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La formula perfetta: Una storia di Hollywood
David Thomson, «il più grande critico cinematografico vivente» per John Banville, ha qui tentato una storia di Hollywood -- la sua -- e lo ha fatto col piglio caustico e malandrino che contraddistingue chi da sempre ama quel mondo e ciò che ha da offrire: sogni surrettiziamente innervati dalla realtà. Thomson prende spunto da un capolavoro, Chinatown, il mitico film di Roman Polanski del 1974, il che gli permette di ripartire da molto lontano, dalla crescita indiscriminata, corrotta e manovrata di Los Angeles, e di puntare la sua personale macchina da presa sulle speculazioni fraudolente intorno alla gestione dell’acqua e della viabilità, elementi che, sottotraccia, contribuirono notevolmente alla nascita e allo sviluppo di Hollywood. Ricostruisce poi la storia di quegli anni, dalle prime salette improvvisate ai grandi cinema, alla creazione degli Studios, affrontando il passaggio dal muto al sonoro, dal bianco e nero al colore e alle ulteriori innovazioni tecniche. Ma soprattutto racconta le storie, sempre curiose, spesso sordide, comunque illuminanti, dei grandi che hanno fatto grande il cinema: registi come Griffith, Welles o Hitchcock, divi come Greta Garbo o Marlene Dietrich, Humphrey Bogart o Jack Nicholson, e insieme produttori come Jack Warner, Louis Mayer o Samuel Goldwyn, nonché altre figure meno note ma non meno influenti. Thomson vuole darci «la formula perfetta», espressione che riprende dall’ultimo romanzo incompiuto di Fitzgerald, ambientato nella Mecca del cinema: l’equazione che sola può offrire una visione d’insieme di quel mondo, quell’arte, quel mestiere, quell’industria, quel gioco d’azzardo, in tutta la sua varietà, follia e grandezza.
605 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
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About the author
David Thomson
66 books152 followersDavid Thomson, renowned as one of the great living authorities on the movies, is the author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, now in its fifth edition. His books include a biography of Nicole Kidman and The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood. Thomson is also the author of the acclaimed "Have You Seen . . . ?": A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films. Born in London in 1941, he now lives in San Francisco.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 43 reviews
May 21, 2009
David Thomson is in love with movies, which is not surprising in itself, given his profession. Luckily (for us, not so much for him) his is the bitter, exasperated kind of love that an intelligent man might conceive, against his will, for a brainless little skank. It’s this ambivalent quality that gives his criticism its torque, propelling it beyond the naïve boosterism of the standard Entertainment Weekly puffery.
But I'm not here to talk about Thomson’s many virtues because, for me, the flaws in The Whole Equation are a lot more arresting. What got my back up right away was the tone of the book, which runs the gamut from sour to cynical (props to Dorothy Parker, apologies to Hepburn). Thomson is so eager to play the undeceived truth-teller about Hollywood that he goes in for some major intellectual thuggery, as in this stunning cheap shot: ‘Joan Crawford swallowed her share of cum, and her lips shone in close-ups. How do you think lip gloss got invented?’ What the - ? Not that I find this offensive, but isn’t it just a wee bit gratuitous? Worse, it’s not even funny.
Thomson’s aggressiveness also leads him into some really clunky, ill-considered imagery:
This was still the nineteenth-century, when no one had any notion of what a film director might be, when movies seemed like a wild craze scooping up the momentary appearance of things, like a blood sample at a crime scene.
Am I being excessively literal, or on what metaphysical plane could a ‘craze’ do anything so strenuous as ‘scooping’? And while I’m stomping around in my grammar-Nazi jackboots, I have to wonder about that self-cleaning blood…
Okay, all of us have had bad things happen to our good similes, so I’ll cut him some slack there. But I’m less inclined to forgive his methodological sins, which include setting up some pretty dubious contrasts between film and literature. A typical gambit: he’ll tell you what filmmakers were up to in, say, 1917 (The Birth of a Nation, most significantly), and then, in order to do the dirty on cinema, he’ll survey what was happening in the world of literature around the same time (Conrad, Joyce, Woolf – the 3-4-5 hitters of Modernism). See, he’ll say, practically in tears, just look how coarse and stupid Griffith is in comparison. What can the silent era offer to equal the richness and sophistication of Ulysses?
Now being more of a book guy than a movie guy myself, I’m fairly sympathetic to this line of argument, but in the end even I have to acknowledge its unfairness. In 1917, film was still a bawling infant, while the European novel had centuries of tradition to draw on. And besides, is it even legitimate to compare two completely different art forms in this way (it’s like asking, which is better, architecture or ballet? See what I mean?)
Well, to be honest I’ve isolated a few incidental defects in an otherwise solid, sometimes enlightening book (though until now I've been polite enough not to bring up Thomson’s most notorious quirk: his hopeless, drooling infatuation with Nicole Kidman – but that’s a whole other kettle of psychosexual fish). For whatever reason, Thomson irritates the hell out of me, so I tend to magnify shortcomings that I’d simply pass over in another writer.
But at least I never said he swallows.
But I'm not here to talk about Thomson’s many virtues because, for me, the flaws in The Whole Equation are a lot more arresting. What got my back up right away was the tone of the book, which runs the gamut from sour to cynical (props to Dorothy Parker, apologies to Hepburn). Thomson is so eager to play the undeceived truth-teller about Hollywood that he goes in for some major intellectual thuggery, as in this stunning cheap shot: ‘Joan Crawford swallowed her share of cum, and her lips shone in close-ups. How do you think lip gloss got invented?’ What the - ? Not that I find this offensive, but isn’t it just a wee bit gratuitous? Worse, it’s not even funny.
Thomson’s aggressiveness also leads him into some really clunky, ill-considered imagery:
This was still the nineteenth-century, when no one had any notion of what a film director might be, when movies seemed like a wild craze scooping up the momentary appearance of things, like a blood sample at a crime scene.
Am I being excessively literal, or on what metaphysical plane could a ‘craze’ do anything so strenuous as ‘scooping’? And while I’m stomping around in my grammar-Nazi jackboots, I have to wonder about that self-cleaning blood…
Okay, all of us have had bad things happen to our good similes, so I’ll cut him some slack there. But I’m less inclined to forgive his methodological sins, which include setting up some pretty dubious contrasts between film and literature. A typical gambit: he’ll tell you what filmmakers were up to in, say, 1917 (The Birth of a Nation, most significantly), and then, in order to do the dirty on cinema, he’ll survey what was happening in the world of literature around the same time (Conrad, Joyce, Woolf – the 3-4-5 hitters of Modernism). See, he’ll say, practically in tears, just look how coarse and stupid Griffith is in comparison. What can the silent era offer to equal the richness and sophistication of Ulysses?
Now being more of a book guy than a movie guy myself, I’m fairly sympathetic to this line of argument, but in the end even I have to acknowledge its unfairness. In 1917, film was still a bawling infant, while the European novel had centuries of tradition to draw on. And besides, is it even legitimate to compare two completely different art forms in this way (it’s like asking, which is better, architecture or ballet? See what I mean?)
Well, to be honest I’ve isolated a few incidental defects in an otherwise solid, sometimes enlightening book (though until now I've been polite enough not to bring up Thomson’s most notorious quirk: his hopeless, drooling infatuation with Nicole Kidman – but that’s a whole other kettle of psychosexual fish). For whatever reason, Thomson irritates the hell out of me, so I tend to magnify shortcomings that I’d simply pass over in another writer.
But at least I never said he swallows.
October 3, 2014
David Thomson tells the history of American cinema with enthusiasm and wit, loaded with sass and bile he still manages to convey a great love for the medium despite being painfully aware that it has always been a place for hucksters and conmen to screw over everyone it can in the never ending hunt for a quick buck.
In Thomson's Hollywood nothing is straightforward, everybody has an ulterior motive and nobody gets away clean. His love of noir and especially Chinatown is apparent in this approach. He readily reveres the legends of the business and their skill in giving birth to "an American artform" that is at the same time a business that runs itself contrary to those principles that make their so-called great country but is willing to acknowledge that all men are fallible; it is these weaknesses, this fallbile nature, that provide the ingredients for an interesting story well told, the juxtaposition with the fantasy world of good overcoming evil, beauty being mandatory and instant gratification they strive to inflict upon the world as the only right way to behave is not lost on the author or the reader.
