What Hollywood’s Ultimate Oral History Reveals

What exactly is an “oral history,” and why would we need one? Most history begins and ends with personal witness, and even written documents, after all, were very often once spoken memories, with many of the best histories depending on recollected conversation, from Boswell’s life of Dr. Johnson to the court memoirs of Saint-Simon. Yet the term has become so much a part of our book culture that it tells us to expect something very specific: a heavily edited chain of first-person recollections, broken into distinct related bits, about a place or a system or an event. Although the contemporary version has roots in the oral histories compiled by the W.P.A. in the nineteen-thirties, it seems to derive, in form, from documentary films of the sixties like those of D. A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock, in which testimony is offered in sequential counterpoint, without explicit commentary.

The significant promise of oral history, as opposed to the obviously written kind, is that the parade of first-person witnesses, unimpeded by editorial interference, might, at last, tell it like it is. Though oral history from below produced blue-collar pop masterpieces in Studs Terkel’s “Hard Times” and “Working,” the genre now mostly amplifies history very much from above. So, after Jean Stein and George Plimpton’s fine oral history “American Journey” (1971), a chorus of voices speaking on the train bringing home Bobby Kennedy’s body, their subsequent and even more successful one, “Edie” (1982), was devoted to the Warholite-socialite Edie Sedgwick. That may be a clue to the form: an oral history works best as a series of impressions made on other people’s minds, and someone like Edie was only the impressions she made on other people’s minds. That’s broadly true of show people, too. Peter Bogdanovich’s two good collections of interviews with directors and actors, “Who the Devil Made It” and “Who the Hell’s in It,” are not, strictly speaking, oral histories, but they become so in their intricately self-conscious sequencing and broad panoramas of people. In the past few decades, there have been notable oral histories—in the form of books or magazine features—about the making of films including “Deliverance,” “Urban Cowboy,” “Goodfellas,” “Clueless,” “Dazed and Confused,” and “Mad Max: Fury Road.”

What makes Bogdanovich’s books matchless bedside reading is the sense that everybody counts. A similar oral history of Abstract Expressionism would doubtless contain a constant series of old quarrels about Pollock, de Kooning, Mitchell, and other luminaries. In Bogdanovich’s interviews, the Dodo’s rule rules: everybody has a part and everybody gets a prize. Although Howard Hawks and John Ford are given particular attention, the big figures are respected the way football coaches respect other football coaches, knowing that their success has much to do with the constellation of talent that happened to form around them. Because the intentions and the creation are so nearly simultaneous, Bogdanovich’s interviews with even third-rank directors make more satisfying reading than any number of critical biographies do. Most artistic biographies are studies in premeditation. Writers such as Henry James or Virginia Woolf can be found brooding on a “problem” that they share with their circles, agonize over in letters, and then attempt to resolve. This never happens with a Hollywood filmmaker from the classic period. There are no letters from Howard Hawks saying, “I feel often these days the need to make a Western, but not a Western in the conventional manner, of the kind that so many of our generation have labored with too long, but rather—and how to explain this?—one somehow underlit by elements of tragedy, almost, one might say, Greek, though Hesiod perhaps more than Homer, as yet unrealized in the form.” He just makes “Red River,” which is that.

Only when movies are discussed in retrospect, paradoxically, does some version of intention emerge. Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson’s “Hollywood: The Oral History” (Harper) now seeks to render the process of moviemaking, from the silents right up to today, genuinely transparent. Basinger, a film historian and archivist possessed of a love of movies (and for whom this writer did minor editorial chores many decades ago on a book about “It’s a Wonderful Life”), and Wasson, a former student of hers and the author of books about “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “Chinatown,” and “Fosse,” tell us that much of the testimony in their pages derives from the Harold Lloyd Master Seminars, which were held, during the past half century, under the auspices of the American Film Institute.

