Hollywood: The Oral History

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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. Because they owned the production from soup to nuts, and owned the theaters, they were able to produce as many as fifty movies a year. 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. And the idea that the movies made under the studio system, which monopolized the industry from top to bottom, from the writing to the theaters, weren't first and foremost about making money is probably the stupidest thing I've heard all week.

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. 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. 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.My favorite sections were about the old studio system and all the actors and actresses connected to the studios. The material in the book - gathered over the decades by the American Film Institute - has never been published before, has never been heard before. 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.

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. An oral history culled from thousands of interviews conducted by the American Film Institute, "Hollywood" provides lots of anecdotal material but could use a little contextual material to back up what often descends into mere chatter. Perhaps that's the point: that a mighty beast was ripped to pieces, and the vultures moved in; that once it was at least partly about art; but this might have been brought to life in a less tedious way.

She has appeared in several movie-related documentaries and completed audio commentaries on about a dozen classic films. It’s a fascinating look at the creative processes that went into bringing this medium to the public. But sources stress over and over that Mayer regarded the studio as a family with himself as pater familias. Especially because half of the last chapter was people repeatedly saying that "No one knows what is going to be successful.

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.

So that, for instance, Wilder and Blanke are chewing the fat about the Hays code over an after-dinner drink in Romanoff’s. Basinger and Wasson have carefully pieced together an oral history from the archives of interviews done over the years since 1969 by the American Film Institute. 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. 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. They're people talking about events that happened 20-40 years in the past, and so naturally there's some rose-colored glasses when they talk about the good old days and the fun they had.