His metaphors are colourful and playful and occasionally borderline offensive, witness the way he talks about Louis B. Mayer et al screwing over Joan Crawford for example, "Joan Crawford swallowed her share of cum, and her lips shone in close-ups. How do you think lip gloss got invented?", it's less about the sexual acts Crawford is said to have performed for money pre-fame and more about the way the industry used and abused people. Well I'm taking it as a deliberate button-pushing metaphor anyway.
Anecdotal in nature he tries to tell not just the story of the town and the business but the way the art and the business, the producers and the audience, the country and the society that allowed it to flourish are intrinsically linked, he doesn't quite manage to tie it all together in a neat package but he gives it a damned good shot and leaves you with the thought "Why does so much in American films supports the worst views held of us in other parts of the world: that we are combat-ready, aggresive, adolescent, greedy, sensationalists without humour, depth or imagination, rampant devotees of technology (as opposed to enlightentent?" which is an entirely accurate statement both on American cinema and the way the country is seen, and in looking back over this excellent, absorbing and ideosynchratic history of Hollywood you'll realise the answer has been apparent from the moment moving pictures were invented.
In Thomson's Hollywood nothing is straightforward, everybody has an ulterior motive and nobody gets away clean. His love of noir and especially Chinatown is apparent in this approach. He readily reveres the legends of the business and their skill in giving birth to "an American artform" that is at the same time a business that runs itself contrary to those principles that make their so-called great country but is willing to acknowledge that all men are fallible; it is these weaknesses, this fallbile nature, that provide the ingredients for an interesting story well told, the juxtaposition with the fantasy world of good overcoming evil, beauty being mandatory and instant gratification they strive to inflict upon the world as the only right way to behave is not lost on the author or the reader.
His metaphors are colourful and playful and occasionally borderline offensive, witness the way he talks about Louis B. Mayer et al screwing over Joan Crawford for example, "Joan Crawford swallowed her share of cum, and her lips shone in close-ups. How do you think lip gloss got invented?", it's less about the sexual acts Crawford is said to have performed for money pre-fame and more about the way the industry used and abused people. Well I'm taking it as a deliberate button-pushing metaphor anyway.
Anecdotal in nature he tries to tell not just the story of the town and the business but the way the art and the business, the producers and the audience, the country and the society that allowed it to flourish are intrinsically linked, he doesn't quite manage to tie it all together in a neat package but he gives it a damned good shot and leaves you with the thought "Why does so much in American films supports the worst views held of us in other parts of the world: that we are combat-ready, aggresive, adolescent, greedy, sensationalists without humour, depth or imagination, rampant devotees of technology (as opposed to enlightentent?" which is an entirely accurate statement both on American cinema and the way the country is seen, and in looking back over this excellent, absorbing and ideosynchratic history of Hollywood you'll realise the answer has been apparent from the moment moving pictures were invented.
January 12, 2025
An interesting take on an analysis of film history and the film industry. Instead of offering a re-telling from a chronological order, Thomson presents an equation: the unending moving parts that make up the film industry and the evolution of these elements to produce the industry we know today. He starts the book with an analysis of Polanski's Chinatown to highlight the criticality of rights and ownership in Hollywood and how trading credit for your work leads to short term gains and long term losses (potentially) and then moves on to capture the different aspects of moving making: using light, developing the camera and techniques for cinematography, evolution of actors and acting, distribution, the studio system from the 20s-60s -> rise of independent film making, theaters and theater going in America, etc. and overlays this historical analysis with the actual history of America, which was very interesting.
Some of the more notable portions:
- The 60s, 70s follow the breakdown of the tradition cog and wheel studio system, leading to more independent film making; however, Thomson declares that independence is only a mindset--films are sold at one point to distributors or the sale of points to finance the film has to come from somewhere
- Post WWII (rise of Hithchcock, Hawks) 60s-70s: there is a change in what a movie is supposed to be. Rather than mass-produced entertainment, we see a rise in films having an allegorical meaning and serving as reflections of societal issues. Thomson suggests that this is due to a shift in social attitudes to the hippie movement, anti-war sentiments (Vietnam) and incoming AIDS crisis. I thought it was interesting how these elements seem to intertwine.
- 1950s - anti-trust statute that breaks up the vertical integration of the studio system, followed by McCarthyism + witch hunt (big impact on HW) and the rise of TV = drop in theater going audiences
- The actual history of California is a big part of movie history: free-spirited liberals escape the strictly regulated East and head to the Wild Wild West and discover a Gold Rush. This exploratory and daring attitude founds CA and Hollywood with gamblers taking on the establishment of early film-making. As opposed to the East, in CA: there is space, freedom, light, different geographies: ideal for new industry to emerge
- The script (chapter on ownership) is the IP and is used for funding as it provides a framework for the budget and production schedule; it is a managerial tool
- Thomson asserts that film arose out of product of entertainment/business, not art -> studio system in the 1920s (also to balance out the economics of early film making). We see the film-making process mature and evolve into an art form and establish itself with celebrity (creation of Academy Awards, etc) and actors ascending into celebrity status
- Chain: production -> distribution -> exhibition
Things I didnt like
- Thomsons writing is sometimes hard to understand 1) I think there is a strong interest to curate the writing towards an erudite film critic crowd (fine, he has done his research) but its sometimes a little inaccessible 2) it becomes very difficult to follow if you havent seen the films he writes about (fair)
- The passion isnt as noticeable through the writing; you just appreciate it based on the research he has done
- I think there are lot of "outdated" notions about some figures he mentions (Polanski, Weinstein), but I guess his main goal is just to appreciate their work and not their being. hmmm....
Some of the more notable portions:
- The 60s, 70s follow the breakdown of the tradition cog and wheel studio system, leading to more independent film making; however, Thomson declares that independence is only a mindset--films are sold at one point to distributors or the sale of points to finance the film has to come from somewhere
- Post WWII (rise of Hithchcock, Hawks) 60s-70s: there is a change in what a movie is supposed to be. Rather than mass-produced entertainment, we see a rise in films having an allegorical meaning and serving as reflections of societal issues. Thomson suggests that this is due to a shift in social attitudes to the hippie movement, anti-war sentiments (Vietnam) and incoming AIDS crisis. I thought it was interesting how these elements seem to intertwine.
- 1950s - anti-trust statute that breaks up the vertical integration of the studio system, followed by McCarthyism + witch hunt (big impact on HW) and the rise of TV = drop in theater going audiences
- The actual history of California is a big part of movie history: free-spirited liberals escape the strictly regulated East and head to the Wild Wild West and discover a Gold Rush. This exploratory and daring attitude founds CA and Hollywood with gamblers taking on the establishment of early film-making. As opposed to the East, in CA: there is space, freedom, light, different geographies: ideal for new industry to emerge
- The script (chapter on ownership) is the IP and is used for funding as it provides a framework for the budget and production schedule; it is a managerial tool
- Thomson asserts that film arose out of product of entertainment/business, not art -> studio system in the 1920s (also to balance out the economics of early film making). We see the film-making process mature and evolve into an art form and establish itself with celebrity (creation of Academy Awards, etc) and actors ascending into celebrity status
- Chain: production -> distribution -> exhibition
Things I didnt like
- Thomsons writing is sometimes hard to understand 1) I think there is a strong interest to curate the writing towards an erudite film critic crowd (fine, he has done his research) but its sometimes a little inaccessible 2) it becomes very difficult to follow if you havent seen the films he writes about (fair)
- The passion isnt as noticeable through the writing; you just appreciate it based on the research he has done
- I think there are lot of "outdated" notions about some figures he mentions (Polanski, Weinstein), but I guess his main goal is just to appreciate their work and not their being. hmmm....
August 25, 2017
A very entertaining history of the rise and fall of Hollywood and American movies.
February 22, 2024
I should start by saying that all of David Thomson's books I have read so far were first class. The Big Screen (post 9th October 2014), A Light in the Dark - A History of Movie Directors (post 8th March 2021), Moments That Made Movies (post 19th August 2022) and How to Watch a Movie (post 22nd March 2023. I also have his reference books Have You Seen .... and The Biographical Dictionary of Film. So I was looking forward to this new volume about Hollywood. However, I found it all a bit of a mess. There seemed very little structure and lots of repetition. So something of a slog through this long book. Someone said it was "droningly dictatorial". It does ramble on. However, there are gems along the way that made it worth while. I made some notes on each of the 22 chapters so I had better put these into some sort of order.
