Hollywood: The Oral History

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HOO-ray for HOLLY-wood” rings out like cathedral bells in the familiar Johnny Mercer tune. Now make way for Hollywood: The Oral History , which lumbers in like a heavy-duty print encore to that musical chestnut, ushering in a cavalcade of filmland’s dream-makers celebrating the lineage and artistry of American popular film. And it’s all thanks to the voluminous archives of the American Film Institute (AFI). Another flaw perhaps could be that the cinema reviewers are unrepresented here - only Andrew Sarris gets an entry, but nothing by the greatest of them all: Kael and Thomson, which could have graced considerably the book. CUTFORTH The contestants are all living together, by the way. And that finger-in-the-sauce chef, Ken, suffered from night terrors and woke up screaming that first night. When he finally got in a kitchen, he was sharpening his knives all over-the-top and intimidating. People were genuinely terrified of him. MINOPRIO I actually take a lot of responsibility for it. Katie was very young and inexperienced, and I did not do a good job of setting her up for success. I think I’ll always feel bad about that.

A fascinating and relaxed read for those curious about the American film industry, from the early, ad-hoc roots of silent cinema to the present transmedia era, Hollywood: An Oral Historyoffers up a staggering array of diverse industry voices from the beginning of the twentieth century. CUTFORTH Not Boston! Red tape nightmare. Teamsters slashing tires and threatening cast and crew and all sorts of stuff.

KRILEY It used to be about almost psychologically breaking someone down. How much can they endure in terms of also living in the environment? When Jo [Sharon] and I took the helm [of Magical Elves] in 2019, it was important for us to give them separate bedrooms. Many of the people involved at the start of Hollywood were only names to me, but this history helped to explain their significance and their contribution to the film industry. LIPSITZ For a long time, Food Network wouldn’t have anyone from Top Chef on the air. But the culinary landscape is just populated with people who did either Top Chef or Masters. You can’t really avoid it. GAIL SIMMONS (JUDGE) I had been at Food & Wine for exactly one year when Bravo came to our publisher and pitched a partnership the way Project Runway had done with Elle and [then-fashion director] Nina García. It felt like the right move for the magazine, but the question became, “Well, who’s going to be the guinea pig?” The guinea pig was me.

I love oral histories, but they are definitely a double edged sword. The good edge is that they record the experiences of a group of people in their own words. The bad edge is that with the passage of time the memories of the subject tend to get rose colored. SIMMONS I didn’t know what they wanted from me. There was the American Idol template at the time of the nice judge and the mean judge. That was about it. I just tried to be honest and a little provocative. a fat, showbiz-nerd-satisfying tome with something for every showbiz-nerd taste . . . . a trove of direct, un-self-conscious observations about the times and ways in which these pros worked . . . .” — New York Times LIPSITZ But Bravo didn’t have a show like this. After spending so much time with the chefs, we started talking about possibilities and pushing the network on these ancillary projects. Not just the foreign distribution, but the cookbooks, the cookware, the frozen meals, the cruise.In HOLLYWOOD, Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson have painstakingly put together a collection of interviews with these men and women, starting with the first adventurers who traveled across the country to set up shop in the wilds of California. It’s a fascinating look at the creative processes that went into bringing this medium to the public. The good cheer that “Hollywood: An Oral History” exudes extends down past the shoulders and into areas where one finds it hard to credit all the geniality. The producer Pandro Berman says blandly, “While I can well understand the anguish that writers suffered during the days when there were four and five and six writers on a film, I must say I also understand the predicament of the producer who time after time would find he couldn’t get a good screenplay from a writer and had to get certain values from other writers.” This shrugging defense of the assembly-line system is not, to put it mildly, the way that the writers saw the thing; nowhere in the book is there anything resembling Raymond Chandler’s once famous diatribe: “It is the essence of this system that it seeks to exploit a talent without permitting it the right to be a talent. It cannot be done; you can only destroy the talent, which is exactly what happens—when there is any to destroy.” Though he blew his top in his first appearance, affable French chef Hubert Keller (left of Katie Lee and Tom Colicchio) became a Top Chef fixture. David Moir/Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images