Hollywood: The Oral History

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For all ebook purchases, you will be prompted to create an account or login with your existing HarperCollins username and password. 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.

Oral histories work best when one aims to give voice to marginalized people, or to see how someone frames a story of their own lives in the context of larger history, and while these stories are always more "authentic", they can be full of distortions and even outright lies. 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. 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.

Authors Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson wrote an epic history book that covers every aspect of Hollywood. She is a film historian, professor of Film Studies at Wesleyan University and curator and founder of The Cinema Archives at Wesleyan University. Harper should be ashamed for compiling a fantastic book that fails to include two essential elements: dates and an index. It's a wealth of information from the people who were involved in American cinema from the very beginning until now. They were very open about their opinions - whether or not I would agree with them - and I enjoyed that they seemed to be very honest about how they felt about people and movies and studios.

I didn't know how little I cared what Mervyn LeRoy or Bronislau Kaper thought about anything until reading this book. The major studios controlled everything from the creation of the scripts, through the production (with their contract players), the final editing and they were then played in the studios own theater systems.Those who are more familiar with Garland's history may disagree, but I found these recollections convincing. 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.

My favorite sections were about the old studio system and all the actors and actresses connected to the studios. What wasn't so great was the way the interviewees talked about the studio system and the studio heads and producers. There is, however, an obvious flaw in the authors' approach: the AFI's interviewees are – by definition – history's winners; as a result they are overwhelming complimentary about people such as the studio executives, whereas those who were trampled or ruined by Mayer et al remain voiceless. If you're looking for a history of the Hollywood movie business, this is truly a five-star reading experience. There’s a section on the coming of the Hays code in the late 1920s – that censorious set of rules designed to purge Hollywood of its incipient bathtub-gin sleaziness.However, the book, maybe for the first 3/5ths or even 4/5ths, feels like the "witness" scenes in "Reds. The editing involved in “transcribing” these comments from hundreds of actors, producers, directors and camera people --- literally anyone who had a connection to the industry --- to make the reader believe that these figures were sitting down together over a drink to dish the dirt is amazing. upd2: There're still some gems here, or at least fragments of them, but I would only recommend this to somebody new to the topic, and for the most general impression of what's what in Hollywood history. In between, seminar guests talk about budget bloats and business trends, changing acting styles and changing audience tastes. 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.

Hollywood: The Oral History covers the history of Hollywood from the Silent era up to the 21st century. 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 true story of Hollywood, told not by outsiders, academics, historians, revisionists, or fantasists prone to legend, but by those who are singularly qualified to understand it, the filmmakers themselves.This oral history in particular has a fascinating look at what it takes and took to make movies from the people involved. There seemed to be a consensus that he tried to help Garland, if for no other reason than her financial value to the studio. HOLLYWOOD has the cliched “something for everyone,” but for me the most interesting part of the book was the chapter on “The Studio Workforce. Especially because half of the last chapter was people repeatedly saying that "No one knows what is going to be successful. 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.