March 22, 2025 by brendanmstewart

Hollywood: The Oral History, by Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson

I’ve been looking for a good history of the movie industry for a long time now, which makes Jeanine Basinger’s and Sam Wasson’s 2023 release Hollywood: The Oral History all that much more frustrating.

The book is excellent for what it is. Oral histories are as difficult to compile as they are easy to read, and the effort that Basinger and Wasson put in is Herculean. They scoured primarily the American Film Institute’s series of interviews with the movers and shakers of Hollywood. Everyone is accounted for here from studio heads to writers to producers to directors to stars to crew. As they tell their stories, a rough history of the movies takes shape. Unfortunately almost 800 pages later that’s what you’re left with…a rough history of the movies told from specific, and sometimes contradictory, points of view. Over 400 people are represented in the book so the story can get a little scattershot at times.

What this book is extraordinarily good at is providing a detailed look at how movies are made. From concept to script to screen, the journey of a film is explained in detail. Mysteries are solved, such as “What does a producer actually do?” The moguls, people like Irving Thalberg, Jack Warner and Sam Goldwyn, are also discussed at some length by people who knew and worked with them. This oral history approach brings the famous names of Hollywood to life in a way that a more conventional history might not have.

The evolution and dissolution of the studio system takes up the first half of the book, before giving way to the “New Hollywood” when the Hays Code was abandoned and filmmakers approached their jobs with newfound freedom. That freedom ushered in a lot of gratuitous nudity and violence but also enabled the moviemakers with the ability to make personal artistic statements in a way not seen since Orson Welles made Citizen Kane. The ending of Bonnie and Clyde, one of the first films from the New Hollywood, could never have been made during the studio system (one of the reasons it was so shocking in 1967) but it still has the power to shake the viewer almost 60 years later. From the studio system only the shower scene in Psycho compares, and that contained no shots of the knife piercing Janet Leigh’s skin.

The New Hollywood is deservedly discussed at some length, including the rise of the blockbuster films, led by Jaws. The tentpoles of the era are The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws, and Star Wars and all receive their due respect. Most other films are glossed over or mentioned in passing despite their influence on the cinema. While directors like Peter Bogdanovich are quoted extensively, there’s virtually nothing in the book about The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, or What’s Up, Doc? and less to connect him to those movies. Stanley Kubrick gets a bit more respect, but not much. Even Martin Scorsese string of influential 70’s movies get a superficial treatment.

The book is basically the point of view of the studios. There is a great deal of talk about how Jaws opened in a record number of theaters, how it became the first summer blockbuster film, and how much money it made. There is very little, if any, discussion about the content of the film. If you were to read the book without being familiar with the movie, there would be no context whatsoever with the words on the page.

And this is the most frustrating part of the book. In the beginning there is a list of all of the designated narrators of the story, along with their role. So you get names like “Steven Spielberg, director” but there is nothing at all to tell the reader what films Spielberg actually directed. There is no filmography in the book so there is no way to connect the narrators with the final work that they did. More than once I had to go to IMDB to find out just who the narrators actually were. The director Allan Dwan is quoted at some length in the book but it wasn’t until I went to IMDB before I realized that he’d directed Brewster’s Millions and The Sands of Iwo Jima. Similarly, there is no sense of when the interviews were given. Some of them are decades old. Directors will wax poetic about the good old days and the problems with movies in the current age, but there is no clue whatsoever about when the good old days were or when the current age is. When discussing movies in the present tense, it’s helpful to know when the present is.

A similar frustration is the lack of an index. It is historical malpractice to write an extensive, 800 page survey history of a time and place without including an index. So if you want to know the opinion of the Hollywood movers and shakers about Monroe, Marilyn (not a good opinion at all), you just need to remember in which chapter and pages those observations reside. It makes going back to fact check some of my opinions here impossible.

On the negative side, there is also the lack of pictures. How does one compile an oral history of moving pictures without including any pictures? It’s another missed opportunity for Basinger and Wasson. Perhaps they were worried that the inclusion of pictures, filmographies, and an index would pad an already overstuffed book, but it would be better to have a 900 page book with context than an 800 page without.

Finally, this is something of a whitewashed history. Hollywood’s notorious reputation of being a place where decadence and debauchery are not just accepted but expected, is nowhere to be found. There is no cocaine blizzard in the studios during the 1970s. There’s no casting couch or #MeToo movement. There are not even any closeted homosexuals married to beautiful starlets. No affairs, no divorce, no alcoholism, no mental breakdowns. Hollywood earned this reputation and not just recently. Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust was written in 1940 and the hedonistic reputation of the city as both the maker and breaker of dreams was already set in stone.

Hollywood: The Oral History is a compelling and at times fascinating book. Unfortunately it is not the whole story and what is there is presented without much context. As such it is Hollywood 101. Deep dives into the history of the movies exist, but they are more likely to be focused on specific eras or filmmakers (e.g., Peter Biskind’s authoritative history of the New Hollywood in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls). An oral history may be the right approach for a history of such an unwieldy subject, but Basinger and Wasson fall several feet short of the mark.

April 15, 2024 by brendanmstewart

Cinema Speculation, by Quentin Tarantino

Back in 1993, I rented the movie Reservoir Dogs from my local Blockbuster based on nothing more than the fact that it had a really good cast and I was going through something of a Harvey Keitel phase at the time. In my head now I can see Quentin Tarantino, the director of Reservoir Dogs, nodding his head briskly and winding himself up to tell me about all the movies he discovered the exact same way, by taking a chance on an unknown film with a favorite actor. I’d never heard of the director.

