Hollywood: The Oral History

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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. In between, seminar guests talk about budget bloats and business trends, changing acting styles and changing audience tastes. HOLLYWOOD has the cliched “something for everyone,” but for me the most interesting part of the book was the chapter on “The Studio Workforce.

The book is fun, informative, and should appeal to pop culture enthusiasts, historians, and movie lovers of all ages and stripes. The other complaint I have is that although there is a list at the beginning of everyone who was interviewed and what their job was, it would have been nice to have their principle job listed next to their name when there is a quote by them. The book is especially strong on the silent era, studio system (pro and con), movie moguls (ditto) and, strangely, the independent film movement of the late 60s. 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.

Marilyn Monroe gets a few pages; Gary Cooper a few; Humphrey Bogart one or two; the blacklist years, a few; often there are accounts given that take up several pages, and these are often entertaining but just as often contain a majority of hearsay and defensiveness regarding the Hollywood we "think" we know.

I absolutely loved learning about the history of Hollywood and what some of the most popular people in the industry had to say about it. Had I not just read about Madge Oberholzer, the woman who brought down the KKK in Indiana early in the 20th century, and learned of D. Especially because half of the last chapter was people repeatedly saying that "No one knows what is going to be successful.Published in 2022, this is a massive book of personal quotes and stories by people connected with the film industry from back when it started until today. Ended as a bunch of old men complaining about ‘how things were better in the olden days,’ and how the sexual violence problem in the industry ‘was not that bad. So that, for instance, Wilder and Blanke are chewing the fat about the Hays code over an after-dinner drink in Romanoff’s. Harper should be ashamed for compiling a fantastic book that fails to include two essential elements: dates and an index. 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 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 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. One section literally just has speakers listing great films from the era, one speaker after the other, as if this were a novelization of a docuseries. What wasn't so great was the way the interviewees talked about the studio system and the studio heads and producers.Nine hours into the book, from late 19th century through 5 decades of the 20th century, there was finally mention of a Black director – Gordon Parks.