Hollywood: The Oral History

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A lot of these snippets don't even say that much ("oh, he was great, just great, just awesome" might very well be the extent of somebody's opinion here), neither do they seem to be edited all that well to tell a story. the true story of Hollywood, told not by outsiders, academics, historians, revisionists, or fantasists prone to legend, but by those who are singularly qualified to understand it, the filmmakers themselves. While the comments are generally in a chronological, historical narrative, it would have been great to have an index of major film credits for each of those interviewed. 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.

Adding the year the person was interviewed wouldn't have taken up that much space, and it would've done the reader a great service. Director George Seaton remembers Montgomery Clift, that anguished soul who longed to be a method actor rather than a matinee idol. 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.

Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today. 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. Another gripe not so much with the book but with the interviewees was their attitude of "Back in my day movies were better and the process was better, kids today don't know how to make good movies. But first: The savory opening chapter draws on anecdotes from some of the now-gone greats of classic Hollywood, including Raoul Walsh, Frank Capra, Leo McCarey, Fritz Lang, Howard Hawks and Lillian Gish, schmoozing about their starts in the business. In their massive, easily readable and entertaining book, Hollywood: The Oral History, film historians Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson have imaginatively woven together excerpts of some 3,000 transcripts from the American Film Institute’s archive of industry interviews.

The author then tries to tie it together with a few quotes at the end about the magic of the movie business, which doesn't really land because of the preceding 250 pages of incessant demoralizing complaining. At least 2/3 of the book concentrates on "old Hollywood" into the 1960s, and that's fine with me, as "new" Hollywood isn't really Hollywood anymore. This is a really good read for movie buffs, but "Hollywood: The Oral History" could have been a truly great book. Two Black movies were mentioned Carmen Jones, though only the word Carmen was mentioned along with Diahann Carroll’s name though she was only a supporting character.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.