Hollywood: The Oral History

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LAKSHMI I wasn’t really, and still am not, a reality TV connoisseur. But they said, “Would you be interested in being a part of this show that we’re developing?” I said, “Sure.”

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.The authors have had the good sense to count with the stories not only of the stars and the well-known names (all those mentioned above and then some more) but also with a myriad of other talented men and women that, literally, made Hollywood. These are the composers, art directors, tailors and film editors, largely represented here, and deservedly so. He’s someone who people return to. Even if you're making movies in 2022, you think about Irving Thalberg. I haven't seen the movie Babylon , and I imagine you haven't either, but as far as I understand it, he's the only real person who's a character in that movie, which FLYNN In London, we were like “We’re here! It’s Top Chef!” And they’re like, “That’s lovely… what does that mean?” Kudos to Frances, because all shows are fighting for budgets right now. This season is a bit of an anomaly in terms of the spend. LIPSITZ We just used “Top Chef” over and over again, like, “Something great is going to come right at the end!” That never happened. Now it’s hard to imagine any other title for it. “HOW IS THIS GOING OFF THE RAILS ON DAY ONE?” COLICCHIO A good home cook, I don’t care how good you are, can’t compete with a trained chef that’s been working in restaurants for 10 years.

MINOPRIO That first season was just relentless. I don’t think I had a day off for three months. Everyone involved was, in retrospect, really overworked. 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 As primary sources for a book * 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.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 The contestants were almost harder to cast because of the hideousness of the release forms. I’m fairly sure that it contained language like, “We can shoot you with hidden cameras.” This is, of course, protecting the production against things we had no intention of doing. It’s all the NBCU lawyers. But it’s scary. Having Tom reassured the chefs. SERWATKA The Marcel thing was tough, but I wasn’t necessarily worried about it. That finale was great. MARCEL VIGNERON (CHEF, SEASONS TWO AND EIGHT) I was 24 then. I’ve since gone through a lot of personal growth. SERWATKA Naming a show is so arduous, and you go through all these options. The only alternative I remember was Grillers in the Mist.

As primary sources for a book *on* Hollywood, these interviews would be useful. Pitched as an "oral history", this confuses in the way only pandemic projects do. This isn't so much an "oral" history as it is an edited compendium of a very, very limited cache of interviews. To fill in the gaps, authors Sam Wasson and Jeanine Basinger awkwardly introduce their own "voices", as if they are a part of the oral "conversation" (i.e. "Sam Wasson: And this was really saying something, because for the next 10 years, so-and-so would produce sixty-two films with Metro...")

The quotes are quite interesting and give the reader a lay of the land during various periods in Hollywood over the years. It also gives one a look at the Hollywood system from the beginning through to the digital age. It does not cover the streaming era, though. Still, it might enlighten those who want to blow off actors’ current complaints, by educating one on how things normally work for them, and it is not at all like what you might expect. Two caveats: you have to be very familiar with Hollywood's history to recognize many of the "speakers", and there is no index provided. Nor is there a mini-biography for the source, still less any context. No index, which is annoying, and even worse, no real context. Exactly when were the interviews conducted? By whom, and for what purpose? And how were they curated?

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. A word about the methodology. 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. So that, for instance, Wilder and Blanke are chewing the fat about the Hays code over an after-dinner drink in Romanoff’s. Whereas, in fact, the two men were interviewed on different occasions and with no knowledge of what others might say. Some of the time this careful splicing and intercutting works in the way that the writers want it to, so that the effect is of a high-level symposium of Hollywood’s great and good. At other times the result is disjointed and resembles a scene in which acquaintances keep on mishearing each other in a noisy restaurant.SIMMONS We shot that second season in Los Angeles, and it was a very controversial one. There was a lot of reality drama that none of us had anticipated. By the end of it, I thought we were at a real crossroads. JANE LIPSITZ (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, 2006-19) Remember… Project Greenlight [then at HBO] begot Project Runway. We’d flown to New York and met with a bunch of designers during development, so we took the same approach here. We just met with a bunch of chefs to find out what kind of show would be meaningful. As close to a comprehensive Who’s Who of American film as we’re likely to see, and as close to a definitive history of American cinema as we’ve seen so far. An absolute must-read for industry pros and fans alike." — Booklist (starred review) The book's great originality becomes at points its risk and the fact that there's no narrator, rather the tale is made by the said participants, can be confusing at some point: we read, for instance, "L. B. Mayer was a tyrant" by one actor and then "Mayer was the sweetest person" by another one, and the reader often doesn't know what to make of this.