Hollywood: The Oral History

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SIMMONS I couldn’t tell if it was all going really well or really badly. The night before that finale aired, I was sleepless in a hotel. The next morning, they put a copy of The New York Times in front of my room. There, above the fold of the dining section, was a huge story about the show by Frank Bruni, the restaurant critic at the time. I thought, “This is it. This is the takedown. We’re going down in flames.” But it was amazing. He wrote that it was a show worth watching in that moment where food and pop culture were aligning, that food was becoming mainstream — which is what we were trying to do. Hollywood has a long and storied history of telling stories. The American Film Institute has a series of interviews with the people who were there at the time and contributed to making Hollywood what it is today. Some interviewees died, so it was a great idea to interview them. Much of the middle discussion is about those who ran the studios and those who worked for the studios. Because they owned the production from soup to nuts, and owned the theaters, they were able to produce as many as fifty movies a year. The actual contract players give us their opinions as to how good the system was. LIPSITZ That night, after a production meeting, I walked into my parents’ apartment and asked, “Did we lose yet?” The other complaint I have is that although there is a list at the beginning of everyone who was interviewed and what their job was, it would have been nice to have their principle job listed next to their name when there is a quote by them. Some people had name recognition, but many did not, and there aren't always context clues to piece together who they were and when they worked. I had to let go of caring about that or else I'd go mad.

For this reader, the book delivered a thrilling aural immediacy as these hands-on craftspeople describe the big-screen worlds they’ve created and the professional ecosystem they inhabit(ed). The tone is frequently funny and sometimes gossipy, but it’s consistently trenchant, evocative, and revealing. One instance: the extended exchange among the half-dozen pros who describe the years-long vagaries of making “Gone with the Wind” (1939), that gorgeous potboiler. Standout, classic and influential films (for better or worse) that are captured include: "Gone With the Wind", "Citizen Kane", "The Magnificent Ambersons", "The Godfather", "The Wizard of Oz", "Jaws", "Star Wars", "Kramer vs Kramer", "Casablanca", Westerns by John Ford; films of Martin Scorsese, George Stevens, and a whole slew of pictures made from the 1970s, as Hollywood shifts from the studio system into what it is today. Also, I was glad to read about the breakdown of the studio system through an extensive interview with actresses Bette Davis, (who attempted to) and with Olivia de Havilland, (who succeeded) in making it possible to break the way studios employed actors. Overall, though, this is a well-organized look at the Hollywood system from every angle, told through the eyes, ears and mouths of those who experienced it firsthand. I was a child in the 1970’s and so I saw Chaplin and Laurel & Hardy on morning television during the school holidays, I saw “golden age” musicals and westerns from the 1940’s to 1960’s as television matinees on wet Sunday afternoons, and I saw 1970’s and later films at the cinema. Another flaw perhaps could be that the cinema reviewers are unrepresented here - only Andrew Sarris gets an entry, but nothing by the greatest of them all: Kael and Thomson, which could have graced considerably the book.

COLICCHIO Harold was legit. He’d worked for a lot of really good chefs, and people in New York knew who he was. Elsewhere, a simpler issue afflicts the book: interest ebbs and flows. The silent film sections are fairly short and shallow (and somehow manage to spell Allan Dwan's name wrong throughout), but it's when we get onto New Hollywood and beyond that the book falls apart, in a blizzard of barely-connected anecdotes, followed by some stunningly dull material about deal-making. CUTFORTH The contestant pool was not a level playing field at all, but it somehow still worked. It was charming and fun.

KRILEY It used to be about almost psychologically breaking someone down. How much can they endure in terms of also living in the environment? When Jo [Sharon] and I took the helm [of Magical Elves] in 2019, it was important for us to give them separate bedrooms. In HOLLYWOOD, Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson have painstakingly put together a collection of interviews with these men and women, starting with the first adventurers who traveled across the country to set up shop in the wilds of California. It’s a fascinating look at the creative processes that went into bringing this medium to the public.

By Bruce Allen Murphy

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. The good cheer that “Hollywood: An Oral History” exudes extends down past the shoulders and into areas where one finds it hard to credit all the geniality. The producer Pandro Berman says blandly, “While I can well understand the anguish that writers suffered during the days when there were four and five and six writers on a film, I must say I also understand the predicament of the producer who time after time would find he couldn’t get a good screenplay from a writer and had to get certain values from other writers.” This shrugging defense of the assembly-line system is not, to put it mildly, the way that the writers saw the thing; nowhere in the book is there anything resembling Raymond Chandler’s once famous diatribe: “It is the essence of this system that it seeks to exploit a talent without permitting it the right to be a talent. It cannot be done; you can only destroy the talent, which is exactly what happens—when there is any to destroy.” 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.

As season 20 nears an end, with a Paris-set finale airing June 8, it’s natural to wonder how much further Top Chef can go. But it’s already renewed for No.21, its core team is not yet considering an end to the gig and future spinoffs are on the table. And as those involved from day one look across the industry, both entertainment and culinary, they see their fingerprints everywhere.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. 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.”