Hollywood: The Oral History

At a time when some of the top people in movies; directors, producers, writers, even critics are wondering whether the movies are finally on their way out - a book comes out to remind us just why we love them.

It's called Hollywood: The Oral history by Sam Wasson and Jeanine Basinger.

Wasson joined Simon Morris on At the Movies to discuss the book.   

SM: Where did these interviews come from, how did it all come about?

SW: The American Film Institute (AFI), which was founded in the late ‘60s here in Los Angeles, they've been holding masterclass seminars with the greatest, and in some cases, not greatest filmmakers, in the history of Hollywood.

And because they started when they did in the late ‘60s, they were around to capture the interviews of people who were in the silent era.

So, although the AFI wasn't around in the silent era, certainly folks had lived long enough by that point to testify to it.

So, these interviews, and they're 1000s of them, stretch all the way back from Lillian Gish to the present.

Jeanine Basinger, my co-editor, we were granted total access to these things.

What we did was listen to basically all of them and chop them down, move them around, to create the experience of being in a room with the most important, colourful, talented people in the history of Hollywood.

And have them tell you the story of the movie business.

SM: How did Hollywood start, because it wasn’t where movies started was it?

SW: They did not start in Hollywood, they started either on the east coast with Edison or in France with figures like Pathe or Lumiere.

Thomas Edison and others had patents on this technology. So, filmmakers, in order to get their freedom had to flee to the West Coast far, far away from Edison and his lawyers.

 And Hollywood being as far west as you could go, combined with the fact that it was close to Mexico, should they need to jump the border.

There was so much topographical variation for different types of movies seemed the perfect location

SM: Hollywood started as business basically making comedy didn’t it?

SW: There was a lot of comedy in the early days, we think of silent films, we also think big, dramatic actors, Valentino, and but by and large, those were harder to improvise, you could really go out into the streets with a few knock-about comedians and a cameraman and pull off a comedy.

It didn't really require story and writing, premeditation, the same way that a drama did.

And so, in the very early days of Hollywood, when the business itself was learning how to make movies, when production wasn't really organised, films were largely improvised comedies especially and the short form films were better suited to comedy.

So, before the feature films really started up, shorts were really where it was at and that was more suited to comedy.

SM: The time that things started getting serious was according to the book two guys who couldn't be more different. One of them was DW Griffith's and the other one was Cecil B. DeMille.

SW: When filmmaking began, it was not feature filmmaking, these were short films at first.

It was only later, basically with DW Griffith and Birth of a Nation that the idea of a feature film became popularised and successful.

We use Griffith and DeMille as two strong different visions of what it meant to be directors of stature in the silent film days when feature filmmaking was just starting to emerge.

SM: Griffith invented how to make movies, didn't he?

SW: We are so used to movies, we forget that it had to be invented, this language had to be invented.

And it was DW Griffith who realised the power of cutting, that you could move from a wide shot to a close-up to change the perspective for the audience.

And then you could cut back to a wide shot, you could cut to a medium shot, that basically the relationship between the performer and the camera could change to elongate a moment, to amplify drama.

Up until then film was just a passive recording medium. It was not an active storytelling tool. Griffith figured that out.

SM: Then Cecil B DeMille brought something else, he brought in showbiz.

SW: DeMille was a great showman. We think of later DeMille movies like The Greatest Show on Earth or The Ten Commandments, but DeMille was doing that stuff pretty early on casts of 1000s, great feathered headdresses, Claudette Colbert being pulled down the Nile by 100 naked men, this was so the DeMille school of filmmaking, spectaculars, generally important and I put that in quotes, subjects, ancient subjects, but also with a sense of humour and a real sexual playfulness - that kind that we don't really see so much today.

SM: One of these two giants was the artist who died in penury and DeMille went on to invent the studio system.

SW: The studio system really came about with the beginning of sound. These improvised short films, going out into the street, they could shoot anywhere, in part because they weren't recording sound.

