The American Film Institute (AFI) is where Hollywood’s collective memory lives. Anyone who was (or still is) anyone, from Harold Lloyd to Barbra Streisand, has had their brain hoovered and the results transcribed and deposited in the AFI’s vaults for safekeeping. Distinguished film historian Jeanine Basinger and journalist Sam Wasson have been granted access to these treasures, from which they have stitched together what they call “an oral history of Hollywood”. In other words, here are 400 cinema insiders, including directors, makeup people and actors, recounting what it has been like to make-believe for a living.
The result is fascinating in all the ways you might expect and some you wouldn’t. The fact, for instance, that many of the early Hollywood men were first world war veterans (from both sides) who had been trained in aerial photography and wanted to carry on doing something similar on civvy street. They had, of course, also been through hell and yearned to build an alternative moral universe where good trounced evil and there was always a loyal, pretty girl waiting patiently at the end. As for why the West Coast was picked for this new enterprise, Henry Blanke, producer of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, explains: “There was eternal sun here. The lenses were slow. The film was slow. Everything was slow, and you needed sun. Sun. Plenty of it.” Later, when sound came in, the fact that Hollywood was a “wilderness” helped enormously. “Sunset Boulevard wasn’t even paved”, which cut down on the rumble of the traffic, remembers one old-time agent.
This attitude of making the best of things extended in all directions. There’s a section on the coming of the Hays code in the late 1920s – that censorious set of rules designed to purge Hollywood of its incipient bathtub-gin sleaziness. Now no one could get naked on screen, kiss with tongues or impugn someone else’s mother. To make matters even trickier, the rules were applied differently in each state, with the result, says Blanke, that “you never recognised the picture you had made from one state to another. It was terrible.” Billy Wilder, on the other hand, recalls the Hays code fondly: “There are times when I wish we still had it because the fun has gone out of it … We had to be clever. In order to say, ‘You son of a bitch,’ you had to say, ‘If you had a mother, she’d bark.’”
A word about the methodology. The intention behind Basinger and Wasson’s cutting-and-pasting is to produce the impression that all these interviewees are in the same room at the same time, bouncing off one another. So that, for instance, Wilder and Blanke are chewing the fat about the Hays code over an after-dinner drink in Romanoff’s. Whereas, in fact, the two men were interviewed on different occasions and with no knowledge of what others might say. Some of the time this careful splicing and intercutting works in the way that the writers want it to, so that the effect is of a high-level symposium of Hollywood’s great and good. At other times the result is disjointed and resembles a scene in which acquaintances keep on mishearing each other in a noisy restaurant.
Nonetheless, the revelations keep coming. There’s Meryl Streep kvetching about how she likes to get done in four takes while Robert De Niro just goes on and on. Michael Ovitz mourns the fact that Hello, Dolly! was a huge disaster: “I mean, it cost $25 million. That would be like three or four hundred million bucks today. I mean, it almost sank the company.” Director George Seaton remembers Montgomery Clift, that anguished soul who longed to be a method actor rather than a matinee idol. During the shooting of The Search, Clift insists on bringing his Russian acting coach to the set, which freaks everyone out. Then there is Gene Kelly, the man who put brawn into modern musical masculinity, confessing that he would love to have had the boneless body of Buster Keaton: “I often wish I did. He was a complete genius, and there was a lot of dance inherently in his movements. They were balletic.”
Inevitably, at times the pseudo-conversation can start to seem like a lot of old men grumbling. Ismail Merchant complains that executives are here today and gone tomorrow. Mike Nichols says that the only plot “they” want these days is Cinderella or Rocky. Jack Nicholson pops in to say that the pancakes at the International House of Pancakes on Sunset are not what they once were. In among the grouchiness, though, there are a few positive souls who are determined to look on the bright side. Fay Wray, who in 1933 squirmed in the sweltering paw of King Kong, is happy to reflect that at least now the studios have air conditioning, which is a complete joy and a wonderful protection against that eternal, necessary sun.
• Hollywood: The Oral History is published by Faber & Faber (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
