Hollywood: The Oral History

by Jeanine Basinger

The real story of Hollywood as told by such luminaries as Steven Spielberg, Frank Capra, Bette Davis, 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. 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. Gleaned from nearly three thousand interviews, involving four hundred voices from the industry, The Oral History , lets a reader "listen in" on candid remarks from the biggest names in front of the camera -- Bette Davis, Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Harold Lloyd -- to the biggest behind it -- Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg, Alfred Hitchcock, Jordan Peele, as well as the lesser known individuals that shaped what was heard and seen on musicians, costumers, art directors, cinematographers, writers, sound men, editors, make-up artists, and even script timers, messengers, and publicists. The result is like a conversation among the gods and goddesses of lively, funny, insightful, historically accurate and, for the first time, authentically honest in its portrait of Hollywood. It's the insider's story. 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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Film, Media Tie In, Pop Culture, Audiobook, Biography

1 pages, Audio CD

First published November 8, 2022

About the author

Jeanine Basinger holds a BS and MS from South Dakota State University. She is a film historian, professor of Film Studies at Wesleyan University and curator and founder of The Cinema Archives at Wesleyan University. In addition, she is a trustee emeritus of the American Film Institute, a member of the Steering Committee of the National Center for Film and Video Preservation, and one of the Board of Advisors for the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers.

She has appeared in several movie-related documentaries and completed audio commentaries on about a dozen classic films.

Reviews

[Heidi (can’t retire soon enough) · Rating 5 out of 5]

A glorious and fairly powerful look at the history of filmmaking and Hollywood. Hundreds of first person interviews strung together by categories. If you name a leading director, producer, actor or technical filmmaking genius— they’re in here. If it’s not their interview, it’s one legend talking about another.

But it’s not just legends, it’s people from all levels of production, development, design, marketing and management. The interviews are authentic which is what makes a super long book fascinating, page after page!

Though I own both the hard cover and audio version, I listened more than I read… I recommend, at the very least, a blend.

Only drawback— not terribly impressed with the narrators— several pronunciation goofs and all the female interviews sounds exactly the same. TBH— I wish they had used the source material when possible — certainly there are those interviews which served as the foundation of this book along with some printed interviews.

If you are a film historian or just love movies— I can’t recommend this enough!! Maybe the best compliment is that I can’t wait to listen to it again!! ⭐️🎬⭐️📽️⭐️🎞️⭐️🎥⭐️

[Melanie THEE Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

A dense read, but an informative and necessary one for cinephiles. Well-researched and you can tell that the authors are both knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the subject matter. Within these 730+ pages you get the full history of motion pictures; from silent films to "talkies,” from the creation of "youth films" to summer blockbusters. You also get the full backstory of the big studio systems (and everyone who worked in those systems) that originated in the 1930s/40s like MGM, Fox and Paramount. It was cool to hear directly from heavy hitters from the past and present. People who acted or directed in the Golden Age of Hollywood like Charlton Heston, Vincente Minnelli, Billy Wilder, Katherine Hepburn, Olivia de Havilland, Sidney Poitier, Gregory Peck (MY FIRST OLD HOLLYWOOD CRUSH) etc. But you also get to hear from Jane Fonda, George Clooney, Penny Marshall, Tom Hanks, John Singleton, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Jordan Peele. While it's a long read, I can't think of anything that should've been left off. Would highly recommend to all movie buffs.

I think my favorite parts of the book were the anecdotes: Costume designers joking about how sweet Ginger Rogers was, but that she had horrible taste and would continuously add accessories to her costumes. Dennis Hopper talking about how difficult it was to get Easy Rider funded. Steven Spielberg reminiscing about when he first heard the iconic Jaws theme from John Williams. Stories like that are what kept me reading when the book started feeling a little long.

CW: Roman Polanski jumpscare

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

First, the good:

This is a tremendous set of AFI interviews with directors, producers, stars, cinematographers, composers, you name it. It's a wealth of information from the people who were involved in American cinema from the very beginning until now. Know that these are interviews, and people don't always tell the complete truth in interviews, but whether they are or aren't being honest with us, the material is fascinating.

Now the bad:

Harper should be ashamed for compiling a fantastic book that fails to include two essential elements: dates and an index.