It didn't matter if there was a car driving by and it didn't disturb the soundtrack. There wasn't a soundtrack.

Once they figured out that there was going to be a soundtrack, now you need sound stages, you need insular spaces to contain and control the sonic environment and with sound stages you need real estate. Well, now you have a studio.

It only came about because sound needed to be controlled, and with studios came the incredible armies of technicians, craftsmen and artists who needed to be on hand at all times to make sure all of these productions were running smoothly.

But like everything else in Hollywood, that had to be discovered, that didn't really happen until about 30 years after the motion picture was invented.

SM: By this stage they had money to spend and they spent it on getting the top people they could possibly lay their hands on, didn't they?

SW: A beautiful thing, a lot of money and spending it well, that's a terrific way to characterise what we think of as the Golden Age of Hollywood.

And anyone who doubts that just has to see the movies themselves; The money is on the screen, the talent is on the screen.

And when you see that, you see behind that great producing, that's the job of the producer to get the best people together and make sure that they are doing their best. That's what made Hollywood Hollywood.

SM: Behind the producers were the great moguls.

SW: They were geniuses, they were definitely geniuses. They invented this.

Of course, many of them were coarse, many of them were not educated, but they were all brilliant businessmen. And if they didn't have a knack for storytelling themselves, they delegated to people who had a knack for storytelling.

And they had terrific instincts for what would sell and what people wanted to see.

And again, this is evident in the movies themselves. This is a machine that works. Who's running the machine, the heads of the studio at the very top; folks like Louis B. Mayer, folks like Darryl Zanuck, people like Harry Cohn, they were the founders of this business.

And to this day, amongst the greatest leaders that we've ever had in Hollywood.

SM: Can you give us an indication of how different some of these Hollywood studios were?

SW: I don't want to oversimplify and say that MGM was known for musicals, although it was, or that Paramount was known for a sophisticated type of comedy, although it was, these studios, they made all different kinds of movies.

But yes, it is true that certain tendencies did emerge in these studios.

Warner Brothers, if you look back in history, did excel in a kind of fast, tough, gangster style of movie.

Mostly left-leaning types of movies at Paramount, with its influx of a lot of European talent did bring that sort of sophistication to it.

And MGM famously had the greatest musical performers in all of Hollywood.

So, they had their strengths, definitely, but that didn't mean that they didn't cross over into other kinds of filmmaking.

SM: The guy they particularly liked to hate was Harry Cohn, who I think was Columbia?

SW: Harry Cohn liked foul language, and he was not the most elegant creature. But he loved movies, and he respected talent.

Now, that's not to say he was a nice guy all the time.

But bottom line, he always most of the time let the talent win.  Now that alone, it shows incredible courage on his part.

He was not at educated, but these are movies, they are for a mass audience. They are not for an educated audience.

Ideally, they are for everyone. It's only, in our lifetimes that the idea of ratings emerged or demographics, niche audiences, these are movies for teenagers, these are movies for adults, these are art movies or action movies.

That concept didn't really exist in the studio era. And you could see how it's actually good business practice. Why not get children and adults to like the same movie? You didn't have to be smart. You just had to want to be entertained.

SM: In the '30s and '40s audiences started to recognise the director, didn’t they?

SW: Ford was a big one early on, so was Capra, DeMille, Certainly, there were filmmakers who were associated with the movies, not a lot. Certainly, the stars and the genres are what sold people to the movies. That's what drew people to the movies, I want to go see a Western or I want to go see a Gary Cooper movie.

But gradually, as Hollywood started to mature, it became evident that wait a second, this movie is sort of like that movie and they have the same director.

Maybe directors are doing something here. Maybe there is a personal stamp, a personal style they're putting on the movie.

That was certainly true of Frank Capra, John Ford. And as we know, Alfred Hitchcock very famously.

