What emerges are chapters that feel like a series of panel discussions involving some 368 named Hollywood filmmakers in dialogues concerning subjects ranging from various forms of film formats; genres and technologies, the art; craft and personalities of various studio personnel, the rise and fall of the Hollywood studio system to today’s “product,” covering more than one hundred years of American film history. Harper should be ashamed for compiling a fantastic book that fails to include two essential elements: dates and an index. With the conversations of more than 3,000 guest speakers to choose from, of course, the organizing structure is key.

From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer.But sources stress over and over that Mayer regarded the studio as a family with himself as pater familias. The material, which was assembled by the veteran film scholar and professor Jeanine Basinger and her collaborator, the movie journalist Sam Wasson, comes from the deep resources of the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. My favorite sections were about the old studio system and all the actors and actresses connected to the studios. Ended as a bunch of old men complaining about ‘how things were better in the olden days,’ and how the sexual violence problem in the industry ‘was not that bad. To fill in the gaps, authors Sam Wasson and Jeanine Basinger awkwardly introduce their own "voices", as if they are a part of the oral "conversation" (i.

The author then tries to tie it together with a few quotes at the end about the magic of the movie business, which doesn't really land because of the preceding 250 pages of incessant demoralizing complaining. There’s Meryl Streep kvetching about how she likes to get done in four takes while Robert De Niro just goes on and on.The material in the book – gathered over the decades by the American Film Institute – has never been published before, has never been heard before.

Actors like Bill Bojangles Robinson, Louise Beavers, and Stepin Fetchit who became a part of the minor Hollywood characters of illiterate, untalented, and virtually useless human detritus (but were placed in white films to make them successful), starred in Black film. The whole book is made up of short one paragraph quotes from different Hollywood veterans beginning with comments from people who worked and created silent movies. What we are seeing slowly created is the Studio system being created again as Netflix and Prime Video set up their own studios. Some people had name recognition, but many did not, and there aren't always context clues to piece together who they were and when they worked.Still, it might enlighten those who want to blow off actors’ current complaints, by educating one on how things normally work for them, and it is not at all like what you might expect. There’s a section on the coming of the Hays code in the late 1920s – that censorious set of rules designed to purge Hollywood of its incipient bathtub-gin sleaziness. In addition, she is a trustee emeritus of the American Film Institute, a member of the Steering Committee of the National Center for Film and Video Preservation, and one of the Board of Advisors for the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers.