Imagine attending a crowded meeting on Zoom, topic of the day Hollywood, and among the participants there are Fritz Lang and Howard Hawks, Katharine Hepburn and Quentin Tarantino, Jane Fonda and David Lynch talking about their work, the system, money , scripts, costumes, sounds. George Lucas explains that making a film means “dealing with the greatest group of complicated neurotic psychotic dudes you could ever imagine.”
Billy Wilder recalls when, in 1924, Erich von Stroheim stopped filming Greed “for three days, because there wasn’t enough horse shit and they had to go pick it up everywhere.” There was not even air conditioning «and all the amenities that are found in the Studios today», recalls Fay Wray, the blonde diva of the first King Kong. Jurassic Park sound designer Gary Rydstrom confesses that the T-Rex growl belongs to his dog Buster. And Frank Capra says that he had other plans in his life, to be precise, to be an engineer; but then, as an unemployed man, he had started writing jokes and intertitles for the silent cinema. It made him laugh that they paid him for it, but that’s how he eventually came to do It’s a Wonderful Life.
What appears to be a single, long and incredible virtual conversation between directors, producers, actresses, actors, cameramen, producers, sound workers, makeup artists, editors, set designers – today as it did a century ago – is actually a book of 910 pages, Hollywood: The Oral History (HarperCollins), released in the USA by Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson. She, at 87, is a celebrated historian, founder of the film studies department at Wesleyan University; he, much younger, is a writer, author of the biography of Bob Fosse. They had a unique privilege: access to the American Film Institute (AFI) recording archive, the living memory of cinema.
“In 1969,” Wasson explains by telephone from Los Angeles, “AFI inaugurated a series of seminars for students with professionals of all stripes. We listened and selected something like 4,000 hours of recordings out of 10,000. They are essentially the story of Hollywood as told by whoever made it.” «We often forget that cinema was invented in 1895», adds Jeanine Basinger, «at the time nobody planned to make a career in cinema, simply because it didn’t exist yet. Lucille Ball says she came from a small provincial town to work in vaudeville. In those days money was scarce, people didn’t travel as they do now; she dreamed of vaudeville because that was what came to her village. And she ended up on her first set only because a woman who worked for Sam Goldwyn met her on the street, they were desperately looking for a showgirl willing to shoot a comedy in six weeks. Had she auditioned, perhaps they would not have taken her. Interesting, right? A very different image from the myth emerges».
Nothing to do with Babylon by Damien Chazelle, nominated for three Oscars (set design, costumes, soundtrack). «A wrong film, three wasted hours of my life», Basinger cuts short. «In the narrative of Hollywood sex, drugs, scandals – which, yes, there were – were not dominant. Otherwise it is not clear how they would have produced all those magnificent films. They were people who had to get up in the morning, take the car, go to the Studios, work and go home. They were just employees of the big production houses. They had the power to push a film, but they weren’t in charge.” They were a community, “and if you had the skills, whether it was photography or making fake furniture, you could make good money and be treated with respect.” The most underrated figure, according to Wasson, is the sound engineer, «not the most glamorous but essential», followed by the editor, «requires an extraordinary talent for storytelling and knowing how to cut footage». This is the most compelling part of the book, the way Basinger and Wasson put people at the center, the many individual talents, ending up demystifying several legends. It surprised them to discover, for example, that Joan Crawford was anything but the “mommy dear” we think. «More than one director says that she was a star, a disciplined, kind, respectful professional. Would you believe it? You astonished me to discover that I had misconceptions about several people.’ Who was not loved at all was Marilyn Monroe. “Hollywood was a system driven by profit, by efficiency, by collaboration, and Marilyn was a problem,” adds Basinger. “It didn’t work under stress, it required attention; we today see the tragic figure, them an overpaid and unreliable actress. Billy Wilder says something memorable: “I think there have been more books written about Marilyn than about World War II. But there is a great similarity between the two”.
However, it emerges from the stories how much fun they had, how powerful the creative part was, the madness. «The Hollywood of the golden years can be summed up for me in three words: fun, flexibility and family. They had fun, they were adaptable, and they functioned as a family. Today there is nothing left. Hollywood is long gone,” Wasson says. The film that best told it? «Vincent Minnelli’s Brute and Beauty, with Lana Turner and Kirk Douglas» concludes Basinger. “In the story of the producer who doesn’t give up, there is everything, the desire for greatness, the obsession, the visionary power of cinema”.