Sam WassonBesprekingen

Hollywood: An Oral History by Jeanine Basinger/Sam Wasson is a 2022 Harper publication.

Oral history is a hit or miss with me, but if a book is going to cover old Hollywood at all, I can’t seem to resist. While the page count for this book appears daunting, it’s actually very easy to read. There’s no dense text or history. It is exactly what it says- an oral history. (Though some might beg to differ)

The quotes are quite interesting and give the reader a lay of the land during various periods in Hollywood over the years. It also gives one a look at the Hollywood system from the beginning through to the digital age. It does not cover the streaming era, though. 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.

Some of the more surprising passages were those about Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland- two women who were undoubtedly a victim of the Hollywood system- but were not remembered fondly by some people who had to deal with them in moment.

I did not read this book from start to finish like a novel, but browsed through it here and there until I finished it. I will not lie and say I digested every single portion the same way. The authors cover nearly every single aspect of the movie making business- producers, directors, writers, music, actors, and all points in between. Some of these areas were not as interesting as others, and I seldom recognized the names of the people working some of the behind the scenes jobs- so I confess to having skimmed some sections.

Overall, though, this is a well-organized look at the Hollywood system from every angle, told through the eyes, ears and mouths of those who experienced it firsthand.

It’s an interesting book, and it is obvious the authors put a great deal of effort into it. I think it is important to know two things going in- there is no big, long index, no biographies or photographs. It’s strictly interview snippets that apply to the time period- from silents, to talkies, to the studio system, to the 1970s, the big blockbusters, and finally the digital age.

This is what you should expect and nothing- more- or less. It’s comprehensive and so I can’t imagine why it wouldn't be enough for those interested, but of course the lack of bios and index might be frustrating to some readers. Personally, I didn't feel either of those were necessary.

The book is fun, informative, and should appeal to pop culture enthusiasts, historians, and movie lovers of all ages and stripes.

4 stars

The authors have reviewed many interviews from people in the industry, extracted paragraphs of interest, then organized these by topic (e.g. Comedy, Silent Directors, Sound!). Reading a chapter is pretty easy in this format, but reading the book through was more difficult. There is a lot of great stuff here and I enjoyed it a lot, but I have three complaints.
1. This must have been a big undertaking. How hard would it be to add mini-biographies? I recognized many of these people, the stars, the directors, and people like Edith Head, but some I did not know, and I had to guess at their identity from what they were talking about.
2. If mini-biographies were done, there should be figures of these people, especially in a book about the movie industry, unless there are plans to redo this in an illustrated edition.
3. Somewhere in the book there should be a list of the source interviews and the date they were made.

The story of the making of the movie Chinatown, told, more or less, as disorganized often sordid biographies of the movie's producer, screenwriter, lead actor, and director (Robert Evans, Robert Towne, Jack Nicholson, and Roman Polanski). This is a tough book to rate. I enjoyed it a lot, it has many great anecdotes, but it has its problems. The text isn't well-organized, jumping around and leaving some holes in the storyline - Didn't Polanksi realize that his producer had completely replaced the composer and score of his movie? The author always seems to be looking around for new scandalous details, even when they concern secondary or tertiary characters, and the whole shape of the story seems to be guided by the decadent and miserable stories that are available. So, for example, Roman Polanski's statutory rape case is described in great detail, but it postdates the movie. Also, it still isn't clear to me how Chinatown represented the last years of Hollywood, there have been many great movies of all kinds made in the U.S. since then, and it's not like the old studio system was still active in the mid-1970s.

Apart from the author’s intro and outro, this is a wonderful compilation of quotes from big names and the ‘unknown’ behind-the-scenes people. Added together, it makes for a fascinating narrative.

The bulk of material is from the early days through to the 1950s. I found this to be the most entertaining. I watch films from all eras, so I knew many of the old stars who are featured, like comedy genius Harold Lloyd and the wonderful Mary Pickford.

Having mentioned that, Mary is only referred to, not quoted. She’s among several big names who aren’t quoted, plus many others don’t get any mention. Clara Bow, for example, is referred to only once.

This isn’t a case of the author deciding certain stars are unworthy to be remembered. Rather, it’s down to the material she had at her disposal. She mentions at the end how she wishes she had more stars to include, and regrets having to cut many hours’ worth of material. What we have, though, is excellent.

Beforehand, I didn’t think I’d be too interested in the cameramen and other behind-the-scenes people, yet they all add to the fascination of early Hollywood.

My fascination downgrades to interest when we leave the Golden Years and venture into the 1960s. From the 1970s onwards, much of the sparkle has gone, but that’s not to say it’s boring. It does become patchy, though.

In the main, however, this is a superb read.

A big mess of a book for a big mess of a story. The narrative doesn't quite flow, but seemingly captures the chaotic intensity of the time - late 60s to 80s Hollywood, the rise of Nicholson, the fall of Polanski. Cocaine and overheating, overwhelming fame.

The “authors”, really editors who add occasional continuity passages, beautifully patch together quotes from Hollywood actors, directors, screenwriters, producers to create a gripping narrative history of the Hollywood film industry from its beginning. What the authors achieve which makes this book remarkable is that the story is able to maintain real drive and that the story is told by those who were there.

