Hollywood: The Oral History

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If you're looking for a history of the Hollywood movie business, this is truly a five-star reading experience. 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.

What wasn't so great was the way the interviewees talked about the studio system and the studio heads and producers. The authors have edited the book into a giant jigsaw puzzle that is meant to feel like a free-flowing conversation, but ends up exhausting. With classics such as Ted Hughes's The Iron Man and award-winners including Emma Carroll's Letters from the Lighthouse, Faber Children's Books brings you the best in picture books, young reads and classics. Oral history is a hit or miss with me, but if a book is going to cover old Hollywood at all, I can’t seem to resist. 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.

Don't get me wrong I love golden age Hollywood movies, there are many timeless classics from that era.

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. Gossip fans may be disappointed by the relative lack of score-settling and just plain dissing, although the careful reader will find a few servings of good dish. However, the book, maybe for the first 3/5ths or even 4/5ths, feels like the "witness" scenes in "Reds. This is a tremendous set of AFI interviews with directors, producers, stars, cinematographers, composers, you name it.

Some people had name recognition, but many did not, and there aren't always context clues to piece together who they were and when they worked. 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). I had a hard time putting down the first half of the book because it was really fascinating reading about what people thought about those early days.

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. The silent film sections are fairly short and shallow (and somehow manage to spell Allan Dwan's name wrong throughout), but it's when we get onto New Hollywood and beyond that the book falls apart, in a blizzard of barely-connected anecdotes, followed by some stunningly dull material about deal-making.In among the grouchiness, though, there are a few positive souls who are determined to look on the bright side. Even Hollywood the entity didn’t begin in California, so Black Film Companies in Nebraska, Chicago, and other places were still a part of the Hollywood entity. Yes, I know this was probably an expensive book to produce and it's a long work, but spend the money, Harper, and provide an index. So that, for instance, Wilder and Blanke are chewing the fat about the Hays code over an after-dinner drink in Romanoff’s.

Much of the middle discussion is about those who ran the studios and those who worked for the studios. From the beginnings, up until the current era, everything is covered from the films, directors, producers, actors, and even make up and camera people.But the idea that movies are no longer about making art when its now easier than ever for anyone to make a movie than its ever been, allowing artists that wouldn't have had a chance in earlier eras to get a film made can do it all by themselves is just stupid.