Billed as “the only comprehensive first-hand history of Hollywood,” Basinger and Wasson’s book is firsthand history in its Sunday best, with all the witnesses speaking formally to a public eager to have the shiniest face put on things, a pressure felt throughout its pages. Though occasionally enlivened by tales of sexual and professional jealousy—we learn that Mae Busch clobbered Mabel Normand over the head with “a vase or something” when she was discovered in flagrante with their mutual amour, Mack Sennett, thereby putting an end to the high period of Keystone comedies—it is not nearly as enlivened by tales of sexual and professional jealousy as one suspects a comprehensively accurate history of Hollywood would have to be. Most stories here are positive, most people decorous, most collaborations happy. Notorious bullies, thugs, and couch-casters like Darryl Zanuck and David O. Selznick emerge as good company men, “rough” and “tough,” perhaps, but also “confident and bold” executives devoted to making good movies. Frank Capra appears here as a benevolent overseer—a very different Capra from the narcissistic dictator-director one encounters in, for instance, the fine recent memoir by Victoria Riskin, the daughter of Capra’s indispensable screenwriter Robert Riskin, which tells of Riskin’s marriage to Fay Wray, of “King Kong” fame, and his attempts to escape from Capra’s grip. (The memoir is distinguished by its portrayal of a beautiful actress who preferred a Jewish wit to a giant ape.) For a fuller, stereoscopic view, we might read with this book in one hand and Kenneth Anger’s “Hollywood Babylon” in the other.

Nonetheless, it is, as people used to say before books were turned on rather than picked up, a hard book to put down. The special virtue of Basinger and Wasson’s work is its seamlessly sequential organization, so that talk about cinematographers flows neatly into talk about writers, which flows into talk about actors, almost all of it magically mucilaged part to part. With a net cast this wide, many glimmering fish are drawn up. We get wonderful testimony from Hannah Sheeld, a onetime “script girl”—what we would now call a continuity supervisor—detailing how electric the mundane job of making certain that everything is the same from scene to scene can be. “She is the only one whose eyes are riveted at all times,” Sheeld tells us, and she can make an editor’s life much easier if she takes specific notes on each take (e.g., “Take one was NG”—no good—“because of fluffed lines throughout”). Elia Kazan explains that, having come from the theatre, he had to learn to trust the sustained long shot and resist the urge to cut into it. “The whole thing with a theatre-trained person is to jump in and see the facial expression,” Kazan says, but Ford taught him that it was often best to leave it a mystery. Cinematographers seem on the whole happy—they were the ones on set who actually communed most intimately with the stars, lighting away lines and fixing facial angles—and composers on the whole not: Elmer Bernstein recalls having to write, for Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments,” specific set themes for Moses, evil, God, and Exodus. (“All of these things worked in a rather literal way.”) Nobody who loves old movies won’t be tickled to discover that Clark Gable’s jackets in “Gone with the Wind” had padded shoulders, in an anachronistic, nineteen-thirties style, which differentiated him from the rest of the nineteenth-century Southern gents. On the other hand, Joan Crawford, though she always seems to be in shoulder pads, never needed them. “Her shoulders were naturally square,” the designer Jean-Louis announces. Of such winning details is the book built, often delightfully.

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

Old Hollywood has by now become so enshrined that we strain to recall the cynical, disgusted view of it that used to be taken for granted among high-minded people. For decades, S. J. Perelman, a veteran of the system, got terrific comedy in these pages out of sending up the inanities and the grotesque pretensions of Hollywood producers—while also guying the pretensions of the art-house cinema, with its relentless festivals of “Battleship Potemkin” and “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” These days, Erich von Stroheim’s “Foolish Wives,” whose absurdities of story and style Perelman mocked, is played, in worthily restored form, in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art, as though it were, well, “Battleship Potemkin.” Who now remembers that Raymond Chandler also called Hollywood “an endless contention of tawdry egos, some of them powerful, almost all of them vociferous, and almost none of them capable of anything much more creative than credit-stealing and self-promotion”?

And yet an important quaver rises: most of us know Chandler best through his screenplay, brutally extracted by Billy Wilder, for the peerless “Double Indemnity.” The contrast between work with integrity that no one notices and compromised work that everyone has seen has dissolved with the passage of time. How this happened, the uprating of prewar Hollywood until it stands with the New England transcendentalists and Eighth Street-school painters as an obvious reservoir of American aesthetic value, is in itself a worthy subject for an oral history. That story would involve critics like Manny Farber and his disciples, who took the actual experience of movies to be more important than any desiccated analysis of them, and who recognized that B movies, the low-budget bottom half of a double feature, had a kind of sensuous immediacy, an enveloping quality previously known only in dreams and nightmares, that made them matter as much as “Battleship Potemkin.” This indigenous candor was met by a French wave of enthusiasm that, in the French manner, maniacally systematized and theorized the same effect—producing the idea of noir from what had been regarded as a bunch of unrelated suspense movies, and then coming up with auteur theory, by fastening on the particularities associated with various directors. In short, journals like Cahiers du Cinéma argued, something big was happening, and it wasn’t happening by chance.