The Gamble and the Lost Rights
How wonderful it starts with a friend. Roberts Towne, a screenwriter and Oscar winner for Chinatown. Not that well paid until he assisted with the Mission Impossible franchise. We do get a decent history of the making of Chinatown especially the relationship between Towne and director Roman Polanski who changed the ending and made it so awful. The bad guy survives. But the sequel The Two Jakes was "a turkey". But somehow the book often harks back to the things in this chapter. Why?
Mayer and Thalberg
Some stuff about the heads of studios - David O. Selznick, Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer. Thomson obviously admires Thalberg but despises Mayer; "greedy and cruel" with starlets visiting his office.
The Place
That must be Los Angeles. "The light is brighter than elsewhere - you can measure it on a light meter". "There is a glamour, a life enhancement, a romance in American cinematography that you do not find in other countries". A bit about the growth in the population of LA from 150,000 in 1890 that exploded to a million in1915 to the 8 million of today. The supply of water was always a problem, the risk of earthquakes, but the light!
To be in an Audience
Thomson quotes from the stirring ending of Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. "So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past". The title refers to that shared experience in a cinema, "there is no stopping or repeating" ( had to go and see Inception and Oppenheimer twice to understand something that I missed) and that it is "fundamental to the beauty and art of what we call a movie".
Charlie
An important section, but not for me. Mentions, of course, for The Gold Rush 1925, The Circus 1928 and City Lights 1931, the "pinnacle" of his career.
By a Nose
Why does a History of Hollywood have a chapter about Nicole Kidman's prosthetic nose as Virginia Woolf in The Hours? Thomson tells us all about the voice, the make-up and deportment that made her unrecognisable. The author is obviously a huge fan of Nicole, but why a whole chapter in this sort of book? OK, there were deservedly lost of Oscar nominations and wins. And a cast to die for including Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore, class direction from Stephen Daldry and the screenplay by David Hare from the Pulitzer Prize winning Michael Cunningham. Thomson notes how rare on film is someone who commits themselves to a role like this. "I still like The Hours, I was moved by it". Then "there isn't a sight in movies as momentous as shots of a face as it's mind is being changed". "And only movies have allowed that". It's a superb piece by the author, but why here in this book?
The Man in the Hat ...... The Woman in Gloves
Oh dear, now we jump back, way back to D W Griffiths and early film. After several hundred shorts, here comes The Birth of a Nation in 1915 and Intolerance the following year. The author tells us "my task .... (it is the passion of the equation) is to convince you that the two are one: that the urge to tell these stories is inseparable from the wish to make money". The book is littered with these scattershot ideas.
Stroheim and Seeing Money
"Anyone in film, or into it, has grown up with the legend of Stroheim". I did not have a clue, David. The movie Greed from 1925 is forty reels long. Thomson says it's "one of the most important achievements in silent film". But nine hours? A long and tedious biography of the film maker.
The Frenzy on the Wall
Here is the author living in Streatham as a child, the late 40's, the cinemas there. Should this not have started the book and why here? Lots of box office statistics, all boring.
Respect
All about Louis B. Mayer (again!) of MGM, the highest paid man in America. Who are the MPPDA (now the MPAA)? Mayer was at the helm (and chairman) of of the newly formed International Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The birth of the Oscars.
At the Paradise
Somehow an Edward Hopper painting from 1929 leads us into the advent of sound in pictures. Not an easy birth.
The Factory
Thomson asks us "What is Art" and then goes into an interminable explanation. He calls the studios "the factory" and dwells on what it takes to make a film. Somehow we are on to the films of King Vidor (as I said it's all over the place) especially the very successful The Big Parade. Then on to War and Peace from 1956 and Duel in the Sun from 1946. When he talks about financing pictures, we are on to Greta Garbo and James Cagney. He compares Gone with the Wind (the all time success) with the box office failure that was Jean Renoir's La Regle de Jeu. But then how the latter was a "landmark and a masterpiece). When Thomson slags off films of today at the end of this section, is he just being stupidly controversial for the sake of it?
Viable Business
Going back in time, he tells us how many films a star had to make in a year. James Cagney made thirty two in ten years. Including playing Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream (highly exceptional). Thomson notes "the manner in which the screenplay itself became a managerial tool, a set of plans, insurance that the system would be upheld". What does this all mean? He rambles on "The script in Hollywood is now regarded as a sacred thing; time and again the emptiness of modern movies is blamed on bad scripts, and with ample reason". I could not believe what I was reading. Then more boring stuff about Hollywood producers again, and then the unions (the Writer's Guild the most protected union ever). "They are technicians rather than authors" because their work is never theirs. And do not get me started about his views on agents!
Golden?
Now we know Thomson's golden age of film. The 1930's and 40's. There is too much about It's a Wonderful Life and how it lost out to The Best Years of Our Lives at the Oscars. But then a nice piece about Preston Sturges, initially a writer, he thought he could direct his own scripts. And did so very successfully. Until a sad ending to his career. After a highly successful period with Paramount, he refused to accept their new contract, and ended in failure. More like this please.
Divorce, Hollywood Style
Who could be interested in all of this? Not me. A lot about David Selznick again. He almost has a whole column in the Index at the end. Why not put everything about him in one place rather than dozens of different pages all through the book? I was not interested in his private life. Sorry.
Our Town
Of course that's LA. A potted history but then an extraordinary couple of pages Harlem Carpenter or Jean Harlow as we know her. "America's slut". She married Paul Bern who is found dead, naked in his dressing room. A big scandal but Harlow went on to make many more films, forty two in all before she died at twenty six. Compared to Katherine Hepburn - "a model of feminist independence".
The Darkness and the Light
After the war, the dark inside a cinema was an alternative to the daylight outside, so was "the bet place to be". Interesting about the dark films of the post war period 1945-1949. So "where did noir come from. An intriguing question and one not adequately answered". Thomson mentions Crossfire, The Killers, Double Indemnity and others. A dozen pages at the end covers the late forties in style.
In a Lonely Place
Thomson describes the title as "I am thinking about a kind of alienation that begins within the film business itself, and in it's relation to America". It "is elusive" to say the least. "The loneliness is actual, you can feel it in LA". We are in the early fifties and soon we are on to The House Committee For Un-American Activities and The Blacklist. Not forgetting unions, gangsters and strikes. Or The Committee For The First Amendment. A collection of top movie people including John Huston, Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart among others. Arguing about the "unfriendly hearings". Joseph Losey leaves America when his communist background rears it's head, and in the UK makes The Criminal, The Servant, Accident and The Go-Between. All brilliant movies (that's me). Other films in this period discussed are Crossfire, Force of Evil, The Maltese Falcon, High Sierra (those last three with Bogart).
"What is Cinema?"
This part all starts with RKO. Not the biggest studio but one that produced some outstanding movies. But they dumped Lucille Ball thinking she had no future in film. She had previously met Desi Arnaz and they formed the company Desilu. They paid for a pilot of a comedy called I Love Lucy and sold it to CBS for not much. It became the nation's number one TV show and by 1953 had a revenue of Six Million Dollars. In 1967 Gulf and Weston bought Desilu for Seventeen Million Dollars. This was just to show how TV was taking over from cinema. But films fight back with Cinemascope and the biggest screens showing The King and I, Carousel, South Pacific, The Ten Commandments, The Greatest Show on Earth (one of my early movies), and Ben-Hur. We then get a list of all the stars who really wanted to work in films and not TV including Cary Grant and Grace Kelly (To Catch a Thief). Then more about Hitchcock and Billy Wilder and their successes. When the author goes on to some film history, we hear that it is the French who take the work of American directors far more seriously than their homeland, and find themselves as "Auteurs". The first ever book on Hitchcock was by Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer!
