Book Review | The Story of Hollywood: An Illustrated History

Hollywood and Bust

by Thomas Delapa


In the minds of most, “Hollywood” has always been much more of a mythic idea than a real place. For nearly a century, it has been the world’s film capital—glitzy dream factory, star-studded entertainment center and sinful new Babylon all rolled and reeled into one.

Of all the thousands of books on the business, art and history of Hollywood, few have devoted more than a handful of pages to its existence as a community and, since 1910, as a four-square-mile patch of Los Angeles proper. That sparse scene dramatically changed with the 2005 publication of The Story of Hollywood: A Illustrated History, by Gregory Paul Williams. Handsome, meticulous and chock-full of facts and pictures, Williams’ sharp close-up is just the ticket for serious movie fans.

A Hollywood native, author and part-time puppeteer, Williams writes about his home town with love and nostalgia, as well as a clear, incisive eye. For anyone who has seen Hollywood’s urban decline over the past 50 years, this account will at least be a reminder of what’s been lost. Of course, Hollywood hasn’t faded out entirely in its centrality as movie Mecca, but it has shed much of its glitter. Of the legendary major studios that once famously called it home, only Paramount remains.

First claimed from Native Americans by Spain and then Mexico, the area now known as Hollywood was once dubbed Nopalera—after a cactus. Nestled against the Santa Monica Mountains in the sunny Cahuenga Valley, the land was bisected by the Camino Real, the main Spanish trail down the California coast. Soon after California made statehood in 1850, a wave of Anglo settlers from the East began moving in, edging out Mexican landowners. The Southern Pacific Railroad furthered Americanization of the valley, with farmers and ranchers sowing an array of warm-weather crops, especially lemons, figs, grapes and strawberries. Envisioned as a pricey L.A. subdivision by town wheeler-dealer Harvey Wilcox, Nopalera was renamed Hollywood (after an Illinois estate) sometime in the 1880s, with the east-west Hollywood Boulevard surfacing as the main drag.

No one could have imagined that the budding motion-picture industry would take root in these rural boondocks 3000 miles from the East Coast. The year 1907 saw the first film company go far west, joined soon after by the Biograph Company and its great silent director D.W. Griffith. Whether due to the balmy climate, picturesque locations, cheap land or great distance from New York City—and its monopolistic movie syndicates—Hollywood’s environs became America’s fertile crescent for making “flickers.”

Williams’ vivid flashback is splashed with colorful characters, good and bad, backed by a supporting cast of thousands. From the start of the film era, there existed a tension between the puritanical locals and in-migrating movie people (including the predominately Jewish studio moguls), who were treated with suspicion for their freewheeling, often scandalous ways. But with the rise in Hollywood’s wealth, property values and global fame, the locals grudgingly accommodated the new kids on the block. It was Griffith’s incendiary 1915 Civil War blockbuster, The Birth of a Nation, which signaled the ascendancy of American film, with Hollywood as its glittery new capital.

Writing with enthusiasm and simple prose, Williams crafts a narrative as high-minded, melodramatic and tawdry as any Cecil B. DeMille biblical epic. It’s tinted with rose-colored regrets, most especially for the vintage buildings—like the Vine Street Brown Derby—wantonly cut from the heart of the community over the years. Cast as the main villain is the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA), a quasi-public organization formed in 1983 that burned through hundreds of millions of dollars in public money in an effort to stem the growing blight.

As several major studios began moving out towards greener L.A. pastures as early as the 1920s—like Warner Bros., to of all places, Burbank—the stars themselves began a westward trek toward swanky Beverly Hills and Bel Air. Even though the burgeoning television and (rock) music industries recharged the production scene in the 1950s and 1960s, Hollywood by the 1980s had morphed into crime-ridden “Hollyweird,” a low-concept urban disaster plot missing a superhero.



Like many a true-life saga, The Story of Hollywood lacks the happy ending that its namesake is famous for. The 21st-century ushered in an upbeat sequel of sorts, starting with the new (now-sponsorless) Kodak Theater, which in 2002 won the Oscars back home for the first time since 1960. A hip, Gen-X-fueled club scene took a bow, with some stars actually returning to reside in dodgy but historic Hollywood. Unlike so many of its grand old theaters, the Pantages (1930) is still in the spotlight, as is Grauman’s Chinese (1927) and the Egyptian (1922), the latter lovingly restored as the non-profit American Cinematheque. The original Charlie Chaplin Studios (1918) has been taken over by the Muppets.