Still, old habits and big names die hard, as Basinger and Wasson’s book makes plain. We hear much, and most of it reverent, about “legends” like Selznick and Irving Thalberg, while the remarkable director and designer Mitchell Leisen is reduced to being a sort of Thersites figure in the margins, making catty comments about Edith Head’s taking credit for dresses she didn’t design, and putting down Orson Welles. (Leisen, perhaps the first more or less openly gay Hollywood director, made “Death Takes a Holiday,” in its day a very big hit, and later the terrific Barbara Stanwyck noir “No Man of Her Own.”)

In general, the book doesn’t fully register the big reversal of taste in American movie sensibility, by which the B movies are experienced as more vivid and revealing than much of the A-list stuff seems today. We hear a lot about M-G-M in the thirties, though it was barnacled by now unwatchable prestige projects (Luise Rainer as O-Lan in “The Good Earth”), and rather less about Paramount in the forties, when much of that great noir got woven. The critic Richard Schickel appears to explicate a version of auteur theory as a way of praising famously independent-minded directors, like Capra and Welles. Yet the more original point of the French theory was to suggest that otherwise obscure filmmakers might have had personalities and points of view that they were able to smuggle onscreen, against the grain of genre moviemaking. Edgar Ulmer and Joseph H. Lewis, who don’t appear in the book, along with directors like Leisen, became heroes of an “underground” cinema that didn’t know it was one. Whether the directors of hypnotically absorbing forties and fifties movies like “Gun Crazy” and “Detour” were fully self-aware artists or not is a much labored question; the real lesson is that America was so invested in stories of crime and illicit passion that it made the movies burn through even when they seemed, on the surface, formulaic. Just as there are many great songs and hardly any bad songs in the R.K.O. musicals of the thirties, the form being so flowing and strong from the jazz atmosphere around it, so there are very few dull B-movie thrillers of the forties, this form being buoyed up by the tides of tabloid headlines and pulp fiction.

What exactly is an “oral history,” and why would we need one? Most history begins and ends with personal witness, and even written documents, after all, were very often once spoken memories, with many of the best histories depending on recollected conversation, from Boswell’s life of Dr. Johnson to the court memoirs of Saint-Simon. Yet the term has become so much a part of our book culture that it tells us to expect something very specific: a heavily edited chain of first-person recollections, broken into distinct related bits, about a place or a system or an event. Although the contemporary version has roots in the oral histories compiled by the W.P.A. in the nineteen-thirties, it seems to derive, in form, from documentary films of the sixties like those of D. A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock, in which testimony is offered in sequential counterpoint, without explicit commentary.

The significant promise of oral history, as opposed to the obviously written kind, is that the parade of first-person witnesses, unimpeded by editorial interference, might, at last, tell it like it is. Though oral history from below produced blue-collar pop masterpieces in Studs Terkel’s “Hard Times” and “Working,” the genre now mostly amplifies history very much from above. So, after Jean Stein and George Plimpton’s fine oral history “American Journey” (1971), a chorus of voices speaking on the train bringing home Bobby Kennedy’s body, their subsequent and even more successful one, “Edie” (1982), was devoted to the Warholite-socialite Edie Sedgwick. That may be a clue to the form: an oral history works best as a series of impressions made on other people’s minds, and someone like Edie was only the impressions she made on other people’s minds. That’s broadly true of show people, too. Peter Bogdanovich’s two good collections of interviews with directors and actors, “Who the Devil Made It” and “Who the Hell’s in It,” are not, strictly speaking, oral histories, but they become so in their intricately self-conscious sequencing and broad panoramas of people. In the past few decades, there have been notable oral histories—in the form of books or magazine features—about the making of films including “Deliverance,” “Urban Cowboy,” “Goodfellas,” “Clueless,” “Dazed and Confused,” and “Mad Max: Fury Road.”