A Film We Can't Refuse
Into 1960 and Cleopatra. And other big blockbusters of the sixties. And how the movies were sold off to TV. Then all those films of the 60's and early 70's such as The Godfather,
Right Before Your Eyes
Oh No! He starts with The Matrix and then something about horror films. It's just turning into a list of movies, has he got bored with the book, or as he previously remarked, the only good films are those from way back. we do get some insight into the making of Heaven's Gate. but we have heard all that before. But there does seem to be an interesting book called "Final Cut: Art Money and EGO in the making of Heavens Gate, the film that sank United Artists" by Steven Bach.
That's All Folks?
To finish we get lots of facts, lots of numbers (for example cinema chains going bust) and some stuff on independent films. Thomson glosses over Miramax. He says later "I regret the way that America has elected to make films for it's bluntest section of society (yes, he actually says this) and in ways that flatter them". And there is "much evidence that digital images will not last" ... "there is a deadness in digital" ... "they abandon the one essential: reliance on light". Then "I am alarmed and mystified by the way film still photography have so fallen in love with digital imagery". His "last story" makes him out to be a bitter old man, which I'm sure he is not.
The Gamble and the Lost Rights
How wonderful it starts with a friend. Roberts Towne, a screenwriter and Oscar winner for Chinatown. Not that well paid until he assisted with the Mission Impossible franchise. We do get a decent history of the making of Chinatown especially the relationship between Towne and director Roman Polanski who changed the ending and made it so awful. The bad guy survives. But the sequel The Two Jakes was "a turkey". But somehow the book often harks back to the things in this chapter. Why?
Mayer and Thalberg
Some stuff about the heads of studios - David O. Selznick, Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer. Thomson obviously admires Thalberg but despises Mayer; "greedy and cruel" with starlets visiting his office.
The Place
That must be Los Angeles. "The light is brighter than elsewhere - you can measure it on a light meter". "There is a glamour, a life enhancement, a romance in American cinematography that you do not find in other countries". A bit about the growth in the population of LA from 150,000 in 1890 that exploded to a million in1915 to the 8 million of today. The supply of water was always a problem, the risk of earthquakes, but the light!
To be in an Audience
Thomson quotes from the stirring ending of Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. "So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past". The title refers to that shared experience in a cinema, "there is no stopping or repeating" ( had to go and see Inception and Oppenheimer twice to understand something that I missed) and that it is "fundamental to the beauty and art of what we call a movie".
Charlie
An important section, but not for me. Mentions, of course, for The Gold Rush 1925, The Circus 1928 and City Lights 1931, the "pinnacle" of his career.
By a Nose
Why does a History of Hollywood have a chapter about Nicole Kidman's prosthetic nose as Virginia Woolf in The Hours? Thomson tells us all about the voice, the make-up and deportment that made her unrecognisable. The author is obviously a huge fan of Nicole, but why a whole chapter in this sort of book? OK, there were deservedly lost of Oscar nominations and wins. And a cast to die for including Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore, class direction from Stephen Daldry and the screenplay by David Hare from the Pulitzer Prize winning Michael Cunningham. Thomson notes how rare on film is someone who commits themselves to a role like this. "I still like The Hours, I was moved by it". Then "there isn't a sight in movies as momentous as shots of a face as it's mind is being changed". "And only movies have allowed that". It's a superb piece by the author, but why here in this book?
The Man in the Hat ...... The Woman in Gloves
Oh dear, now we jump back, way back to D W Griffiths and early film. After several hundred shorts, here comes The Birth of a Nation in 1915 and Intolerance the following year. The author tells us "my task .... (it is the passion of the equation) is to convince you that the two are one: that the urge to tell these stories is inseparable from the wish to make money". The book is littered with these scattershot ideas.
Stroheim and Seeing Money
"Anyone in film, or into it, has grown up with the legend of Stroheim". I did not have a clue, David. The movie Greed from 1925 is forty reels long. Thomson says it's "one of the most important achievements in silent film". But nine hours? A long and tedious biography of the film maker.
The Frenzy on the Wall
Here is the author living in Streatham as a child, the late 40's, the cinemas there. Should this not have started the book and why here? Lots of box office statistics, all boring.
Respect
All about Louis B. Mayer (again!) of MGM, the highest paid man in America. Who are the MPPDA (now the MPAA)? Mayer was at the helm (and chairman) of of the newly formed International Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The birth of the Oscars.
At the Paradise
Somehow an Edward Hopper painting from 1929 leads us into the advent of sound in pictures. Not an easy birth.
The Factory
Thomson asks us "What is Art" and then goes into an interminable explanation. He calls the studios "the factory" and dwells on what it takes to make a film. Somehow we are on to the films of King Vidor (as I said it's all over the place) especially the very successful The Big Parade. Then on to War and Peace from 1956 and Duel in the Sun from 1946. When he talks about financing pictures, we are on to Greta Garbo and James Cagney. He compares Gone with the Wind (the all time success) with the box office failure that was Jean Renoir's La Regle de Jeu. But then how the latter was a "landmark and a masterpiece). When Thomson slags off films of today at the end of this section, is he just being stupidly controversial for the sake of it?
Viable Business
Going back in time, he tells us how many films a star had to make in a year. James Cagney made thirty two in ten years. Including playing Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream (highly exceptional). Thomson notes "the manner in which the screenplay itself became a managerial tool, a set of plans, insurance that the system would be upheld". What does this all mean? He rambles on "The script in Hollywood is now regarded as a sacred thing; time and again the emptiness of modern movies is blamed on bad scripts, and with ample reason". I could not believe what I was reading. Then more boring stuff about Hollywood producers again, and then the unions (the Writer's Guild the most protected union ever). "They are technicians rather than authors" because their work is never theirs. And do not get me started about his views on agents!
Golden?
Now we know Thomson's golden age of film. The 1930's and 40's. There is too much about It's a Wonderful Life and how it lost out to The Best Years of Our Lives at the Oscars. But then a nice piece about Preston Sturges, initially a writer, he thought he could direct his own scripts. And did so very successfully. Until a sad ending to his career. After a highly successful period with Paramount, he refused to accept their new contract, and ended in failure. More like this please.
Divorce, Hollywood Style
Who could be interested in all of this? Not me. A lot about David Selznick again. He almost has a whole column in the Index at the end. Why not put everything about him in one place rather than dozens of different pages all through the book? I was not interested in his private life. Sorry.
Our Town
Of course that's LA. A potted history but then an extraordinary couple of pages Harlem Carpenter or Jean Harlow as we know her. "America's slut". She married Paul Bern who is found dead, naked in his dressing room. A big scandal but Harlow went on to make many more films, forty two in all before she died at twenty six. Compared to Katherine Hepburn - "a model of feminist independence".
The Darkness and the Light
After the war, the dark inside a cinema was an alternative to the daylight outside, so was "the bet place to be". Interesting about the dark films of the post war period 1945-1949. So "where did noir come from. An intriguing question and one not adequately answered". Thomson mentions Crossfire, The Killers, Double Indemnity and others. A dozen pages at the end covers the late forties in style.
In a Lonely Place
Thomson describes the title as "I am thinking about a kind of alienation that begins within the film business itself, and in it's relation to America". It "is elusive" to say the least. "The loneliness is actual, you can feel it in LA". We are in the early fifties and soon we are on to The House Committee For Un-American Activities and The Blacklist. Not forgetting unions, gangsters and strikes. Or The Committee For The First Amendment. A collection of top movie people including John Huston, Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart among others. Arguing about the "unfriendly hearings". Joseph Losey leaves America when his communist background rears it's head, and in the UK makes The Criminal, The Servant, Accident and The Go-Between. All brilliant movies (that's me). Other films in this period discussed are Crossfire, Force of Evil, The Maltese Falcon, High Sierra (those last three with Bogart).
"What is Cinema?"
This part all starts with RKO. Not the biggest studio but one that produced some outstanding movies. But they dumped Lucille Ball thinking she had no future in film. She had previously met Desi Arnaz and they formed the company Desilu. They paid for a pilot of a comedy called I Love Lucy and sold it to CBS for not much. It became the nation's number one TV show and by 1953 had a revenue of Six Million Dollars. In 1967 Gulf and Weston bought Desilu for Seventeen Million Dollars. This was just to show how TV was taking over from cinema. But films fight back with Cinemascope and the biggest screens showing The King and I, Carousel, South Pacific, The Ten Commandments, The Greatest Show on Earth (one of my early movies), and Ben-Hur. We then get a list of all the stars who really wanted to work in films and not TV including Cary Grant and Grace Kelly (To Catch a Thief). Then more about Hitchcock and Billy Wilder and their successes. When the author goes on to some film history, we hear that it is the French who take the work of American directors far more seriously than their homeland, and find themselves as "Auteurs". The first ever book on Hitchcock was by Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer!
