Hollywood, in Its Own Words - Vanity Fair

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Little Gold Men

Drawing on decades of interviews from the American Film Institute, Sam Wasson and Jeanine Basinger assembled the incredibly ambitious Hollywood: The Oral History.

By Katey Rich

November 11, 2022

Carole Lombard and John Barrymore perform a scene on the set of Twentieth Century. Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Sam Wasson has a few things he wants to clear up about the history of Hollywood. For starters, it’s never been a “party-party-fuck town”—this is a place where cast and crew alike get up at the crack of dawn to get to set, and especially in the studio-system era when people would work on dozens of films a year, there wasn’t time for much else. And despite the idea that studio titans of the past, like Louis B. Mayer, were tyrants who tortured their talent, Wasson argues that there was no actual historical reason for them to have behaved that way: “How are you gonna get Judy Garland to sing her best—by making her miserable?” Wasson asks. “You need these people, for the bottom line, to be happy to the best of your ability.”

Wasson knows his way around plenty of Hollywood myths and legends—the author of books including The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood and Fosse, Wasson has dug into many periods of the movie industry’s history. But for the colossal undertaking that was his new book, Hollywood: The Oral History, he needed help, so he called in the biggest gun he could think of: Jeanine Basinger, the film historian and founder of the film studies department at Wesleyan University, which Wasson (and, full disclosure, I) attended. Offered the chance by the American Film Institute to turn some 3,000 interviews from its archives into an oral history, Wasson knew there was only one person to ask to work on the project with him. “There’s no one on the planet or off the planet who knows more about Hollywood than Jeanine,” Wasson says. “It was a no-brainer.”

Hollywood: The Oral History, in bookstores now, is a conversation across generations of Hollywood, beginning with tales of Hollywood’s Wild West origins (Frank Capra: “Hollywood! What the hell good could come out of a Hollywood?”) and ending with a cascade of boldface names repeating William Goldman’s famous axiom, “Nobody knows anything.” (James Cameron: “Just get out there and shoot some film, really.”)

On this week’s Little Gold Men podcast, Wasson talked about how the book came together, the algorithms ruining Hollywood, and what the upcoming movie Babylon may be getting wrong about the early days of the studio system.

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Vanity Fair: We should say from the start that we have a shared past to some degree, in that we both graduated from Wesleyan University in the film studies program. You were a bit ahead of me, but you wrote this book with our shared old professor, Jeanine Basinger, the smartest person I've ever met to talk about movies. That makes you the best student, right?

Sam Wasson: At least this year, I'm the best student. Someone else will happen next year. I'm certainly the most historically focused student, so one naturally inclined to call up Jeanine and say, Jeanine, look what we got. We got these 3000 interviews from the history of Hollywood going all the way back to Lillian Gish. There's no one on the planet or off the planet who knows more about Hollywood than Jeanine. So it was a no brainer.

The process of making the book is sort of written into it You've got these archives from AFI, mountains— I don't even know what the physical status of these were, but I'm just imagining piles of something that you're putting together into a book. Where do you start?

It started because I was researching the Chinatown book. I wanted to look into Anthea Sylbert, who was the costume designer at Chinatown? There was, She didn't leave a lot of interviews, but she did one at AFI, which was extraordinary. These were seminars where you're speaking to the students, you are really teaching. Reading this interview, I just got lost, not in just her testimony around Chinatown, but about what it meant to be a costume designer in the 70s. It was a time travel to the past, and then I realized, wait a second. This is just one of 3000 of these.

They were all in all sorts of condition because a lot of people don't know about them. So I called up friends at AFI and called up Jeanine, and I said, we can now tell the story of Hollywood firsthand. This is not my interpretation. This is not nostalgia. We're not looking back on it. These are the people who were there and who made it. And we don't just take anyone's word for it.

What we wanted to do was make it like a real conversation. So we wanted it to be like Lillian Gish is in the room with Jordan Peele. And, and the way that we achieve that is by having people finish each other's thoughts. It is one long conversation. In Hollywood, we're still dealing with the same issues of changes in technology and how to make a living and how to live a life out here. None of it changes, it just wears a different hat.

I think it's Louis B. Mayer who is the studio head you spend the most time on where everyone has a story and the stories contradict each other. There are people who talk about how he was wonderful and people who talk about how he was a monster. That happens for a couple of different people. The historical debate about these really powerful studio heads and how they treated people continues to this day. And I wonder how you guys decided the lens that you wanted to put on that.