The book moves mostly in chronological order, but even if you know a fair amount of movie history, we don't know *when* these people are speaking. That makes an enormous difference when you're trying to evaluate the information being presented. Time does a lot to memories, and events that recently happened are usually fresh on your mind, but I have no idea when Frank Capra, Edith Head, Alan Dean, Katharine Hepburn, Billy Wilder, Lillian Gish, William Wyler, King Vidor, Elia Kazan, Fritz Lang, or any of the other contributors were being interviewed. (Some of these people lived a long time.) Adding the year the person was interviewed wouldn't have taken up that much space, and it would've done the reader a great service. All you needed to do was write "Elia Kazan (1957):" for example.

All the film scholars (and even non-film scholars who are simply inquisitive) I know are up in arms over the book's lack of an index. Yes, I know this was probably an expensive book to produce and it's a long work, but spend the money, Harper, and provide an index. You have done your readers a frustrating disservice. I hope you redeem yourselves when you publish the paperback edition.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant compendium of quotes from the creators of the Hollywood film industry is vastly entertaining and informative, though BEWARE of the audiobook version. The male narrator mispronounces some 60% of all the names—many of them very famous names. But the book itself is superb.

[Alex Thompson · Rating 2 out of 5]

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...")

I felt flummoxed around page 250, when I realized there would be no real structure to the book, just the same 20-30 people talking until the authors run out of steam. Marilyn Monroe gets a few pages; Gary Cooper a few; Humphrey Bogart one or two; the blacklist years, a few; often there are accounts given that take up several pages, and these are often entertaining but just as often contain a majority of hearsay and defensiveness regarding the Hollywood we "think" we know. Marilyn wasn't tortured by Mayer, he took her mental health very seriously! Hollywood wasn't sexist, it was run by smart men who knew what was best! These pronouncements get no background, no backup, and disappear anyway within a few lines. Someone will say, in a section devoted to Bogart, "...I liked him, but I always preferred Errol Flynn." That's the transition. The next speaker will begin talking about Errol Flynn until someone mentions Katherine Hepburn, and so on. 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. One section literally just has speakers listing great films from the era, one speaker after the other, as if this were a novelization of a docuseries.

I didn't know how little I cared what Mervyn LeRoy or Bronislau Kaper thought about anything until reading this book. What's clear is that of the cache, these men, among others, spoke a lot. It's often the impression I got reading, that the person who we'd actually like to be hearing from, who might actually have been in the room or who might have had some insight, just didn't figure into the trove of interviews Wasson and Basinger worked from.

The result is immensely disappointing for a book as broadly titled as "Hollywood: ***THE*** Oral History"- it is like a 750-page glut of Slashfilm clickbait - "Billy Wilder says Sunset Boulevard couldn't be made today" ; "Bogart wasn't really an actor, but Edward G. Robinson was, says old director" - why are 500 pages of this book pontification? Who thought it was smart to keep it all in?

A book that is entirely built on anecdotes and hearsay can be interesting, and ironically though "Hollywood: The Oral History" seeks to be an explicit antidote to Kenneth Anger's "Hollywood Babylon"it is essentially the same book, minus the editorial panache, a honeytrap for old Hollywood fans, with dribs and drabs of exciting stuff and firsthand accounts of the earliest days of Hollywood.

[Jessica Duffield · Rating 5 out of 5]

Authors Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson wrote an epic history book that covers every aspect of Hollywood. They went over more than tens of thousands of hours of interviews to write the most accurate account of this industry as they could. This book has everything any movie buff could ever want: you have legendary actors talking about their jobs, you have the biggest directors discussing how they made some of the greatest movies of all time, you have make-up artists devolving secrets about what it’s like to create such extravagant characters, and you have musicians talk about how they scored some of the biggest movie soundtracks of our generation. The size of this book was intimidating, but once you dive in, you’ll see that these authors needed to cover so much ground within this industry that this book size was necessary. 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. It was a great historical read and I cannot recommend it enough to all of my movie junkies out there.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first complaint about this Hollywood history is that at almost 800 pages there is not a single picture except the one on the cover. That aside, what a glorious book. At least that’s what I thought in the beginning. It’s a culmination of conversations between Hollywood professionals and AFI conservatory students beginning in 1969 and pored over by the authors of this book into the story of Hollywood. The conversations were not just with actors but include directors, writers, editors, makeup artists, cinematographers and many others giving a very wide view of Hollywood over the years.
As far as the actors themselves go, I was disappointed that there were so few that were interviewed over the years. Roughly 346 interviews from industry people were used for the contents of the book, two of them being the authors (so a lot of their own content is in the book); but only about 65 of them were actual actors, a few of which I have never heard of. After a while a lot of the book was quite boring for me. I’m actually quite disappointed in the book after hearing so much about it and I may have skimmed the last one hundred pages or so. Would I recommend it, not really.