A Film We Can't Refuse
Into 1960 and Cleopatra. And other big blockbusters of the sixties. And how the movies were sold off to TV. Then all those films of the 60's and early 70's such as The Godfather,
Right Before Your Eyes
Oh No! He starts with The Matrix and then something about horror films. It's just turning into a list of movies, has he got bored with the book, or as he previously remarked, the only good films are those from way back. we do get some insight into the making of Heaven's Gate. but we have heard all that before. But there does seem to be an interesting book called "Final Cut: Art Money and EGO in the making of Heavens Gate, the film that sank United Artists" by Steven Bach.
That's All Folks?
To finish we get lots of facts, lots of numbers (for example cinema chains going bust) and some stuff on independent films. Thomson glosses over Miramax. He says later "I regret the way that America has elected to make films for it's bluntest section of society (yes, he actually says this) and in ways that flatter them". And there is "much evidence that digital images will not last" ... "there is a deadness in digital" ... "they abandon the one essential: reliance on light". Then "I am alarmed and mystified by the way film still photography have so fallen in love with digital imagery". His "last story" makes him out to be a bitter old man, which I'm sure he is not.
December 16, 2024
David Thomson is a movie scholar but his writing style is more easily compared to certain music critics such as Greil Marcus than many movie critics. That is to say he is deeply knowledgeable, highly opinionated, and writes in a sort of ecstatic voice that marvels at the connections he’s making (and isn’t afraid to lapse into an occasional dirty joke). He is trying to investigate “the whole equation” of Hollywood, and takes a scattershot look at the whole history of American movies to do so. I appreciate his not strictly linear approach as he moves through the decades with thematic diversions; but I think he falls short of saying anything profoundly new about film as an art or Hollywood as a producer of said art. His intelligence runs deep, and the book is highly entertaining and insightful, but I don’t know that I came away knowing anything about cinema I didn’t already know. His style promises a profundity that the substance of the book didn’t deliver but, such is the kinetic nature of that style that I’d still consider this a five star read. Go figure!
February 15, 2011
The Whole Equation was a doomed enterprise from the very start, of course, at least in a way... one man, one volume, could not hope to encompass the whole of Hollywood's history from its inception in the 19th Century to the 21st. Yet David Thomson's discursive musings are a great success in another way, for they do provide an evocative and, I daresay, valid sense of the sweep of that history, or at least of its early years.
Thomson is a guy who is utterly enthralled by the cinema. He was born in Britain in 1941, and hence grew up during that country's most austere period, during and just after WWII, when the national mood was gray and the great movie houses were just about the only places where gaudy extravagance was not only to be found but to be expected. That contrast made an indelible mark on the young Thomson, and he makes no pretense of detachment when it comes to the movies that came out of Los Angeles. He loves them, even though he knows them well. And although he has often been betrayed by Hollywood (as have we all), just like any mature lover Thomson sees and accepts the flaws in his beloved, without forgiving them blindly... he remains able to cast a critical and, at times, savage eye on films and film history.
Thomson has his quirks. He seems to see the advent of color filmmaking as a devolution (except of course for the bygone glory of true Technicolor), and bears an inordinate (albeit freely admitted) attraction to Nicole Kidman, for example. But these idiosyncrasies only lend spice and vigor to his work. The Whole Equation focuses on the earlier years of Hollywood, becoming much sketchier as it draws closer to the present, and that is perhaps more of an indictment.
Still and all, if you've ever given a thought to how those flickering images came to capture so much of our time and money... this book is an important, influential, entertaining and even essential resource.
Thomson is a guy who is utterly enthralled by the cinema. He was born in Britain in 1941, and hence grew up during that country's most austere period, during and just after WWII, when the national mood was gray and the great movie houses were just about the only places where gaudy extravagance was not only to be found but to be expected. That contrast made an indelible mark on the young Thomson, and he makes no pretense of detachment when it comes to the movies that came out of Los Angeles. He loves them, even though he knows them well. And although he has often been betrayed by Hollywood (as have we all), just like any mature lover Thomson sees and accepts the flaws in his beloved, without forgiving them blindly... he remains able to cast a critical and, at times, savage eye on films and film history.
Thomson has his quirks. He seems to see the advent of color filmmaking as a devolution (except of course for the bygone glory of true Technicolor), and bears an inordinate (albeit freely admitted) attraction to Nicole Kidman, for example. But these idiosyncrasies only lend spice and vigor to his work. The Whole Equation focuses on the earlier years of Hollywood, becoming much sketchier as it draws closer to the present, and that is perhaps more of an indictment.
Still and all, if you've ever given a thought to how those flickering images came to capture so much of our time and money... this book is an important, influential, entertaining and even essential resource.
October 3, 2014
It is frustrating how well David Thompson writes about film considering how little he seems to respect it. Film through Thompson's lens seems a bit dirty, in both the kid in the mud, and Larry Flint way. He looks down on film, constantly lauding literature and other arts as superior. Which is fine, hell I share the same condescending view towards video games - only I wouldn't bother to write a page on them, much less a book. Thompson gets the title from Fitzgerald's THE LAST TYCOON, his final, unfinished novel about Hollywood. THE WHOLE EQUATION here is one which takes into account the combination between art and business, as well as the audience's contribution to both.
Thompson is a wonderful writer, whose words flow with such intelligence and wit that the underlying condescension feels natural and right. But it isn't. Mark Cousins tells a similar cinematic history in his documentary THE STORY OF FILM, and he is equally critical towards the excesses of industry; but his is a true love story. Thompson's story of film is a jilted lover's take - a look back at an ex to find what the hell he saw in the first place. Cousins' explores the history as one would with a life-partner, exposing the flaws only because they are part of the beloved whole.
Actually, Thompson seems to feel towards cinema the way I feel towards his book: appreciative for the moments of truth, beauty and entertainment, while frustrated at the cynicism blocking the artistic potential.
Thompson is a wonderful writer, whose words flow with such intelligence and wit that the underlying condescension feels natural and right. But it isn't. Mark Cousins tells a similar cinematic history in his documentary THE STORY OF FILM, and he is equally critical towards the excesses of industry; but his is a true love story. Thompson's story of film is a jilted lover's take - a look back at an ex to find what the hell he saw in the first place. Cousins' explores the history as one would with a life-partner, exposing the flaws only because they are part of the beloved whole.
Actually, Thompson seems to feel towards cinema the way I feel towards his book: appreciative for the moments of truth, beauty and entertainment, while frustrated at the cynicism blocking the artistic potential.
February 8, 2009
This book was very different from what I initially thought it would be. Although it claims to be "A History of Hollywood", it really is more a personal musing about film that uses Hollywood as a framework. It took some getting used to, as Thomson's style in this book is very colloquial, with lots of parenthetical flights. But once I got onto his wavelength, I found it be quite a good book. He brings up philosophical questions about film (as opposed to say, books) that I hadn't ever thought about, and there are a number of overarching themes to follow through the story. If you are seriously interested in film, this book is worth checking out.
March 22, 2008
Generally I eat this stuff up: a well-written, insightful look at the movies that engagingly theorizes while dishing up dirt here and there. But perhaps Thomson's amazing Biographical Dictionary of Film just raised my expectations too much....
The book moves from the early silent days to the present, using Los Angeles as a sort of through-line (and Chinatown as an exemplar) but things feel half-baked at times and the framework isn't entirely nailed down.
But an enjoyable and lightning fast read (it would be a 3 1/2 if the option were available).
The book moves from the early silent days to the present, using Los Angeles as a sort of through-line (and Chinatown as an exemplar) but things feel half-baked at times and the framework isn't entirely nailed down.
But an enjoyable and lightning fast read (it would be a 3 1/2 if the option were available).
