars? This book won’t tell you. Rather, the focus is on her being late and a few around her questioning whether and to what degree she may have been mentally ill. Mayer is entirely let off the hook.Surely the most comprehensive portrait of America’s dream factory ever committed to paper.” — The Guardian (UK) The Silent Era was interesting since they didn't have to have good voices. You could pantomime everything, and it would be hilarious. Then talkies came out, and everyone wanted sound in their movies. No one knew how to do anything with sound at all.