[Michael Ritchie · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're looking for a history of the Hollywood movie business, this is truly a five-star reading experience. Basinger and Wasson have carefully pieced together an oral history from the archives of interviews done over the years since 1969 by the American Film Institute. There are big names (Katherine Hepburn, George Cukor, Meryl Streep, Frank Capra) and smaller names (folks in the fields of acting, cinematography, costumes, makeup) and the excerpts are pieced together masterfully to give a grand vision of Hollywood history. At least 2/3 of the book concentrates on "old Hollywood" into the 1960s, and that's fine with me, as "new" Hollywood isn't really Hollywood anymore. I highly recommend this to serious movie buffs. Less serious buffs may feel a bit overwhelmed.

[Olivia · Rating 2 out of 5]

This started off as a fascinating history of Hollywood and ended up dragging on for what felt like forever. 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.’

[Susan Chapek]

Deep dive into Hollywood lore. (Screenwriter Ranald MacDougall's reason for changing Mildred Pierce into a noir murder was even more outrageous than I expected.) Fascinating, memorable--but no index, so not a handy reference book.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely amazing but also possibly the longest book I’ve ever read. A must-read if you love movies.

[Michael Samerdyke · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting and mostly entertaining book.

In terms of information, there was plenty of stuff here that I knew already. However, the book, maybe for the first 3/5ths or even 4/5ths, feels like the "witness" scenes in "Reds." I pictured these old-timers telling us about the classic days of Hollywood, and I felt like I was in good hands. These were people who knew how to tell a story, who had told (and thus polished) these stories a lot, and I was getting the benefit of their skill.

The last part of the book, perhaps the post-Star Wars part of the book, is less enjoyable. Perhaps the events are too contemporary, not romanticizable, perhaps the "witnesses" are still too close to the action, but it just felt like the glamor was gone, and the stories weren't that interesting.

Overall, I'm glad I read this one. The book has an interesting concept, but this will not be one of my favorites.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

The authors have reviewed many interviews from people in the industry, extracted paragraphs of interest, then organized these by topic (e.g. Comedy, Silent Directors, Sound!). Reading a chapter is pretty easy in this format, but reading the book through was more difficult. There is a lot of great stuff here and I enjoyed it a lot, but I have three complaints.
1. This must have been a big undertaking. How hard would it be to add mini-biographies? 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.
2. If mini-biographies were done, there should be figures of these people, especially in a book about the movie industry, unless there are plans to redo this in an illustrated edition.
3. Somewhere in the book there should be a list of the source interviews and the date they were made.

[Shawn Thrasher · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm going to give this book five stars for the sheer audacity of what Basinger and Wasson did. They pored through the American Film Institute's archives that include oral histories and recorded seminars, three thousand speakers, nearly ten thousand hours of conversation. They then created sort of a commonplace book of observations and quotes gleaned from that ten thousand hours (plus some interviews they did on their own) and SHAZAM, this book that tells a pretty damn well complete oral history of Hollywood. This isn't a salacious gossip Hollywood Bablyon-esque work either - it's about "the artists, the craftspeople, the producers, the salesmen." Money and power, yes, but also the every day craft that went into making movies from the silent era to (almost) the present day. Name after name of people you will recognize - Henry Fonda, Clint Eastwood, Bette Davis, and so on and so on, in their own words, but also PLENTY of people you probably never heard of, I certainly had not, agents, editors, publicists, script girls (yes, that was a thing). It's not always the most interesting book - it drags. But it's still an amazing accomplishment. To paraphrase Hamlet, we shall not see the like of this again. (a side note: the year I read Jeanine Basinger's The Movie Musical!, it was one of the best books I read that year - I highly recommend it too!).