July 7, 2007
I started reading this book in September 2005, and made it to the 3rd chapter - while on a cruise. Theoretically, I am still currently reading. However, I really don't know that I will have the gumption to finish the book. It was rather dry and not real interesing to me - but perhaps that is just me. It seems to me to be difficult to write the history of Hollywood in one book. The subject should be more specialized. There's too much to write about Hollywood to cover it thoroughly.
February 6, 2014
In which David Thomson talks at meandering length about the "movies". The style is what Rob Langham would call "talking in statements" and others might label "highly irritating", "self-indulgent" and/or "pretentious". There are some interesting sections to be sure, but it feels cobbled together. The less said about his sexual obsession with Nicole Kidman, the better.
March 30, 2020
This is one of the books which has had the greatest influence on my life. It set me on a path of discovery, for which I will always be grateful. It turned me into a passionate fan of the golden age, when beforehand I didn't really know much about films at all. David Thomson writes beautifully about how it all fits together, an overarching theory of cinema. I found it dazzling.
Want to read
July 29, 2016I picked up this book because I love David Thomson; I bought it because of this line: 'Charlie Chaplin fucked like a very wealthy man with an utterly private life.'
March 26, 2021
I have made a number of false starts on this book over the years, but have glad that I persevered.
David Thomson is a singularly frustrating writer on film. With the deliberately obscurantist or slaves to theory, those who seem to take deliberate pleasure in making criticism in accessible, it is possible to set aside their work with minimal feeling of guilt.
By contrast, Thomson is perhaps not the most limpid of writers, but this is due less to a drive to starve the reader of meaning and more to an apparently irresistible urge to cram as many thoughts, facts, anecdotes, irrelevant asides and puns as he can into almost every sentence. The result is hard going on the digestion, but also rewarding, if challenging in a different way. There is no shortage of writing to pique the interest. The difficulty is in focusing the attention on just one aspect of the kaleidoscope of ideas that he sets out.
The high concept for this book is a History of Hollywood, and there is certainly a line of narrative centered on the film industry, taking the reader from the birth of motion pictures up to the turn of the 21st century. However the title, 'The Whole Equation', is an early hint at the wide digressions to be found within: ; Hollywood as a place as well as an industry (the original sin of its foundation myth, as set out in 1974's 'Chinatown', as well as the substitution of Southern California's naturally perfect light with the artificiality of digital filmmaking); parallels between the gambler's town of Las Vegas and the great gamble lying at the heart of the studio system; the dialogue between fiction and reality in F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Last Tycoon'.
Thomson's thesis is, effectively, that the story of the movies (Hollywood movies) is integrally linked to the story of the twentieth century, which means that any understanding of what Hollywood represents, what Hollywood movies are or should be, requires mastery of this 'Whole Equation' - only ever grasped by a select few of the movie business (a list is never provided but includes, potentially, Irving Thalberg, Lew Wasserman and Steven Spielberg).
Given that this challenge of holistic understanding extends to writer, not to mention the reader, it is perhaps understandable that Thomson is never quite so brave (or perhaps arrogant) as to summarise this 'Whole Equation'. But that is not necessarily a weakness: rather than a neat idea stretched over 400 pages the result is a wealth of ideas which (like the titular equation) are hard to comprehensively absorb in one go. This is made more challenging by Thomson's idiosyncratic magpie mind, throwing in conjecture and strong opinion go with facts and figures.
The aspect that I will take away is his extensive digression on the audience, and the relationship between viewers and the movies. Some of his prose reads like reactionary alarmism - the risk of movies infecting audiences with a reliance on some fantasy existence, insidiously supplanting or informing our own views of reality (for instance his thought that, at some atavistic level, the September 11 attacks chimed with the appetite for grand-scale destruction created and fed by the movies).
However, in the same way that I felt compelled to return to the book as a whole, there is something in the idea that has lingered. We live in a world where lawmakers referenced the antics of Jack Bauer in '24' as a justification for torture. Where the execution of Osama Bin Laden was, within a year, recreated on screen in 'Zero Dark Thirty' (it took 6 years for Operation Eagle Claw to make it into the opening scenes of 'The Delta Force'). Where the most recent presidency closed in scenes of chaos which were at the same time inspired by apocalyptic fantasies by the perpetrators and formed the basis for a counter-apocalyptic narrative in the news networks. One of the big questions is how the return to normalcy heralded in the eyes of many by the incoming Biden administration will sustain as news networks suffer crashing ratings and some begin to bemoan how boring politics have become. This attitude, and the febrile atmosphere of the last five years - surely borne in part from an audience used to consuming spectacle and sensation - must also form part of that whole equation.
David Thomson is a singularly frustrating writer on film. With the deliberately obscurantist or slaves to theory, those who seem to take deliberate pleasure in making criticism in accessible, it is possible to set aside their work with minimal feeling of guilt.
By contrast, Thomson is perhaps not the most limpid of writers, but this is due less to a drive to starve the reader of meaning and more to an apparently irresistible urge to cram as many thoughts, facts, anecdotes, irrelevant asides and puns as he can into almost every sentence. The result is hard going on the digestion, but also rewarding, if challenging in a different way. There is no shortage of writing to pique the interest. The difficulty is in focusing the attention on just one aspect of the kaleidoscope of ideas that he sets out.
The high concept for this book is a History of Hollywood, and there is certainly a line of narrative centered on the film industry, taking the reader from the birth of motion pictures up to the turn of the 21st century. However the title, 'The Whole Equation', is an early hint at the wide digressions to be found within: ; Hollywood as a place as well as an industry (the original sin of its foundation myth, as set out in 1974's 'Chinatown', as well as the substitution of Southern California's naturally perfect light with the artificiality of digital filmmaking); parallels between the gambler's town of Las Vegas and the great gamble lying at the heart of the studio system; the dialogue between fiction and reality in F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Last Tycoon'.
Thomson's thesis is, effectively, that the story of the movies (Hollywood movies) is integrally linked to the story of the twentieth century, which means that any understanding of what Hollywood represents, what Hollywood movies are or should be, requires mastery of this 'Whole Equation' - only ever grasped by a select few of the movie business (a list is never provided but includes, potentially, Irving Thalberg, Lew Wasserman and Steven Spielberg).
Given that this challenge of holistic understanding extends to writer, not to mention the reader, it is perhaps understandable that Thomson is never quite so brave (or perhaps arrogant) as to summarise this 'Whole Equation'. But that is not necessarily a weakness: rather than a neat idea stretched over 400 pages the result is a wealth of ideas which (like the titular equation) are hard to comprehensively absorb in one go. This is made more challenging by Thomson's idiosyncratic magpie mind, throwing in conjecture and strong opinion go with facts and figures.
The aspect that I will take away is his extensive digression on the audience, and the relationship between viewers and the movies. Some of his prose reads like reactionary alarmism - the risk of movies infecting audiences with a reliance on some fantasy existence, insidiously supplanting or informing our own views of reality (for instance his thought that, at some atavistic level, the September 11 attacks chimed with the appetite for grand-scale destruction created and fed by the movies).
However, in the same way that I felt compelled to return to the book as a whole, there is something in the idea that has lingered. We live in a world where lawmakers referenced the antics of Jack Bauer in '24' as a justification for torture. Where the execution of Osama Bin Laden was, within a year, recreated on screen in 'Zero Dark Thirty' (it took 6 years for Operation Eagle Claw to make it into the opening scenes of 'The Delta Force'). Where the most recent presidency closed in scenes of chaos which were at the same time inspired by apocalyptic fantasies by the perpetrators and formed the basis for a counter-apocalyptic narrative in the news networks. One of the big questions is how the return to normalcy heralded in the eyes of many by the incoming Biden administration will sustain as news networks suffer crashing ratings and some begin to bemoan how boring politics have become. This attitude, and the febrile atmosphere of the last five years - surely borne in part from an audience used to consuming spectacle and sensation - must also form part of that whole equation.
May 4, 2019
Passionate, knowledgeable, grumpy, and idiosyncratic (to say the least), film critic Thomson's history of Hollywood centres on what he terms 'the whole equation' of the industry: the art and the business. While I enjoyed his succinct and astute pen-portraits of films both familiar and unfamiliar, he's fairly dismissive of the notion that any but a tiny minority of films could be deemed 'art' - although it has to be said that judging film by the rules and expectations of other forms of art, and cheery-picking a handful of outstanding examples from other media as your comparators - feels rather like holding a finger on the scales. I didn't know much about Thomson as a critic going into this book, but within a few pages I found I could predict his views on 95% of the films he mentions; by the same token, my list of films to watch now has at least twenty new-to-me titles on it, and he made me rethink my perspective on a few I've already seen. He's a giant snob, no doubt, but he pretty much always actively makes the case for his verdict, rather than just assuming it.
