Hollywood: The Oral History

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To make matters even trickier, the rules were applied differently in each state, with the result, says Blanke, that “you never recognised the picture you had made from one state to another. Photograph: Palace Nova Eastend View image in fullscreen The man who put brawn into modern musical masculinity … Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain. 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. 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.

They had, of course, also been through hell and yearned to build an alternative moral universe where good trounced evil and there was always a loyal, pretty girl waiting patiently at the end. Director George Seaton remembers Montgomery Clift, that anguished soul who longed to be a method actor rather than a matinee idol. 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. 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. The authors have edited the book into a giant jigsaw puzzle that is meant to feel like a free-flowing conversation, but ends up exhausting.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. 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. It's a wealth of information from the people who were involved in American cinema from the very beginning until now. I recognized many of these people, the stars, the directors, and people like Edith Head, but some I did not know, and I had to guess at their identity from what they were talking about.

For all ebook purchases, you will be prompted to create an account or login with your existing HarperCollins username and password. There’s Meryl Streep kvetching about how she likes to get done in four takes while Robert De Niro just goes on and on.Everything was experimental in the earliest days --- from the use of equipment to the physical actions of the actors, especially before “talkies” allowed for more than the most dramatic pantomimes. Oral history is a hit or miss with me, but if a book is going to cover old Hollywood at all, I can’t seem to resist.