July 08, 2007
Tinseltown tales
The Wall Street Journal offers movie buff (and TCM host) Robert Osborne’s list of the five best books about Hollywood by or about the biggest of Tinseltown’s bigwigs.
1. "The Name Above the Title" by Frank Capra (Macmillan, 1971).
This is the best show-business autobiography to date, bar none, written by a man who for many years was one of only three directors in Hollywood (the others: Cecil B. DeMille and Alfred Hitchcock) whose name meant as much on a marquee as any star's.The life of Frank Capra (1897-1991) is a dazzling American success story, filled with more peaks than plateaus. But by the time the three-time Academy Award-winning director was 64, "the Marquis de Sade had taken over the movie industry," he writes, and "the kind of people I once ate for breakfast were maneuvering me out of pet projects I wanted to do and out of the studio I had helped build into a major company." So Capra called it a day. Regrettably, for us. What he has to say about his time in the sun is filled with all the verve and intrigue of a great mystery novel.
It’s shocking to think that Capra spent his last 30 years without the opportunity to direct a single film. Now, it’s not even noteworthy when directors like Clint Eastwood produce some of their best work well into their seventies and eighties.
2. "Memo From David O. Selznick" edited by Rudy Behlmer (Viking, 1972).
Apparently no one ever wrote more memos, with carbon copies, than producer David O. Selznick (1902-65). The memos flew out of his office at an alarming rate, whether he was pondering the casting of "Gone With the Wind" ("Would Warners give us a picture a year with Errol Flynn if we give him the lead?") or telling Ingrid Bergman how much makeup to use.
Deftly assembled by Hollywood historian Rudy Behlmer, "Memo From David O. Selznick" shows us how the obsessively hands-on Selznick was able to produce so many outstanding movies--in addition to "Gone With the Wind," he was behind "Dinner at Eight," "Nothing Sacred" and "Rebecca." It also makes clear why people ran screaming whenever a messenger showed up with another memo from DOS.
It’s men like Selznick that make me nostalgic for the “Golden Era” of filmmaking, when the studio system was cultivating stars and turning out future classics in astonishing numbers. It’s a shame he died relatively young; who knows what he could have done with all that talent and twenty more years.
4. "Lion of Hollywood" by Scott Eyman (Simon & Schuster, 2005).
Soon after MGM's big boss, Louis B. Mayer, died in 1957, his name became a symbol of Hollywood hierarchy at its most monstrous. I have always found this confusing, since many of those who knew Mayer well and worked for him were fond of the man who shepherded "more stars than there are in heaven."
[…]
Eyman's meticulously researched book never panders to Mayer but does a great deal to balance our perceptions of him. Along the way, we learn how a boy born in Russia in 1882 joined a generation of refugees, glove salesmen and other ambitious young men to start an American industry. The empire they built was dictated much more by need and passion than meanness and malice.
How quintessentially American, that a Russian Jewish immigrant created the cinematic images that defined “All-American values” for two generations of moviegoers.
There are more recommendations; I’ll probably read them all (or at least add them to my Amazon wishlist).
Posted by Mike Lief at July 8, 2007 11:31 PM
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