What makes Bogdanovich’s books matchless bedside reading is the sense that everybody counts. A similar oral history of Abstract Expressionism would doubtless contain a constant series of old quarrels about Pollock, de Kooning, Mitchell, and other luminaries. In Bogdanovich’s interviews, the Dodo’s rule rules: everybody has a part and everybody gets a prize. Although Howard Hawks and John Ford are given particular attention, the big figures are respected the way football coaches respect other football coaches, knowing that their success has much to do with the constellation of talent that happened to form around them. Because the intentions and the creation are so nearly simultaneous, Bogdanovich’s interviews with even third-rank directors make more satisfying reading than any number of critical biographies do. Most artistic biographies are studies in premeditation. Writers such as Henry James or Virginia Woolf can be found brooding on a “problem” that they share with their circles, agonize over in letters, and then attempt to resolve. This never happens with a Hollywood filmmaker from the classic period. There are no letters from Howard Hawks saying, “I feel often these days the need to make a Western, but not a Western in the conventional manner, of the kind that so many of our generation have labored with too long, but rather—and how to explain this?—one somehow underlit by elements of tragedy, almost, one might say, Greek, though Hesiod perhaps more than Homer, as yet unrealized in the form.” He just makes “Red River,” which is that.

Only when movies are discussed in retrospect, paradoxically, does some version of intention emerge. Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson’s “Hollywood: The Oral History” (Harper) now seeks to render the process of moviemaking, from the silents right up to today, genuinely transparent. Basinger, a film historian and archivist possessed of a love of movies (and for whom this writer did minor editorial chores many decades ago on a book about “It’s a Wonderful Life”), and Wasson, a former student of hers and the author of books about “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “Chinatown,” and “Fosse,” tell us that much of the testimony in their pages derives from the Harold Lloyd Master Seminars, which were held, during the past half century, under the auspices of the American Film Institute.

Billed as “the only comprehensive first-hand history of Hollywood,” Basinger and Wasson’s book is firsthand history in its Sunday best, with all the witnesses speaking formally to a public eager to have the shiniest face put on things, a pressure felt throughout its pages. Though occasionally enlivened by tales of sexual and professional jealousy—we learn that Mae Busch clobbered Mabel Normand over the head with “a vase or something” when she was discovered in flagrante with their mutual amour, Mack Sennett, thereby putting an end to the high period of Keystone comedies—it is not nearly as enlivened by tales of sexual and professional jealousy as one suspects a comprehensively accurate history of Hollywood would have to be. Most stories here are positive, most people decorous, most collaborations happy. Notorious bullies, thugs, and couch-casters like Darryl Zanuck and David O. Selznick emerge as good company men, “rough” and “tough,” perhaps, but also “confident and bold” executives devoted to making good movies. Frank Capra appears here as a benevolent overseer—a very different Capra from the narcissistic dictator-director one encounters in, for instance, the fine recent memoir by Victoria Riskin, the daughter of Capra’s indispensable screenwriter Robert Riskin, which tells of Riskin’s marriage to Fay Wray, of “King Kong” fame, and his attempts to escape from Capra’s grip. (The memoir is distinguished by its portrayal of a beautiful actress who preferred a Jewish wit to a giant ape.) For a fuller, stereoscopic view, we might read with this book in one hand and Kenneth Anger’s “Hollywood Babylon” in the other.

Nonetheless, it is, as people used to say before books were turned on rather than picked up, a hard book to put down. The special virtue of Basinger and Wasson’s work is its seamlessly sequential organization, so that talk about cinematographers flows neatly into talk about writers, which flows into talk about actors, almost all of it magically mucilaged part to part. With a net cast this wide, many glimmering fish are drawn up. We get wonderful testimony from Hannah Sheeld, a onetime “script girl”—what we would now call a continuity supervisor—detailing how electric the mundane job of making certain that everything is the same from scene to scene can be. “She is the only one whose eyes are riveted at all times,” Sheeld tells us, and she can make an editor’s life much easier if she takes specific notes on each take (e.g., “Take one was NG”—no good—“because of fluffed lines throughout”). Elia Kazan explains that, having come from the theatre, he had to learn to trust the sustained long shot and resist the urge to cut into it. “The whole thing with a theatre-trained person is to jump in and see the facial expression,” Kazan says, but Ford taught him that it was often best to leave it a mystery. Cinematographers seem on the whole happy—they were the ones on set who actually communed most intimately with the stars, lighting away lines and fixing facial angles—and composers on the whole not: Elmer Bernstein recalls having to write, for Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments,” specific set themes for Moses, evil, God, and Exodus. (“All of these things worked in a rather literal way.”) Nobody who loves old movies won’t be tickled to discover that Clark Gable’s jackets in “Gone with the Wind” had padded shoulders, in an anachronistic, nineteen-thirties style, which differentiated him from the rest of the nineteenth-century Southern gents. On the other hand, Joan Crawford, though she always seems to be in shoulder pads, never needed them. “Her shoulders were naturally square,” the designer Jean-Louis announces. Of such winning details is the book built, often delightfully.