[Stewart Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE YEAR OF THE BRICK continues with the first nonfiction brick I’ve read in 2025. Oral histories almost feel like cheating re: brick status, since 750 pages here read as quickly as 350 in a novel.

I have some issues with the way this thing is structured and I’m not crazy about the editors’ interjections (which are typical of oral histories, but the way they’re inserted as if part of the conversation here is weird); however, the sheer amount of interviews with great directors, actors, and Hollywood figures is enough to make this a worthwhile read. It focuses heavily on old school Hollywood so you’ll get more out of it if you’re already a fan of silent films and the landmark classics of the 40s-60s, but if you’re not, at least you’ll find a few dozen movies to add to your list.

[Lauren Mun · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved this book. Any fans of classic Hollywood, the history of film, or all of the above will love it, too. This book was written for those who have such an appreciation for this industry that they will willingly both pick up and devour a 700+ page book about it.

Just from the sheer volume of interviewees and interviews alone, I know that creating this book had to have been a massive labor or love, and I can truly appreciate how much work and time went into creating such a thorough oral history.

While some reviews say that it ends on a jaded note with complaints of today's Hollywood not comparing to years' past... I disagree. The latter may be true, but I do think that we won't get another Golden Age of Hollywood and of film. Cinema and moviemaking as a whole are not what they used to be, and while it is still a magical artform, it's just different now. Personally, I love the artistry that went into a beautiful soundstage musical, aesthetically, but I can also still agree that the studio system should not come back.

I really love Jeanine Basinger as a historian and artist, and it is one of my goals to read all of her books. It is clear she is someone not only with a respect for the industry, but also a passion for it.

[Rick Rapp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 2022, this is a massive book of personal quotes and stories by people connected with the film industry from back when it started until today. It is humorous, self-pitying, egotistical, and so much more. Divided into 17 chapters on such topics as "Beginnings," "Studio Heads," and "New Hollywood," this book addresses a myriad of topics and personalities. It is a fascinating read (which I believe is best enjoyed in small doses.)

[Nick Guzan · Rating 5 out of 5]

fascinating (for me) and masterfully curated chronicle of how making movies has shifted from the days of Chaplin to Chalamet.

reading about the blood, sweat, and tears regularly spilled from all these passionate pros almost makes me feel bad for some of my lower letterboxd ratings (except Pearl Harbor really is a 2-star movie)

[Daniel Austin Green · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book doesn't have much of a narrative, as it's really just a compilation of recollections from folks who were on the scene for the emergence and evolution of the film industry. What emerges, though, is a curious, roughly chronological and topical collection of observations that provide a unique, diverse, and sometimes conflicting thoughts from a first-hand perspective.

[Michael Cahn · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

[RD Chiriboga Moncayo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Audiobook
Essential for movie lovers.

[Jonathan Beckner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Man folks from Hollywood really like to tell you they're from Hollywood.

[☮ morgan ☮]

DNF @ 28%

I've tried getting through this twice now, and each time i get stuck. I'm sure there's plenty of good information in here, maybe someday I'll try it again.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s good. It’s boring. It’s fascinating. It’s frustrating.

[David Gill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book showing a diverse range of opinions on everything from the pros and cons of the studio system, the modern questions of delivery for film such as streaming, and anecdotes about various directors, producers, and composers. If you're a fan of film, this book is a must-read.

[P.D. Quaver · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fans of my historical novel series "The Ordeals of Elly Robin" will be aware, due to
several scenes set in the Essenay film studios of Chicago and the Triangle film studios
of Fort Lee, New Jersey (as well as portrayals of silent film stars such as Gloria Swanson,
Wallace Beery, Fatty Arbuckle and Mabel Normand), of my fascination with early silent film
production. In fact, I'd originally planned to include a volume to be called "Elly Robin in
Hollywood," and the series' epilogue concludes in 1918 with newly-wed Elly en route to
that already storied city to perform the aerial stunts for one of (fictional) Bert Jenning's
comedies.

