Hollywood: The Oral History

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I felt flummoxed around page 250, when I realized there would be no real structure to the book, just the same 20-30 people talking until the authors run out of steam.

This is a tremendous set of AFI interviews with directors, producers, stars, cinematographers, composers, you name it. In addition, she is a trustee emeritus of the American Film Institute, a member of the Steering Committee of the National Center for Film and Video Preservation, and one of the Board of Advisors for the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers. Movie fans may get lost in the technical details offered up by costume designers, cameramen, editors and cinematographars, just to name a few.

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. 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. And that is just great, because it feels like Hollywood has this sort of hush hush nature about it, the golden age in particular. Hollywood: The Oral History covers the history of Hollywood from the Silent era up to the 21st century.

The size of this book was intimidating, but once you dive in, you’ll see that these authors needed to cover so much ground within this industry that this book size was necessary. Along those same lines someone in the final chapter says movies today are all about making money, they aren't about making art anymore. What emerges are chapters that feel like a series of panel discussions involving some 368 named Hollywood filmmakers in dialogues concerning subjects ranging from various forms of film formats; genres and technologies, the art; craft and personalities of various studio personnel, the rise and fall of the Hollywood studio system to today’s “product,” covering more than one hundred years of American film history. The stars and directors are the ones who get the most attention (and money), but it takes a village, to use the phrase.Basinger and Wasson have gathered figures critical to the film industry's development far beyond mere stars (think directors, some producers and a raft of technicians/artists) who made it all work. Film historians Basinger and Wasson splice and dice 10,000 hours of interviews conducted by the American Film Institute since 1969, as they chart Hollywood's evolution from a ramshackle start-up in an orange grove to the agent-dominated industry of today. So far the actual stories (or rather bits and pieces of them put together in sort of a digest of different voices) are quite fun and lively, but they also lack substance, it's just a collection of loosely connected anecdotes. 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.

Between them, Basinger and Wasson have published nearly 20 books on the stars and overviews of various films and genres, so I can’t imagine two people better qualified to collaborate on this entertaining volume. Then it's people complaining about filmmaking in the 70s, then the 80s, then the 90s, and by the end it's modern filmmakers and actors talking about the "good old days" of the 90s. First off, the intro claims that events told by their participants are necessarily more true and generally superior, but anyone even remotely familiar with oral histories knows that this just isn't the way it works.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. The book is fun, informative, and should appeal to pop culture enthusiasts, historians, and movie lovers of all ages and stripes. As much fun as it is, the book faces the inherent dilemma of oral history -- the lack of a coherent narrative. Quibbles aside, it's fascinating to learn what legendary directors like Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, and George Cukor have to say about their movies and the work of others. With the conversations of more than 3,000 guest speakers to choose from, of course, the organizing structure is key.

All the film scholars (and even non-film scholars who are simply inquisitive) I know are up in arms over the book's lack of an index. Harper should be ashamed for compiling a fantastic book that fails to include two essential elements: dates and an index. First it's the people from the first half of the book complaining about the destruction of the studio system and filmmaking in (I think - there are no dates beyond saying the interviews started in 1969, so one has to use context clues) the 60's. It's great to read the first=person insights of legends like Frank Capra, Bette Davis, Alfred Hitchcock, and Harold Lloyd as well as many men and women you may have never heard of, but who made enormous contributions to the movies. It's often the impression I got reading, that the person who we'd actually like to be hearing from, who might actually have been in the room or who might have had some insight, just didn't figure into the trove of interviews Wasson and Basinger worked from.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. In between, seminar guests talk about budget bloats and business trends, changing acting styles and changing audience tastes. Two caveats: you have to be very familiar with Hollywood's history to recognize many of the "speakers", and there is no index provided. But something about the relaxed setting — peer to peer, with no scholar-with-a-theory, journalist, critic ( eww) or pop-culture blogger asking questions, hankering to publish the answers embellished by descriptions of the talker’s wardrobe or salad-eating habits — has resulted in a trove of direct, un-self-conscious observations about the times and ways in which these pros worked. 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.