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

Old Hollywood has by now become so enshrined that we strain to recall the cynical, disgusted view of it that used to be taken for granted among high-minded people. For decades, S. J. Perelman, a veteran of the system, got terrific comedy in these pages out of sending up the inanities and the grotesque pretensions of Hollywood producers—while also guying the pretensions of the art-house cinema, with its relentless festivals of “Battleship Potemkin” and “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” These days, Erich von Stroheim’s “Foolish Wives,” whose absurdities of story and style Perelman mocked, is played, in worthily restored form, in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art, as though it were, well, “Battleship Potemkin.” Who now remembers that Raymond Chandler also called Hollywood “an endless contention of tawdry egos, some of them powerful, almost all of them vociferous, and almost none of them capable of anything much more creative than credit-stealing and self-promotion”?

And yet an important quaver rises: most of us know Chandler best through his screenplay, brutally extracted by Billy Wilder, for the peerless “Double Indemnity.” The contrast between work with integrity that no one notices and compromised work that everyone has seen has dissolved with the passage of time. How this happened, the uprating of prewar Hollywood until it stands with the New England transcendentalists and Eighth Street-school painters as an obvious reservoir of American aesthetic value, is in itself a worthy subject for an oral history. That story would involve critics like Manny Farber and his disciples, who took the actual experience of movies to be more important than any desiccated analysis of them, and who recognized that B movies, the low-budget bottom half of a double feature, had a kind of sensuous immediacy, an enveloping quality previously known only in dreams and nightmares, that made them matter as much as “Battleship Potemkin.” This indigenous candor was met by a French wave of enthusiasm that, in the French manner, maniacally systematized and theorized the same effect—producing the idea of noir from what had been regarded as a bunch of unrelated suspense movies, and then coming up with auteur theory, by fastening on the particularities associated with various directors. In short, journals like Cahiers du Cinéma argued, something big was happening, and it wasn’t happening by chance.

Still, old habits and big names die hard, as Basinger and Wasson’s book makes plain. We hear much, and most of it reverent, about “legends” like Selznick and Irving Thalberg, while the remarkable director and designer Mitchell Leisen is reduced to being a sort of Thersites figure in the margins, making catty comments about Edith Head’s taking credit for dresses she didn’t design, and putting down Orson Welles. (Leisen, perhaps the first more or less openly gay Hollywood director, made “Death Takes a Holiday,” in its day a very big hit, and later the terrific Barbara Stanwyck noir “No Man of Her Own.”)

In general, the book doesn’t fully register the big reversal of taste in American movie sensibility, by which the B movies are experienced as more vivid and revealing than much of the A-list stuff seems today. We hear a lot about M-G-M in the thirties, though it was barnacled by now unwatchable prestige projects (Luise Rainer as O-Lan in “The Good Earth”), and rather less about Paramount in the forties, when much of that great noir got woven. The critic Richard Schickel appears to explicate a version of auteur theory as a way of praising famously independent-minded directors, like Capra and Welles. Yet the more original point of the French theory was to suggest that otherwise obscure filmmakers might have had personalities and points of view that they were able to smuggle onscreen, against the grain of genre moviemaking. Edgar Ulmer and Joseph H. Lewis, who don’t appear in the book, along with directors like Leisen, became heroes of an “underground” cinema that didn’t know it was one. Whether the directors of hypnotically absorbing forties and fifties movies like “Gun Crazy” and “Detour” were fully self-aware artists or not is a much labored question; the real lesson is that America was so invested in stories of crime and illicit passion that it made the movies burn through even when they seemed, on the surface, formulaic. Just as there are many great songs and hardly any bad songs in the R.K.O. musicals of the thirties, the form being so flowing and strong from the jazz atmosphere around it, so there are very few dull B-movie thrillers of the forties, this form being buoyed up by the tides of tabloid headlines and pulp fiction.