My fascination extends to the entire history of American film, and I've read hundreds of
books over the years--bios of stars, directors and producers (Keaton, Hitchcock, Disney,
Thalberg), as well as accounts of the making of individual films ("Psycho," "Birth of a
Nation," "The Wizard of Oz," "Heaven's Gate"). So I was enthused enough about the
publication of the following book to offer up a critique.

Hollywood
Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson, editors
Harper Collins

A Review by P. D. Quaver

A 740 page tome, proclaiming on its cover, in letters as bold and starkly white as those
of that monstrous and iconic sign, the title "HOLLYWOOD"--that contains within its pages
not a single photograph? A feast of reminiscences, by such luminaries as Billy Wilder,
Frank Capra and Martin Scorsese, as well as scores of the usually unsung make-up artists,
stuntmen, seamstresses, cameramen and editors who enable their visions, many of them
spilling juicy anecdotes about the moguls who ruled those fantasy empires (as well as actors
who could be equally despotic)--and no index? Even the list of contributors--some 350--shorn
of all but the barest of identifiers ("Director, producer") and not a footnote in sight?

Clearly Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson, the assemblers of this vast and addictively
perusable trove, are up to something.

What that "something" is proclaims itself in the very first pages, in which a mob of long-dead
actors, directors and cameramen (and yes, the people behind those lenses are all men) seem
to be chatting about the various random ways they fell into the movie biz--often by accident,
as a lark--filming one-reeler oaters in a single day in the hills around Los Angeles, concocting
scenarios even as they bounced in their Model T's to the next location. Yet though they appear
to be finishing each others sentences, giddy with the memories of their innocent selves having
the times of their young lives (while birthing the nascent art of cinematic storytelling on the fly),
it soon becomes clear that this seemingly seamless flow of anecdote is in fact the ingenious
result of what must have been a Herculean editing job. Because the entire book has been
assembled from the transcripts of a series of informal lectures, recorded over many decades by
the American Film Institute, craftily jigsawed together in such a way that the story of how that
early seat-of-their-pants filmmaking evolved into a gigantic industry dominated by seven huge
studios (with Disney an innovative outlier) is clearly and compellingly told.

Yet the informal, anecdotal ambience, in what often deliciously degenerates into a gossipfest
of long-dead artists and artisans dishing about their even-longer-dead colleagues, is preserved
throughout. Hence the purging of index, footnotes--any whiff of academia that might detract
from the "Oh yeah? Well top this!" juiciness of it all. Thus someone (without an index, I can't
be bothered to find exactly who) remembers only once overhearing Marilyn Monroe speaking in
her "real" voice--totally different from the little girl coo she affected both on and off screen--in
an overheard phone conversation. And someone else recalls what a pain it was to direct
Montgomery Clift, who would look not to the director for feedback after a take, but to some
acting-guru, standing on the set's sidelines, on whom Clift had had become emotionally
dependent.

There are pages and pages of this stuff, and it's worth the price of admission to eavesdrop
on George Cukor or "Willy" Wyler let their hair down about what it was like to direct Joan or
Greta or Bogie (and provide the counter-intuitive revelation that Crawford was the consummate
professional, always on time, lines letter-perfect, earnestly following the director's dictates).
Yet the raconteurs themselves are sometimes misinformed--the condescending dismissal of
Barbara Stanwyck as just a Broadway chorus girl who made it big in Hollywood (and not a
chorus girl whose acting chops had already elevated her to star status before she ever made
that fateful train journey west) goes uncorrected. Which lays bare the book's limitations, and
readers hoping to glean hard facts from what often sounds an awful lot like cocktail party
chatter are advised to come equipped with a large salt shaker. Even the editors themselves,
in one of their few footnote-like intrusions, display their own ignorance by tacking on a
bracketed [in Wonderland] after "Alice," as someone recalls Disney in the early days of the
"Oswald Rabbit and Alice" silent shorts. But the "Alice" one-reelers were in fact primitive
experiments in the combining of animation with actual footage of a young girl (and had
nothing to do with Lewis Carroll), while "Oswald Rabbit" was Disney's abortive attempt to
concoct a character to compete with the enormously successful "Felix the Cat", a quest which
would come to fruition with the invention of Mickey Mouse.

