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.