Louis B. Mayer, I don't think anyone thought he was a monster. I think they thought he was, at worst, very tough, emotionally extravagant, sometimes manipulative, could explode into outrage. But he was also visionary, giant respecter of talent and we've got incredible testimony from Katharine Hepburn actually about him bending over backwards to try to take care of Judy Garland. This, this idea that studio heads were bad to the talent is so wrong, and this book proves that over and over and over again. It doesn't make sense actually, historically why they would be. Think about it. You run the studio and your people are artists under contract, how are you gonna get them to do their best? How are you gonna get Judy Garland to sing her best—by making her miserable? You need these people for the bottom line to be happy, to the best of your ability. Now, it doesn't mean they're always happy, and it doesn't mean that there aren't conflicts between the power and the subordinates. But Louis B. did everything, and Jack Warner would say, you know, If, if Judy were under contract to Warner Bros., I never would've been as patient as you have, you know, as, as you were.

It’s a long way of saying, yes, all giants are complicated. Louis B. Mayer was, and we hope that complication is in there. But I would never say monster.

From that studio period, you also have a lot of craft people working behind the scenes who are saying the way that you learn to make movies is to make 50 of them a year— the famous studio system output. Was that just a recurring theme that anyone who worked in a studio kind of looked back at that incredible pace really fondly?

Yes. And that was such an important part of why we wanted to do this book and say the studio system was the greatest era in Hollywood. And we're not romanticizing the past, we're not creating a fiction. If you don’t want to believe that, don't shoot the messenger. We've got 500 pages of one person after the next saying, I worked my ass off. I got to do what I love with people I respect, and live. as we know, a very comfortable life. And by the way, create work that endures. Was it paradise? No. Was it a paradise? Definitely.

When you're spending so much time in with these people really holding court and telling stories about themselves, did it give you new insight into how Hollywood tells stories about itself? It's not nostalgic, but they are looking back from a decade or two later about what they've done.

Well I think Hollywood likes to talk about itself, the way we all like to talk about what we're our lives. We're all people. I mean, it's like saying how does Wall Street like to talk about itself? If you're good and proud, you speak about something that you love with pride. I think that would be a generalization to say Hollywood likes to talk about itself in a way that anyone else likes to talk about itself.

Don't you think each industry kind of has different ways that it props up its origin story and what they're proud of and what they're not? I think that Wall Street would have different versions of that than what Hollywood was. You’re looking for patterns across decades of what people talk about. I’m curious what themes reoccur.

I think Irving Thalberg is as close as anyone would come to myth, and that cuts both ways. Irving Thalberg, who was of course a legendary producer working with L.B. Mayer in the twenties and thirties who died very young and was the inspiration for Fitzgerald’s book The Last Tycoon. Thalberg has over time taken on this reputation. He represents dignity in Hollywood. Jeanine and I would talk about this, you know, where did that come from. Why was there so much respect for Thalberg? Did he really earn all of that respect? Or is it just myth that has been carried down over the years? And this is part of our job as historians, is not to take the story that we understand it for granted, but to really look at it and say, Well, how was it was, how was it really?

And Thalberg turns out to be a real friend of the writers at the beginning of sound, and developed a lot of projects that were based on classic works of literature. So people took him to be an intellectual of Hollywood, which he really only somewhat was. And his emphasis was on being on literature, not necessarily on the best possible movies.

He’s someone who people return to. Even if you're making movies in 2022, you think about Irving Thalberg. I haven't seen the movie Babylon, and I imagine you haven't either, but as far as I understand it, he's the only real person who's a character in that movie, which

Well, let's see, let's see how they do it. I'm always wary of any work that paints Hollywood as Sodom and Gomorrah—which it wasn't, as you'll see in over 700 pages of this book. Going back to Fatty Arbuckle, America always thinks that there's really bad stuff going on over there in Hollywood. And of course there's bad stuff going on everywhere where there's money and power. But because people are fascinated, titillated, jealous of, angered by Hollywood, it's all amplified. It becomes the worst of everything, the best of everything. When in fact, , we go to bed early because we, we gotta wake up for when the sun comes up, probably, if we're shooting on location. Even if we're shooting interiors, we've gotta wake up early and set up the shot. Or if you're in the shot, you gotta do hours and hours of makeup, which means you're probably going to bed early. Hollywood is famously not a late town.

There were also wild parties. I'm not gonna say there weren’t wild parties. We are people from the theater and show people. There were theme parties in Hollywood all in the early days of Hollywood that, you know, Carol Lombard gave fantastic theme parties. Hearst had a New Year's Eve party that was outrageous. It went to all hours of the night. Of course, they didn't go to work the next day. They're up in San Simian. It's a different deal. Now, maybe Babylon is a totally sober and honest look at Hollywood, and they just cut a trailer that's going to appeal to this false idea of people’s, which is that Hollywood is party party fuck town, you know, sex and drugs and blood on the walls. But this misconception about Hollywood is still that powerful.