Since its calamitous subway construction in the nineties (compounded by a 1994 earthquake), this onetime citrus grove has dusted off and moved on, and has at least tried to put the brakes on seedy decline. But with the increasing decentralization and digitization of the film industry in the age of the Internet and the indie, Hollywood’s epic run as America’s movie capital may be on its last reel.

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3/27/12

Book Review | Mr. & Mrs. Hollywood: Edie and Lew Wasserman and Their Entertainment Empire (2003)

The Empire Strikes Back

by Thomas Delapa


When Hollywood histories are usually written, surprisingly few shine any light at all on the late Lew Wasserman. Even in Ephraim Katz’s essential Film Encyclopedia, Wasserman doesn’t merit his own entry, whereas Lassie and Rin Tin Tin fetch several paragraphs each.

Yet modern Hollywood as we know it wouldn’t exist without Louis “Lew” R. Wasserman, the secretive super-agent-turned-mogul who transformed Universal from a broke, low-budget studio into a worldwide multimedia colossus.

From the 1940s to well into the 1990s, Wasserman and his wife Edie were one of the U.S. entertainment industry’s high-voltage power couples, consorts and counsels to everyone from stars to presidents. A king and queen among Los Angeles royalty, this matched pair finally got their close-up—warts and all—in Mr. & Mrs. Hollywood: Edie and Lew Wasserman and Their Entertainment Empire (2003), by Kathleen Sharp.

Not that Wasserman (1913-2002) would have wanted the scrutiny, even after death. A famously behind-the-scenes puppet master, he shunned the spotlight, preferring to pull strings from the wings. Few know that it was Wasserman who, as James Stewart’s agent in 1950, negotiated a momentous deal with Universal that gave the star a big chunk of the profits on his film Winchester ‘73. A model for “above the line” talent contracts to this day, it was a shot heard ‘round Hollywood, and one that would be another nail in the coffin of the old studio system.

Sharp traces Wasserman’s personal and professional trajectories from his childhood in Cleveland and marriage to the zesty Edith Brickerman, and on to his near-lifelong association with the formidable—and feared—Chicago-born talent agency MCA (Music Corporation of America) founded by Jules Stein. For every Wasserman success and triumph along the way, Sharp uncovers shadowy counterpoints, from antitrust investigations to mob connections and underhanded labor tactics, once in concert with a minor 1950s actor named Ronald Reagan.

At MCA, Wasserman was Stein’s indispensable right-hand man as it grew into Hollywood’s most powerful and aggressive talent agency after World War II, signing a galaxy of such A-list clients as Stewart, Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Dean Martin, Judy Garland and Charlton Heston, as well as directors Alfred Hitchcock (a close Wasserman friend) and Billy Wilder. But as the old Hollywood studios began to eclipse in the late 1940s, buffeted by the TV revolution and antitrust busting, Wasserman and MCA saw the future before anyone else. In 1950, he engineered a deal to create Revue Productions to make TV shows, renting space at Universal’s massive, 367-acre lot in the San Fernando Valley. By 1958, MCA/Revue was so successful it bought outright the cash-poor Universal City lot for virtually a song. Wasserman’s prescient Midas touch would also include the purchase of undervalued studio film libraries (like Paramount’s), which would turn into a gold mine owing to TV showings and eventual re-releases through the post-1970s home-video bonanza.

While Sharp’s highly readable history glitters with accounts on Hollywood’s critical transition years, the book is a bit tarnished by the author’s resistance to chronological rigor. Rather than starting at the beginning of Wasserman’s life, she drops in jigsaw flashbacks to the 1930s and 1940s. Though strict biographical timelines might seem as prosaic as an old Andy Hardy picture, they’re also usually more complete. (Dennis McDougal’s 1998 The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA and the Hidden History of Hollywood has a tighter focus.)

Most of Mr. & Mrs. Hollywood spans from the late 1950s to Wasserman’s death in 2002. (Edie died just this past year.) During that time, he reinvented himself at least once, dissolving from talent agent into studio mogul. When MCA tried to purchase the Universal studio in 1962, the government stepped in, charging that the deal violated antitrust laws; Wasserman would have to either get out of talent business or nix the deal. He and Stein chose Universal.

In the decades that followed, Wasserman and his executives—like production head Ned Tanen—transformed the former studio best known for monster movies and Deanna Durbin musicals into a conglomerate monolith. Not only did Universal become a major player on TV (with hits from Leave it To Beaver to The Rockford Files), and in the recording industry (Decca), it also morphed into a big-time movie studio, boosted into the stratosphere by such 1970s New Hollywood cash-cows as Steven Spielberg. Tearing a page from Walt Disney, Wasserman's multi-platform business genius also extended to his decision to start a small public tour of the Universal lot in 1964 (see Lana Turner’s dressing room!), which has since grown into one of Southern California's biggest tourist attractions.