Frank Capra who got three Oscar wins in the ‘30s, was also a terrific teacher, in addition to being a filmmaker, because this book is comprised entirely of interviews, he became a great source for us, he really understood how to communicate this history.

SM: The stars have been around ever since they've been movies, but they really were the dominant selling point of movies by around about the ‘30s, ‘40s and 50s. And yet, the point that they make is that they didn't pick their own stuff.

SW: That's exactly right. They had to figure out what a Cary Grant movie was; we think today that Cary Grant was born Cary Grant.

But no, they didn't know what to do with him at first that took a period of trial and error. And once they figured out what clicked with the audience, well, then they can make more of those with variations of course, that was due to the filmmakers themselves.

Cary Grant, obviously, would have some say, in that, but being a contract player, not total freedom, not the freedom that actors have today.

And that's one of the reasons why we don't have stars in the same way, because they're not thinking about their careers in the way that let's say, Louis B. Mayer would think about the careers of his actors.

They were his actors, they belonged to him. Now actors think, well, I want to try something different. I want to do something that shoots in Europe or I've always wanted to play a bad guy. There's not often a plan to a career and that takes its toll on stardom. 

SM: There were a few stars you were allowed to kill in a movie, and for a while it was just Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, you could kill them. You weren't allowed to kill anybody else.

SW:  A star is someone that you know, you feel like you know them, you feel like you could describe them.

We know Cagney, we know Bogart. So, we know that on some level, they're going to be the heavy, or the tragic romantic hero and that death is coming their way.

SM: The studio system itself ended in about the 60s or so what happened there exactly?

SW: It's a huge question worth its own book. What happened was is a combination of many things. Most famously, Washington came after the studios on grounds that they were real monopolies controlling as they did production, distribution and exhibition.

And that was deemed a violation, a monopoly violation. And so the studio's took a hit financially, and from then on, with tastes changing, and television coming in, people moving out into the suburbs in America, the downtown theatres losing their attendance, it began its decline and decline.

That's unfortunately what we're still experiencing today.

SM: There was the introduction of new Hollywood around about the end of the ‘60s where people were making movies without stars, or at least not with without established stars. And we're making sort of edgy sort of interesting films for a while.

SW: After the system crumbled, the Golden Age system crumbled, in the ‘50s and ‘60s we had what we think of as the new Hollywood, or the Hollywood renaissance, that began with films like Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde, The Last Picture Show for about five years.

For about five or six years there Hollywood was, I wouldn't say going strong, but it was at the centre of culture in America again.

Movies meant something to the world, directors meant something to the world. People like Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, Lucas, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Friedkin, that was the great era of these people.

But even that didn't last long, because as soon as corporate interests came in, and really started to take hold, the blockbuster mentality replaced what we think of as the auteur mentality.

And Hollywood really started striving for hits. It's not the first time Hollywood wanted a hit. But with fewer movies being made, the pressure to hit became harder and harder and more excruciating. To the degree that creativity is almost squeezed out.

And that's unfortunately some version of where we are today.

SM: That was the one thing that those original moguls had that you've referred to before, is the fact that they were showman. They were enormous versions of circus hucksters, but it's the same deal. Their idea was to get you interested.

SW: Look how they got you interested? They didn't trick you. You know, the selling aspect of Hollywood as we know it today, barely existed back then. You didn't have to be lured into a movie, you would go to the movies, it was a habit.

Maybe you would see in the theatre lobby, a poster for a movie that was coming next week. And you'd say, oh, I want to go see that.

But the multibillion dollar industry we have now of selling these movies to the public, convincing them that they're worthwhile. These showman in the golden era, were not salesmen so much in that way, they were producers.

And you see that in the quality of work that they made in contrast, as I keep saying, to the quality of work that you have now.

SM: You could argue that in show business, there's just as much business, but it is lacking the show part of it.

SW: That’s exactly right, Hollywood has always been a business. But it used to be a great business. And that's one of the reasons that Jeanine and I wanted to create this book.

This is an edited transcript of the conversation.