I also was struck by the title. What were “reservoir dogs”? It was an evocative title, but I couldn’t fathom what it was evoking. Now, having read Tarantino’s ode to genre movies, I understand. It means absolutely nothing. It was just a title that he thought sounded cool.

And that’s the thing with Tarantino. The movies he’s made all have one thing in common: the director thought they were cool. Cool plots, cool stars, cool camera tricks. Cool like Fonzie. Cool like Steve McQueen in Bullitt, the first film that Tarantino discusses in Cinema Speculation. This book is not any kind of history of cinema in the 1970s…that would be handled definitively by Peter Biskind in his massive tome Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. This book is the equivalent of one of Tarantino’s movies. The movies written about in its pages are ones that Tarantino would describe as “cool”.

Anyone who’s seen an interview with Tarantino knows what he’s like. He’s a hyped-up motormouth who can go on for hours, or maybe days, when it comes to discussing movies. With the possible exception of Martin Scorcese, he likely knows more about movies than anybody alive. But unlike so many of his fellow cinephiles, Tarantino doesn’t put on any airs. He likes what he likes, and doesn’t like the rest. He’s more in his element watching a movie like Humanoids From the Deep than he would be watching The 400 Blows or La Dolce Vita. He’s refreshingly unpretentious for a Hollywood doyen.

And that’s how the book reads. It reads at times more like a transcript of a monologue than something he’s carefully considered and written down. He fills the book with personal anecdotes about the movies he’s discussing, and goes off on tangents about other movies that are directly or indirectly related to the main topic of the chapter. It’s as if somebody turned on a tape recorder and asked, “So what are your impressions of Deliverance?” and then just let Tarantino joyfully and effortlessly spiel.

Tarantino has kept notes about every movie he’s ever seen, going back to when he was a child and his mother took him to some very adult films (e.g., M*A*S*H). He can thus recall not only when he saw the movies, but where, and with whom. In the book he writes about the “Movie Brats” like Scorcese, Spielberg, and DePalma…directors who grew up obsessed with the movies, and how they differed from their forerunners who looked at the movies as a job to be done on time and on budget. The earlier directors tried everything they could think of to get rid of solar lens flare in their outdoor scenes, and now J.J. Abrams, one of the more recent movie brats and something of a hack at it, is known for inserting lens flare into his movies. Why? Because he grew up watching the older movies and accepted it as an effect he thought was marvelous.

Tarantino largely ignores the tent pole movies of the 1970s. He skips The Sting, The Exorcist, Jaws, and Star Wars, although each of those movies gets a mention or two. He skips Viet Nam-centered movies like The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now in favor of Rolling Thunder. He makes the case, convincingly, that the violence and mayhem of Rolling Thunder makes for a better movie about veterans coming home from the war than the maudlin and overly dramatic “serious” film, Coming Home. He writes glowingly about movies termed “Revengeamatics” like Taxi Driver, Rolling Thunder, and Hardcore (which he tears to pieces for the second half of the movie). He doesn’t mention it, but I’ll go out on a limb and say he hated Best Picture Oscar winner Ordinary People…with good reason.

Rather than belabor the much-discussed and analyzed Rocky, he focuses on Sylvester Stallone’s long-forgotten directorial debut, Paradise Alley. It’s an odd choice, and Tarantino writes about the experience of seeing Rocky in the theater and the reaction of the audience, an experience that mirrors my own almost exactly. Instead of Brian DePalma’s masterworks Carrie or Dressed to Kill, he writes about the early effort Sisters, a pretty pedestrian thriller. Clint Eastwood gets the royal treatment with a chapter about Dirty Harry and another about Escape from Alcatraz.

Even The Funhouse, a pretty standard slasher movie from 1981, gets a chapter.

Mixed in with these film discussions are personal anecdotes of a lifetime spent watching movies, and one chapter that gives the book its title, wondering what Taxi Driver would have been like if Brian DePalma had directed it instead of Martin Scorcese. There’s also a somewhat out of place chapter about Peter Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller that, I suspect, was included because he wanted to write a chapter about that particular movie brat without falling back on The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, or What’s Up, Doc?

Throughout the book, Tarantino’s love for movies shines through on every page. It’s almost impossible not to ride the wave of his sheer enthusiasm. I read the ebook version and there are some formatting issues that may or may not be in the print edition. Names of characters, and anything between quotation marks are all italicized for some bizarre reason. Tarantino also has a tendency to be all over the place in his storytelling as talking about one movie will remind him of others that he feels the need to discuss, sometimes at length. This is where that feeling that the book is a transcript comes in. It’s fun, it’s interesting and at times fascinating, it’s opinionated, and you can get dizzy trying to keep up.

Quentin Tarantino, along with Christopher Nolan, is one of the most interesting writer/directors working today. He has said repeatedly that his next movie will be his last so he can focus on writing about the movies. As a fan of his work from Reservoir Dogs to Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood and including everything in between, I would wish for both. Hanging up his director shoes is the equivalent of Daniel Day-Lewis retiring from acting. It seems like a crime against cinema. But if the downside is more books like Cinema Speculation, that will at least be something to tide his fans over and keep his gonzo spirit alive.