On the business side, he's expansive and fascinating. His primary focus is the period up to c. 1954, when factors such as the mass adoption of television in US homes changes the landscape beyond recognition (albeit not, Thomson argues, in the ways and for the reasons sometimes assumed). He combines breakdowns of individual films' budgets (and takings) with detailed discussion of how the studio system operated: the roles played by execs and producers (plenty of larger-than-life characters), the contracts and earnings of those both onscreen and behind it (ditto), and the distribution system that (until a landmark legal ruling in the late 1940s) meant studios both made the product and controlled where, when and how often it was seen by audiences. He moves more quickly through the 50s, 60s and 70s - dwelling on the industry's poor decision-making in relation to TV, and the rise and fall of both the Cahiers du cinema generation and the movie brats - and he deals with the 90s only briefly, in a final chapter in which he is cynical about 'independent' film, and praises Harvey Weinstein while also making it clear he's a colossal arsehole. The industry-changing effects of Jaws and Star Wars are touched upon, but these seem both more predictable and less drastic when set in the context of everything else Thomson has described; in some ways, the book has the shape of a tragedy, in which Hollywood's fatal flaw (its inability to see past the quick buck to the longer-term possibilities) is visible from the start.
Along the way, Thomson advances grand arguments - sometimes convincing, sometimes bizarre - about the cultural role of cinema in US life, as both formative influence and reflection of its times. He's idiosyncratic in his choices (he seems to be writing from an alternative timeline in which- Reagan's presidency aside - the 1980s never happened; fair enough, tbh), and there are one or two spectacularly tone-deaf passages, notably about specific actresses. (I found myself hoping there's an afterlife purely so that, when Thomson gets there, Joan Crawford can greet him with the non-corporeal equivalent of a knee to the balls.) As my summary of the business side of things might suggest, there's a significant moralistic strain amid the enthusiasm, and he's (justifiably) cynical on a whole range of issues; his comments on Hollywood's systemic racism (how it pats itself on the back for lauding a handful of black stars, without stirring itself to any real change in terms of who holds the power) are as pointedly accurate now as they no doubt were in 2003.
Sometimes it made me wince, sometimes it made me laugh, and sometimes it made me raise sceptical eyebrows; but it left me much better informed, and with many more films to watch.
On the business side, he's expansive and fascinating. His primary focus is the period up to c. 1954, when factors such as the mass adoption of television in US homes changes the landscape beyond recognition (albeit not, Thomson argues, in the ways and for the reasons sometimes assumed). He combines breakdowns of individual films' budgets (and takings) with detailed discussion of how the studio system operated: the roles played by execs and producers (plenty of larger-than-life characters), the contracts and earnings of those both onscreen and behind it (ditto), and the distribution system that (until a landmark legal ruling in the late 1940s) meant studios both made the product and controlled where, when and how often it was seen by audiences. He moves more quickly through the 50s, 60s and 70s - dwelling on the industry's poor decision-making in relation to TV, and the rise and fall of both the Cahiers du cinema generation and the movie brats - and he deals with the 90s only briefly, in a final chapter in which he is cynical about 'independent' film, and praises Harvey Weinstein while also making it clear he's a colossal arsehole. The industry-changing effects of Jaws and Star Wars are touched upon, but these seem both more predictable and less drastic when set in the context of everything else Thomson has described; in some ways, the book has the shape of a tragedy, in which Hollywood's fatal flaw (its inability to see past the quick buck to the longer-term possibilities) is visible from the start.
Along the way, Thomson advances grand arguments - sometimes convincing, sometimes bizarre - about the cultural role of cinema in US life, as both formative influence and reflection of its times. He's idiosyncratic in his choices (he seems to be writing from an alternative timeline in which- Reagan's presidency aside - the 1980s never happened; fair enough, tbh), and there are one or two spectacularly tone-deaf passages, notably about specific actresses. (I found myself hoping there's an afterlife purely so that, when Thomson gets there, Joan Crawford can greet him with the non-corporeal equivalent of a knee to the balls.) As my summary of the business side of things might suggest, there's a significant moralistic strain amid the enthusiasm, and he's (justifiably) cynical on a whole range of issues; his comments on Hollywood's systemic racism (how it pats itself on the back for lauding a handful of black stars, without stirring itself to any real change in terms of who holds the power) are as pointedly accurate now as they no doubt were in 2003.
Sometimes it made me wince, sometimes it made me laugh, and sometimes it made me raise sceptical eyebrows; but it left me much better informed, and with many more films to watch.
May 16, 2024
The history of Hollywood is, like so many movies, superficially quite simple: it’s the story of a group of mavericks attracted by a new technology, producing simple stories which prove to be hugely profitable; of the way the money corrupts and corporatises that industry, squelching its ideals; of how new challenges threaten it, forcing it to change and adapt. Like a 60s epic, however, it is also a story with a cast of many thousands, which thus lends itself to being told in many different ways. Thomson’s The Whole Equation Is therefore A History of Hollywood, as opposed to the history of Hollywood – a personal exploration of what was then, roughly a century of cinematic development.
Unfortunately, it is this personal angle which undermines the book. Thomson’s personal obsessions overwhelm the narrative, with chapters seemingly dedicated to random topics like the movie Chinatown or the author’s borderline obsession with Nicole Kidman. What’s left is only loosely a history – in that most of the chapters tackle subjects in what is broadly a chronology - but so much seems to be missing. And much of what is there seems like fluff. Occasionally, there’s an interesting chapter, such as where the author looks at how different directors coped with the factory system, but for the most part you feel that the story being told isn’t the one you were interested in.
I guess what I was hoping for in this book was something more like Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age, but for movies. Something which explains how Hollywood evolved, perhaps using key movies and people to illustrate its points. Instead, what I feel is that I have the equivalent of one of those movies where the trailer has deceived the viewer into thinking it’s something that it’s not.
Unfortunately, it is this personal angle which undermines the book. Thomson’s personal obsessions overwhelm the narrative, with chapters seemingly dedicated to random topics like the movie Chinatown or the author’s borderline obsession with Nicole Kidman. What’s left is only loosely a history – in that most of the chapters tackle subjects in what is broadly a chronology - but so much seems to be missing. And much of what is there seems like fluff. Occasionally, there’s an interesting chapter, such as where the author looks at how different directors coped with the factory system, but for the most part you feel that the story being told isn’t the one you were interested in.
I guess what I was hoping for in this book was something more like Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age, but for movies. Something which explains how Hollywood evolved, perhaps using key movies and people to illustrate its points. Instead, what I feel is that I have the equivalent of one of those movies where the trailer has deceived the viewer into thinking it’s something that it’s not.
May 13, 2018
"...there isn't a sight in movies as momentous as shots of a face as its mind is being changed. And only movies have allowed that."
Brilliantly written. This is a very a personal history - and thanks to that, it is never dry, and yet manages to cover nearly a hundred years of the story of film, all the way from the brothers Lumière to Matrix Reloaded (quite a journey, that one!)
Thomson's style of writing is highly engrossing, mostly because it veers into unexpected territory every once in a while. Consider the following quote, about studio boss Louis B. Mayer:
"He was also the constant advocate of family virtues, on-and off-screen, who could also, any afternoon he dreamed, in his cream-coloured office, have some hopelessly hopeful young woman swallow his grey cum and call it cream..."
So definitely worth a read - whether to get to know Hollywood a little better, or just to get to know Thomson.
September 19, 2023
Uno dei mattoni più pesanti che abbia mai letto. Veramente un’agonia riuscire a finirlo; e non perché non sia interessante l’argomento o ciò che dice l’autore, ma perché quest’ultimo è la persona più tronfia e gonfia di autocompiacimento che esista sulla faccia della terra. Una scrittura pesante che vuole dar conto dell’immensa cultura dell’autore, arrivando a divagare completamente con parentesi inutili che non fanno altro che appesantire la lettura.
