Hollywood: The Oral History

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Perhaps future books could be dedicated to specific topics covered in HOLLYWOOD, offering, for example, a more in-depth look at the years before television, when movies were the only game in town.

However, the book, maybe for the first 3/5ths or even 4/5ths, feels like the "witness" scenes in "Reds. And the result is a fat, showbiz-nerd-satisfying tome with something for every showbiz-nerd taste: on-set stories, technical details, funny anecdotes about actors, the echoes of studio executives kvetching and various people complaining about critics. Perhaps the events are too contemporary, not romanticizable, perhaps the "witnesses" are still too close to the action, but it just felt like the glamor was gone, and the stories weren't that interesting. This book has everything any movie buff could ever want: you have legendary actors talking about their jobs, you have the biggest directors discussing how they made some of the greatest movies of all time, you have make-up artists devolving secrets about what it’s like to create such extravagant characters, and you have musicians talk about how they scored some of the biggest movie soundtracks of our generation.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. This isn't so much an "oral" history as it is an edited compendium of a very, very limited cache of interviews. Divided into 17 chapters on such topics as "Beginnings," "Studio Heads," and "New Hollywood," this book addresses a myriad of topics and personalities.

But it was still really interesting reading about the early days of filmmaking, and how it transitioned into the studio system. 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.I didn't know how little I cared what Mervyn LeRoy or Bronislau Kaper thought about anything until reading this book. 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 book is fun, informative, and should appeal to pop culture enthusiasts, historians, and movie lovers of all ages and stripes. Director Billy Wilder: “There are times when I wish we still had it (censorship) because the fun has gone out of it, the game you played with them. upd2: There're still some gems here, or at least fragments of them, but I would only recommend this to somebody new to the topic, and for the most general impression of what's what in Hollywood history. Don’t break stride for killjoy contemporary questions of race, gender, socioeconomics and unconscious editorial bias in the shaping of historical narrative and maybe it is. It's just a bit mentally draining to read constant complaining about how the industry, and thus the country, is falling apart.It really shows that the average person in the early 20th century was cucked hard by capitalist structures and the idea that people with money were inherently better than people who had less money. Everything was experimental in the earliest days --- from the use of equipment to the physical actions of the actors, especially before “talkies” allowed for more than the most dramatic pantomimes. Movie fans will enjoy this extremely valuable compendium of interviews conducted with film legends by the American Film Institute (AFI) from 1969 through the 1970s). 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. It’s strictly interview snippets that apply to the time period- from silents, to talkies, to the studio system, to the 1970s, the big blockbusters, and finally the digital age.