Beyond such quibbles, the fantastic amount of material from which the editors assembled this
pastiche of a book (over 10,000 hours of recorded interviews with over 3000 guest speakers)
allows them, through whom and what they choose to include or omit, to control the narrative.
So this is manifestly a book dedicated to polishing up the rather tarnished image of the "Dream
Factories" that L. B. Mayer, David O. Selznick, Darryl F. Zanuck et al created in the sunny orange
groves around Los Angeles. And they make the case that all the thousands of lurid tell-all books
and exposes and "L.A. Confidential"-style novels (and the not very surprising news that many
of those all-powerful studio heads, producers and directors were proto-Weinsteins) tend to
overlook with what wondrous efficiency the whole thing worked.

Thus the heart of the book is the 150 page section entitled "The Studio Work Force." Most
of the testimonies in this section are from the workers at MGM. In its heyday the epitome
of industrially efficient filmmaking (to the tune of 50 some pictures a year), it easily lends
itself to the same technique Studs Terkel, in his iconic "Working," employed in his top-down
dissection of one of the huge Detroit auto factories--only instead of executives, body
designers and paint sprayers, substitute producers, screenwriters and make-up artists. There
are glaring omissions; none of the actual studio bosses seem to have sat for interviews, and
some essential directors (Hitchcock among them) are missing. But it's still a treat to hear
lowly gaffers bitch about stars who just had to be photographed from their "good" side. And to
be reminded just how much the creation of those "stars" depended on the wardrobe, makeup
and still-photography departments, along with intimate access to--and often control of--the
stars' personal lives by the studios' all-powerful publicity machines.

This feeds into the book's contention (a common one) that, with the collapse of this fabulous
system, there are no real "stars" anymore. And as the position of Hollywood as the epicenter of
American filmmaking became less and less tenable, in the new era of independent productions
shot on location that began in the '60's, so the book devotes 500 pages to the years 1915--1960,
but a mere 200 to the following half century. The tone changes as well: much less talk by directors
about their creative challenges (though there's some great reminiscing by George Lucas on the
shockingly unforeseen success of his "Star Wars" franchise), and--now that each film, no longer
a part of an assembly line, needed independent financing--much more yakking by agents about
"package deals" and "marketing tie-ins." The result is, to my mind at least, far less interesting.
Though it surely helps make the point that those early decades truly did constitute a sort of
"golden age," the likes of which we're unlikely to ever see again.

[Chris Hartley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Exhaustive but also sort of exhausting. Could have used a bit more context timeline-wise to place certain observations better.

[Zeb Kantrowitz · Rating 4 out of 5]

You'll find this to be a particularly unusual book. The whole book is made up of short one paragraph quotes from different Hollywood veterans beginning with comments from people who worked and created silent movies. The stories follow from the original nickelodeons to the films becoming 2 and 3 reels that played in the first theaters which were usually just empty stores with chairs.

As the movies got more lavish, so did the venues to show them. The system was born seven major studios created the majority of movies. 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.

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.

The last third of the book discusses the end of the system and the beginning of independent movie producers. Now with advent of Cable and Streaming there is a need for more quality production every year. What we are seeing slowly created is the Studio system being created again as Netflix and Prime Video set up their own studios.

[Christine Sinclair · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn't sure if I would like this book, when I realized how it was "written." It is simply a series of quotes, organized by subject. The authors, Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson, were granted "access to the AFI's Harold Lloyd Seminars, oral histories, and complete archives . . . the true story of Hollywood, told not by outsiders, academics, historians, revisionists, or fantasists prone to legend, but by those who are singularly qualified to understand it, the filmmakers themselves." A labor of love, clearly, which touches on every aspect of film in interesting anecdotal form. Directors, producers, writers, stars, agents, studio heads, craftspeople, they're all here, giving their personal view of the art (and business) of making movies.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you’re only going to read one book in your life about Hollywood, this should be that book.

If you’re planning on reading two or more books in your life about Hollywood… skip this one entirely.

I don’t envy the amount of work they undertook in going through all of the AFI interviews and editing snippets into a whole. The problem is that the subject is too large for one book, and I kept missing the stuff they left on the cutting room floor.

Of all the problems, I think the biggest is that the book ends up being a compilation of thousands of anecdotes with little to no context. None of the snippets are dated, for example, which is frustrating then the speaker is talking about “now” (which could be anywhere between 1970 and, well, now).