As one of New Hollywood’s studio godfathers, Wasserman made his share of enemies, usually because of the lowball offers his many minions couldn’t afford to refuse. With a deadeye on profits, he has been cited as one of the originators of the notorious “Hollywood accounting” system, in which seeming financial winners are dubiously written off as money losers. James Garner, star of the lucrative, long-running Rockford Files, was rebuffed for years by Universal lawyers in his efforts to gain his rightful compensation.

Sharp plays a doggedly good flatfoot in this detailed investigation, finding her man (and woman). In The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that “not a half-dozen men have been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.” Add up all the facts in this book, and it’s easy to figure that Lew Wasserman was one of them.

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Book Review | High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess

L.A. Low

by Thomas Delapa


In a town all-too-famous for its meteoric rises and falls, Don Simpson may not belong in the same orbit of Marilyn Monroe, James Dean or even “Fatty” Arbuckle, but if any producer symbolized the revved-up, dumbed-down, testosterone-fueled Hollywood of the 1980s, it was Simpson, who died of a drug overdose in 1996 at age 52.

Gone but not forgotten, Simpson’s dubious legacy lives on in the ubiquitous male action flick, as well as in the blockbuster movies of mass distraction made by his one-time partner, Jerry Bruckheimer, including the soggy Pirates of the Caribbean saga. First published in 1998, High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess (Doubleday) is Charles Fleming’s vitriolic, blow-by-blow account of Simpson’s high—and luridly low—times in Hollywood’s fast lane, and it’s worth another look in the rear-view mirror.

Before he crashed and burned, Simpson was one of Tinseltown’s superstar producers, rising to mogul-dom just as New Hollywood risk and experimentation was running out of gas in the late seventies. At the studios—where it’s said you’re only as good as your last movie—Simpson was a guy who always got his phone calls returned.

Short in stature but not in ego, Simpson began his career at Paramount and Warner Bros., breaking out in 1983 with Flashdance, the first in a string of formulaic, dimly-plotted hits that appalled critics and seduced a new youth audience weaned on TV, pop music and the emerging MTV aesthetic. Simpson was a key player in turning “high concept”—catchy plots easily boiled down into one or two sentences—into lowbrow box-office gold. Over the next 15 years, Simpson and Bruckheimer zoomed to the stratosphere, cranking out big-budget hits like Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop, and Bad Boys, slowed down only by the thunderous dud of Days of Thunder. The team quickly exploited the allure of synthetic pop songs (pasted over the paper-thin plots), selling both Flashdance and Top Gun as essentially long-playing music videos, amped up with sexy hardbodies and hokey fairy-tale heroics.

But in Simpson’s story, there were no happy endings cut from a Tom Cruise movie. Behind the scenes, he became notorious for a lifestyle out of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, not the Hollywood Reporter. His prodigious drug use was an open secret, as were his sordid sexual escapades, which might even embarrass Tiger Woods. A serial womanizer, Simpson was habitually fond of prostitutes (notorious “Hollywood Madam” Heidi Fleiss counted him on her A-list) and S&M, and at least one of his former secretaries sued him for sexual harassment. As he aged and fretted over his looks, his addictions crept into all manner of plastic surgery and hormone treatments, which, as Fleming describes, eventually made his face look like “an inflated ball of Naugahyde.” For all his vain efforts—checkered by stints in rehab—Simpson in the nineties went downhill fast. Few were surprised when, on Jan. 19, 1996, he was found dead at his toilet, the victim of the “combined effects of multiple drug intake,” including cocaine. Michael Eisner, his former boss at Disney, said “I had been waiting for this call for 20 years.”

On his death, dozens of his Hollywood friends and cronies rushed to praise him. Screenwriter Joe Ezterhas, no stranger to hype, called him “a true American original.” Others were quick to bury him. In one of the most mordant Hollywood postmortems, director Robert Altman said, “Simpson was a bad guy, a bum. It’s a big plus for our industry that he’s gone. ...”

Altman—truly a cinematic anti-Simpson—is now gone, too. But since Simpson’s inglorious fade-out, it’s hard to say that Hollywood has gotten better. Flying solo, Bruckheimer has thrived, succeeding beyond even Simpson’s wildest dreams with booty collected from the Pirates franchise, National Treasure and the grimly metastasizing CSI TV series. The hyper-real, youth-skewed, post-narrative trends that Simpson seized on the eighties have exploded in the years since, juiced up by digital special effects. Then, as now, nothing in Hollywood succeeds like excess.

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5/7/10