Peter Bart: How To Survive In Hollywood? Vintage Stars Reveal Rules Of Combat In Hefty New AFI Book
deadline.comThe rules of survival in Hollywood have always fascinated me. “Consistency is the key – always present yourself to studios as a total bitch,” Bette Davis once confided. “Never delude yourself into thinking that a star can become a loyal personal friend,” advised Billy Wilder. “Since studios always lie, a producer’s mandate is to come up with bigger lies,” said David O.
Selznick.As a collector of Hollywood war stories, I was pleased this week to discover a new book (741 pages) with the intimidating title Hollywood: The Oral History – one that has greatly expanded my inventory of intrigue.Over the course of the last 50 years AFI (the American Film Institute) has semi-secretly recorded, and now published, interviews with accomplished stars and filmmakers, thus creating an intimate Hollywood history told in first person (HarperCollins is the publisher).Approaching a book of this size as summer reading, I decided to focus not on thoughtful analysis, but rather on combat.
The AFI’s collection of interviews is thus akin to dropping by a cocktail party with the likes of Katherine Hepburn, Natalie Wood, Olivia de Havilland, Jack Lemmon, Wilder and George Lucas.They’re all at their candid best in exploring their rivalries and conflicts.
Our “native guides” in the AFI book are Sam Wasson and Jeanine Basinger, two gifted film nerds who curated the collection (he wrote The Big Goodbye and she is a film historian and professor at Wesleyan).A case in point: Was Marilyn Monroe really emotionally troubled?
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