Hollywood: The Oral History

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At the very least, here is testimony by over 300 industry professionals, some of whom made silent movies and are now dead, others of whom are Steven Spielberg and Jordan Peele. 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 intention behind Basinger and Wasson’s cutting-and-pasting is to produce the impression that all these interviewees are in the same room at the same time, bouncing off one another. The last third of the book discusses the end of the system and the beginning of independent movie producers. 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.

The whole book is made up of short one paragraph quotes from different Hollywood veterans beginning with comments from people who worked and created silent movies. I looked forward to reading the book because it seemed that with all the different ethnic cultures, even the real Black people from the masterpiece of racist cinema Birth of a Nation (not just the Black faced), were included. What wasn't so great was the way the interviewees talked about the studio system and the studio heads and producers. Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today. 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.Another gripe not so much with the book but with the interviewees was their attitude of "Back in my day movies were better and the process was better, kids today don't know how to make good movies. Along those same lines someone in the final chapter says movies today are all about making money, they aren't about making art anymore. In between, seminar guests talk about budget bloats and business trends, changing acting styles and changing audience tastes. For all ebook purchases, you will be prompted to create an account or login with your existing HarperCollins username and password.

With classics such as Ted Hughes's The Iron Man and award-winners including Emma Carroll's Letters from the Lighthouse, Faber Children's Books brings you the best in picture books, young reads and classics.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.

Legendary film scholar Jeanine Basinger and New York Times bestselling author Sam Wasson, both acclaimed storytellers in their own right, have undertaken the monumental task of digesting these tens of thousands of hours of talk and weaving it into a definitive portrait of workaday Hollywood. 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.

Perhaps future books could be dedicated to specific topics covered in HOLLYWOOD, offering, for example, a more in-depth look at the years before television, when movies were the only game in town. 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. 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. Much of the middle discussion is about those who ran the studios and those who worked for the studios.

Harper should be ashamed for compiling a fantastic book that fails to include two essential elements: dates and an index.There are big names (Katherine Hepburn, George Cukor, Meryl Streep, Frank Capra) and smaller names (folks in the fields of acting, cinematography, costumes, makeup) and the excerpts are pieced together masterfully to give a grand vision of Hollywood history. Hollywood: The Oral History covers the history of Hollywood from the Silent era up to the 21st century. The stars and directors are the ones who get the most attention (and money), but it takes a village, to use the phrase. 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. Know that these are interviews, and people don't always tell the complete truth in interviews, but whether they are or aren't being honest with us, the material is fascinating.