Hollywood: The Oral History

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With the conversations of more than 3,000 guest speakers to choose from, of course, the organizing structure is key. Then there is Gene Kelly, the man who put brawn into modern musical masculinity, confessing that he would love to have had the boneless body of Buster Keaton: “I often wish I did. This started off as a fascinating history of Hollywood and ended up dragging on for what felt like forever. What wasn't so great was the way the interviewees talked about the studio system and the studio heads and producers.

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. Two Black movies were mentioned Carmen Jones, though only the word Carmen was mentioned along with Diahann Carroll’s name though she was only a supporting character.Quibbles aside, it's fascinating to learn what legendary directors like Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, and George Cukor have to say about their movies and the work of others. 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. What we are seeing slowly created is the Studio system being created again as Netflix and Prime Video set up their own studios. Harry Belafonte’s name appeared, though there was no mention of the star Dorothy Dandridge, nor was there mention of the Great Cicely Tyson in the two sentences about the movie Sounder. 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.

Granted, since there's not much format beyond quoting various people talking about various topics, and arranging them vaguely by topic, one must take the quotes with a grain of salt.This is a tremendous set of AFI interviews with directors, producers, stars, cinematographers, composers, you name it. 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. As much fun as it is, the book faces the inherent dilemma of oral history -- the lack of a coherent narrative. Between them, Basinger and Wasson have published nearly 20 books on the stars and overviews of various films and genres, so I can’t imagine two people better qualified to collaborate on this entertaining volume.