Tuesday, December 3, 2019

Stars, sex and scandal / Peter Bradshaw on the best books about Hollywood

Stars, sex and scandal: Peter Bradshaw on the best books about Hollywood

Ahead of the Oscars, the Guardian’s film critic shares his favourite books on the dream factory, including David Niven, Zadie Smith and Rose McGowan

Peter Bradshaw
Friday 22 February 2019

he Oscars approach in the more thoughtful mood created by #TimesUp. These days the awards are a more subdued hooray for Hollywood, but some of the best books on the industry have always warned of the dream factory’s problematic side. F Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel The Last Tycoon, published in 1941, a year after his death, is a portrait of brilliant young studio chief Monroe Stahr, based on MGM executive Irving Thalberg, a man with control over people’s imaginations – the kind of power Mephistopheles might have promised Faust. Stahr is one of a priestly elite “able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads”, Fitzgerald writes. He can comprehend the alchemy of storytelling, spectacle, performance, music, publicity, sex, and deal-making – the mysterious totality of cinema inside and outside the screen’s rectangle. With a flourish of genius, David Thomson took the phrase for the title of his own unmissable history of Hollywood, The Whole Equation.

First published in French in 1959, the avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon is a horribly mesmeric compendium of scabrous gossip about golden-age stars – the English-language edition was banned in the US between 1965 and 1975. Once dismissed as scandalmongering, it’s now seen as a semi-fictional delirium, a dream sequence of satirical horror. David Niven gives a more emollient insider’s guide in his gripping memoir, The Moon’s a Balloon, while historian Donald Bogle offers a valuable corrective to conventional accounts with Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood – a fascinating study of a world outside the studio cartel, with its own culture and history.

‘Nobody knows anything.’ On the set of The Graduate, starring Dustin Hoffman, in 1967.

When the American new wave arrived in the late 60s, it turned the business (briefly) on its head. In Scenes from a Revolution, journalist Mark Harris has the nifty idea of analysing the movies nominated for the best picture Oscar in 1967 – including Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate and In the Heat of the Night – finding in them a guide to how Hollywood and the US were managing the issues of crime, authority, racism and sex.

Rose McGowan. Photograph: Eamonn McCormack/BFC/Getty Images

Legendary screenwriter William Goldman published Adventures in the Screen Trade in 1983. This wised-up mixture of memoir and trade manual gave us a maxim still revered by ad execs, spin doctors, film producers and everyone in the business of pleasing the public: “Nobody knows anything.” There is no proven formula. So people might as well trust their own creative instincts.

Literary takes on the movies have darkened over recent years, but they couldn’t get much darker than screenwriter Bruce Wagner’s 1996 novel I’m Losing You, an ensemble-cast horror story of modern Hollywood that encompasses paranoia, cruelty, assistant-abuse and self-hate. This horrid rush of fear is perhaps only to be expected from an author who co-wrote the screenplay for A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, but it also anticipated the allegations in 2017 against Harvey Weinstein. The industry’s cynicism and exploitation are explored more fully in Brave, a searing autobiography by one of Weinstein’s first accusers, Rose McGowan, in which she describes her upbringing in the Children of God cult, and her escape from what she calls “the biggest cult of all: Hollywood”.

As for the awards themselves, the best and funniest account is Zadie Smith’s Ten Notes on Oscar Weekend, which appears in her collection of essays, Changing My Mind. This report from the ceremony is absorbing, witty and (in the nicest sense) starstruck.

THE GUARDIAN