Gather the major players, get them talking, edit and arrange the remarks: The oral history remains a virtually foolproof way to turn the details of a movie’s production into a memorable narrative. Now two widely admired film historians, Jeanine Basinger of Wesleyan University and best-selling author Sam Wasson, have had the bright idea to extend this format to the entire history of the American film industry. The result is “Hollywood: The Oral History,” a hefty book with charm to match.

In 2022, the biggest problem with such an enterprise is that the pioneers of the silent era and classic Hollywood, as well as key members of the American New Wave generation of the 1970s, are inconveniently dead. Ms. Basinger and Mr. Wasson’s brainstorm was to dive into the vast archives of the American Film Institute. Since 1969, the AFI has been gathering interviews with thousands of film artists: The authors have selected and edited choice moments from the transcripts, along with some of their own interviews with figures such as Frank Capra and Michael Ovitz.

Hollywood: The Oral History

By Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson

Harper, 739 pages, $37.50

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The results are arranged to read as though these artists are talking across the decades to us and to each other, and even to Ms. Basinger and Mr. Wasson themselves—the authors occasionally drop in to the kaffeeklatsch with fiscal and legal detail and other context. At least two-thirds of “Hollywood: The Oral History” is taken up by early filmmaking, silent movies and the studio era, which Basinger says ended around 1960; the transitional 1960s and the New Hollywood of the 1970s are allotted about three chapters; and post-2000 movies get but a sliver. This is a book for those who still revere Hollywood’s past, and that’s fine by this film historian.

My bookshelves are laden with Hollywood memoirs that run the gamut from indispensable to comic to, frankly, a pack of lies. Even so, I found “Hollywood” had something fresh, revealing and frequently amusing on nearly every page. The AFI talks, while lively, are focused on actual filmmaking, so there is less gossip than in a typical autobiography, where the publisher knows that’s what sells. Ms. Basinger and Mr. Wasson also make good use of lesser-known but vital figures, like Margaret Booth, MGM’s editor for many years, or Ranald MacDougall, a great screenwriter but one with low name recognition compared with, say, Billy Wilder.

Is it any surprise that the most entertaining voices here aren’t those of performers? You never know who is going to hit you with a great observation, like the film-music composer Bronislau Kaper discussing the fearsome boss of Hollywood’s then-biggest studio, MGM: “Yes, he was tough. That was why he was Louis B. Mayer. And I’m not tough, so that’s why I am Bronnie Kaper.” You can feel these folks, in the company of others who love and work in the industry, putting up their feet and getting real. I wasn’t prepared for cinematographer Hal Mohr to swerve from a discussion of silent-film actor-director Erich von Stroheim’s extravagance to a hilariously abusive aside about Italian arthouse-titan Michelangelo Antonioni and 1970’s “Zabriskie Point.”

On the other hand, it’s less shocking to hear cigar-loving director Sam Fuller remark, concerning the air quality in a typical late-1960s editing room, “These kids liked to smoke,” and no, he didn’t mean tobacco. Nor, perhaps, is it a surprise to find out from sound designer Gary Rydstrom that a T. Rex’s growl in the original “Jurassic Park” was actually his dog Buster—but it is funny. A few voices I could have lived without, like yet another of editor-director Robert Wise’s self-serving accounts of the mutilation of Orson Welles’ “The Magnificent Ambersons”—is there a law that says Wise gets space for that in every film book? But such eye rolls are more than outweighed by, say, Quentin Tarantino’s eager declaration that working with Bette Davis “would have been f— awesome.”

The introduction states briefly that the interviewees “speak with the attitudes of their own time, but they speak with authority.” Thus the silent-era veterans show great respect for D.W. Griffith, and neither Ms. Basinger nor Mr. Wasson intrude to remind us that “The Birth of a Nation” was a work of virulent racism. The reader is simply trusted to pick up on certain things, such as the ingrained sexism that saw the gifted silent film director Lois Weber and other women slowly pushed out of the industry. The great director King Vidor reflects on fighting to make “Hallelujah,” an all-black musical film from 1929—he had to promise MGM to put up his own salary—and ends by saying, with sadness you can feel in your gut, that he never expected it would take decades in Hollywood for others to make “Black stories or [use] Black actors in important roles.”

Movie history is more like a crabwalk than a straight line, so while the chapters are arranged chronologically, they are also broken into topics. Possibly my favorite is “The Studio Workforce,” with sections devoted to cameramen, music, editors, studio personnel, art direction, costumes and makeup right alongside the inevitable ones about the writers, directors and actors. Most of the big classic-era stars are covered, even if only fleetingly. Ms. Basinger and Mr. Wasson apparently want to round out and even challenge the conventional wisdom. For example, most pages on the eternal Marilyn Monroe skew negative—screenwriter Nunnally Johnson claims “she bored the hell out of everybody.” Billy Wilder expressed his frustration with Monroe in nearly every late-life interview, but “Hollywood” offers a quote I hadn’t encountered: “I think there are more books on Marilyn Monroe than on World War II, and there’s a great similarity.” George Cukor gives a hair-raising description of how Judy Garland worked herself into an emotional state for a breakdown scene in “A Star Is Born.” But the beloved Garland, too, gets several pages of colleagues lamenting her ruinous insecurity and unreliability.

Joan Crawford, on the other hand, is described by those who knew her not as “Mommie Dearest,” but as a loyal friend and a good actress who was grateful to be a star and to the fans who made her one. “Hollywood” often reminds us that the way we see the famous is rarely the way their coworkers see them.

“Hollywood” will surely bring joy to any cinephile, but its organization is a bit of a downer. If ever there were a film book that begged for notes and a source list it’s this one, even if the additions would take the size from heavy to immovable. The front matter includes an alphabetical list of contributors, along with their professions, but none of their credits or even their studio affiliations. Readers moved to curiosity about, say, what films Raoul Walsh directed or what exactly Pandro Berman did in the movie industry will probably spend a lot of time on Wikipedia.

It would be useful to know when someone was speaking—how many years after the events? In certain cases, more time means that an anecdote has become more, shall we say, interesting. There’s little here to remind anyone that Hollywood breeds storytellers off-screen as well as on—let the researcher beware. An index would also have been most welcome. This is one instance where the e-book format, with its search capability, may be a good idea.

Ms. Basinger and Mr. Wasson obviously hope their work will be read cover-to-cover, the better to savor the instances when its subjects appear to address one another, such as when director John Seitz mentions meeting Howard Hughes, and the next quote from the irrepressible Kaper seems to reply, “What are you talking about? You don’t meet Howard Hughes. You meet his money.” Still, many will want to set the book nearby and open it at random from time to time. W

ith luck, they will land on something like the poignant tale of how cinematographer George Folsey got Margaret Dumont, the straight woman in the Marx Brothers’ pictures, a bit part in a 1945 Betty Grable vehicle. When Folsey told Groucho Marx soon after, Groucho, near tears, mused, “It’s wonderful for you to have done that. She hasn’t worked since the last Marx Brothers picture. What am I saying? I haven’t worked since the last Marx Brothers picture!” These are the moments—art versus commerce, kindness versus hard-headed realism—in which “Hollywood” earns its page count.

—Ms. Nehme’s writing on cinema appears in her Self-Styled Siren newsletter, Sight & Sound and elsewhere. She is the author of the novel “Missing Reels.”