Hollywood: The Oral History

Simon Morris talks to Sam Wasson, one of the authors of the massive Hollywood: The Oral History, in which the story of the movie capital of the world is told by the people who made them.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. Claudette Colbert in Cecil B. DeMille's Cleopatra in 1934. Listen to the full conversation with Sam Wasson.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 locationSM: 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…Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details