Pomposo fino all’inverosimile e inutilmente barocco, salva comunque la faccia in virtù di quelli che sono effettivamente alcuni spunti di notevole fattura (ad esempio il commento all’opera di Hopper “New York Movie”, assolutamente illuminante): da qui le due stelle.
Pomposo fino all’inverosimile e inutilmente barocco, salva comunque la faccia in virtù di quelli che sono effettivamente alcuni spunti di notevole fattura (ad esempio il commento all’opera di Hopper “New York Movie”, assolutamente illuminante): da qui le due stelle.
October 19, 2021
A love letter to Hollywood written by a man with a broken heart. If the book fails as history, much of which is assumed, it succeeds as poetry. Along the way there are some brilliant insights. The one that most struck me was the impossibility of creating art with other people's investments: the difference between Stroheim and Welles!
June 16, 2017
Part genius, part monkey on a long leash.
June 24, 2020
3.5 stars
May 2, 2021
Encyclopedic knowledge, put to sometimes intriguing and sometimes maddeningly idiosyncratic use. For me, the chapter on the Red Scare was the most effective
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July 3, 2021Didn’t finish. I love old Hollywood but I got bored with this.
April 15, 2023
Una storia di Hollywood scritta dannatamente bene. Per gli appassionati di cinema, di autorialità e storie produttive. Un must finalmente in edizione italiana.
May 24, 2009
Even reviews by Pauline Kael – those classics – don’t have much impact anymore. It’s hard to say how many books have handled Hollywood seriously. Thomson’s has. You’d expect some of what’s in here: chronology, celebrity, the grit beneath the glitz. But in no small awe you’ll be by his deriving of the ‘equation’ and how he shows it to apply.
Yes. Culture, Hollywood-delivered, begins as popular gadget-entertainment, mass cheap delight. That tradition, one of technical innovation and wonder, continues. Piggybacked upon it rides monetary incentive. Early artistry gets trumped again and again by accounting acumen, financial invention, business arrangement.
But Thompson’s strength goes beyond ‘following the money’. The key part of his equation – or formula – is viewer psychology. For years we’ve taken as true that viewers have a love affair with the Big Screen. Thomson takes us there, into that dark audience staring up at the beautiful face, listening to the emotive words. Unseen.
Movies allow us to experience someone else’s ostensibly deep emotion, to be intimate – physically up close – but at no cost. The screen demands nothing of us but our stare. We give attention – after all, it’s the only bright thing drawing our vision. And, as we so behave, we become, somewhere inside ourselves, silently irresponsible, a bit obsessed.
It’s that quiet addiction, driving the stardom, profiting the productions, generating the technology, that serves as a patent cure for the modern age. Um. Purely medicinal.
Yes. Culture, Hollywood-delivered, begins as popular gadget-entertainment, mass cheap delight. That tradition, one of technical innovation and wonder, continues. Piggybacked upon it rides monetary incentive. Early artistry gets trumped again and again by accounting acumen, financial invention, business arrangement.
But Thompson’s strength goes beyond ‘following the money’. The key part of his equation – or formula – is viewer psychology. For years we’ve taken as true that viewers have a love affair with the Big Screen. Thomson takes us there, into that dark audience staring up at the beautiful face, listening to the emotive words. Unseen.
Movies allow us to experience someone else’s ostensibly deep emotion, to be intimate – physically up close – but at no cost. The screen demands nothing of us but our stare. We give attention – after all, it’s the only bright thing drawing our vision. And, as we so behave, we become, somewhere inside ourselves, silently irresponsible, a bit obsessed.
It’s that quiet addiction, driving the stardom, profiting the productions, generating the technology, that serves as a patent cure for the modern age. Um. Purely medicinal.
February 15, 2017
Absolutely not what I expected, not having read Thomson before, but a fascinating and rewarding read.
May 20, 2012
Quite an interesting read, with an intuitive, ambitious premise -- Hollywood helped create pop culture, but in turn was itself influenced by the tides of 20th century American history and the unique personalities of the early moguls like Mayer and Thalberg, often in ways that were unpredictable. For a book that has such a rambling anecdotal feel to it, Thomson does successfully convey pieces of American cinema 'Equation'. It's an impressionistic style -- tell the story of Myron Selznick to depict the rise of the powerful Hollywood agent and its impact on the financial calculus of what kinds of movies get made; analyze and speculate on the quality of Edward Hopper's 'New York Movie' as a way to highlight the arrival of sound in the movies, 'this half-magical, half-sinister beckoning to be part of the glowing room and romance'. I especially liked his coverage of 'noir' and the HUAC hearings -- never quite understood that Frank Capra was a turncoat. Still, readers new to the history of American cinema probably would benefit with a more orderly, chronological presentation of the film stars, the rise of the studios, the changing movie-going public -- i.e. all the elements in the 'Equation' -- before picking up Thomson's book. Could have used a time-line of events as well.
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June 19, 2009Read the STOP SMILING interview with author David Thomson
The 21st Interview: David Thomson
by José Teodoro
David Thomson is a historian, critic and the author of several books on movies of tremendous influence, among them The Biographical Dictionary of Film, The Whole Equation and, most recently, Have You Seen…?: A Personal Introduction to 1000 Films and Try To Tell the Story: A Memoir. He’s contributed to publications such as Film Comment, Salon and the Guardian. His prose remains highly distinctive among critics, at once bold and intimate, often addressing an individual movie in a context that aligns it to “the movies” as a single, vast cultural phenomenon. Even Thomson’s novels, such as Suspects, which offers interconnected cameo biographical portraits of fictional characters from dozens of movies, speak to a fearsome obsession with the cinema and an urge to consider and articulate the peculiar nature of its spell and how it reflects and distorts our world.
Read the complete interview...
The 21st Interview: David Thomson
by José Teodoro
David Thomson is a historian, critic and the author of several books on movies of tremendous influence, among them The Biographical Dictionary of Film, The Whole Equation and, most recently, Have You Seen…?: A Personal Introduction to 1000 Films and Try To Tell the Story: A Memoir. He’s contributed to publications such as Film Comment, Salon and the Guardian. His prose remains highly distinctive among critics, at once bold and intimate, often addressing an individual movie in a context that aligns it to “the movies” as a single, vast cultural phenomenon. Even Thomson’s novels, such as Suspects, which offers interconnected cameo biographical portraits of fictional characters from dozens of movies, speak to a fearsome obsession with the cinema and an urge to consider and articulate the peculiar nature of its spell and how it reflects and distorts our world.
Read the complete interview...
September 8, 2010
Ok, so I gave this 3 stars. This seems fair to a book that is frustrating and engrossing in equal parts. There is a quote line on the back of my copy which says something along the lines of you don't get a unicorn to pull a cart, which I think is a much more eloquent way of expressing what I felt about it.
It's a curates egg of a book, full of fascinating stories about old Hollywood, a mad dash from the 50's through too the 90's and the occasionally rather tangential aside and also the obligatory few pages that highlight Mr Thompson's rather obsessive fascination in all things Nicole Kidman (c'mon Dave, she is not that good an actress).
Perhaps no-one can capture The Whole Equation but kudos to Mr Thompson for giving it a go and he has perhaps got closer than anyone else. However he perhaps doesn't work best in this format and it would be wiser to stick to his Dictionary of Films, as he works best in self-contained essays. Worth a look for a contrary view from a true-Hollywood insider is Robert Evans The Kid Stays In The Picture, someone who probably did understand the whole equation and full of liberal sprinklings of quality gossip.
It's a curates egg of a book, full of fascinating stories about old Hollywood, a mad dash from the 50's through too the 90's and the occasionally rather tangential aside and also the obligatory few pages that highlight Mr Thompson's rather obsessive fascination in all things Nicole Kidman (c'mon Dave, she is not that good an actress).
Perhaps no-one can capture The Whole Equation but kudos to Mr Thompson for giving it a go and he has perhaps got closer than anyone else. However he perhaps doesn't work best in this format and it would be wiser to stick to his Dictionary of Films, as he works best in self-contained essays. Worth a look for a contrary view from a true-Hollywood insider is Robert Evans The Kid Stays In The Picture, someone who probably did understand the whole equation and full of liberal sprinklings of quality gossip.
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