Many of the people involved at the start of Hollywood were only names to me, but this history helped to explain their significance and their contribution to the film industry.
I was a child in the 1970’s and so I saw Chaplin and Laurel & Hardy on morning television during the school holidays, I saw “golden age” musicals and westerns from the 1940’s to 1960’s as television matinees on wet Sunday afternoons, and I saw 1970’s and later films at the cinema.
The coverage feels weaker after the 1970’s, perhaps because I lived through that period, but it does try to bring the story up to 2022.
This book provides a fascinating glimpse of that world, and although it is long, it is readable, engaging, funny and entertaining. If you are interested in Hollywood, or popular culture, then this is an excellent read.½

The editors of this book—film historian Jeanine Basinger and film chronicler Sam Wasson—have gone through thousands of transcripts of interviews with Hollywood actors, directors, writers, flunkies, producers, etc. who started working in the early twentieth century, up to people who are still working in Hollywood. The film industry.

The book is sectioned into parts like 'Silent actors', 'The studio workforce', 'The end of the system', and 'The deal'. Both Basinger and Wasson contribute by adding contextual passages to make stories flow better.

> **[MERVYN LEROY](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mervyn_LeRoy)**: In those days, anything could happen. If you made a drama, sometimes when you previewed it, it became a comedy. And title writers—if something wasn’t working, they could take a comedy and write a dramatic title and make a drama out of it, and vice versa if it was a drama. You know, when you wrote titles, all you had to do was, when you saw them open their mouths, write a title and stick it in so the audience would know what happened. A lot of good pictures were made that way! It’s true!

The hard thing about these stories is that they're told by people who are deeply engaged. Some stories might be false. Others misremembered. Still, you see certain red threads, threads that are selected and edited by Basinger and Wasson.

Even if you have the most skeptical and critical eye when reading these stories, there's both beauty and horror.

> **[HAL MOHR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Mohr)**: In those days, when you made a picture, there was no designation of responsibilities. I mean, four or five people would get together and take the script, break it down and talk it out, have story conferences, discuss the thing and make decisions. All of us together. And women, too. Universal sent me out with Ruth Stonehouse. They sent me out with Ruth to be her cutter and to keep her straight on the filming techniques. I was sent out that way with men, too, because I had done directing, photographing, and cutting. I could help. You know, there were women directors then. Besides Ruthie, there were other women directors: Ida May Park, Lois Weber.

> **[LILLIAN GISH](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillian_Gish)**: I directed a picture when I was twenty. With my sister, Dorothy. She was the most talented of the two of us, because she had comedy and wit. I thought I could bring it out as a director. I was too busy acting to do much more directing, but there were many women directors . . . and of course, writers, too . . . in the early years. The opportunity was there for a woman if you wanted it. It changed later, after sound came in, I think.

Things that seem weird now were the norm then.

> **[KING VIDOR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Vidor)**: I remember that with the silent films, the director was always asking the cameraman, “What speed? What speed are you going?” And they had a little speedometer on the camera. You don’t see that anymore. Films were shot at sixteen frames per second and projected at about eighteen to twenty frames. Charlie Chaplin said to me once, “Nobody ever saw me run around, turn the corner, as I actually do it, because those cameramen would drop down to half speed.” That slow cranking speeded him up double, made him faster. Everyone was constantly utilizing different speeds on the camera to achieve a sense of “hurry up.” Even Griffith did it. In Birth of a Nation, he has horses traveling at seventy miles an hour pulling chariots. After the interlock came in, everything became twenty-four frames per second and it was locked down.

There's a lot of funny anecdotes throughout the book. One example:

> **[RIDGEWAY CALLOW](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0130564/)**: From the point of view of assistant directors, he was indeed a tyrant. He was the most sarcastic man I have ever worked for, and I did several pictures with him in the capacity of “herder.” In the early days of the picture industry—that is, before the formation of the Directors Guild—whenever they filmed mob scenes, “herders” were employed to help out the few assistant directors assigned to the show. Although termed “herders,” they were actually extra assistant directors for crowd control. In productions with complicated action of the extras, one herder was employed for every hundred extras. The biggest use of herders in those lush days, was, of course, DeMille, who specialized in epics with “casts of thousands.” DeMille was a master in mob control. He demanded complete silence when he spoke, so much so that one could hear a pin drop. He was addressing his mob one day when he caught an extra talking to her friend in the background. “When I’m talking, young lady, what do you have to say that’s so important?” The girl in question was a well-known extra by the name of Sugar Geise, an ex-showgirl and a great wit. Bravely, she spoke up. “I only said to my friend, ‘When is that bald-headed son of a bitch going to call lunch?’” There were a few apprehensive seconds of silence. Then Mr. DeMille yelled, “LUNCH!” So he did have a sense of humor.

Then there are origin stories:

> **[RICHARD SYLBERT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sylbert)**: William Cameron Menzies was the greatest designer that ever lived, the father of the words production design. He didn’t invent that title. David O. Selznick gave it to him. He wanted to bring him in to do the designs for Gone with the Wind. And there was already an art director on the film, so they asked Selznick, “What are you going to call him? Art Director Two?” He said, “No, no, we’ll call him the production designer.” That’s where the term came from.

From the Hollywood of old to the 1970s:

> **[PAUL SCHRADER](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Schrader)**: In Japan, if a man cracks up, he closes the window and kills himself. In America, if a man cracks up, he opens the window to kill somebody else. And that’s what’s happening in Taxi Driver.

Money started flowing in; film studios started becoming banks more than creative pots.

> **[MEL BROOKS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Brooks)**: I don’t want to give twenty-five points to a star. For what? They’re only there for three weeks. I’m there for two years.

>**[JOHN PTAK](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0699668/)**: Columbia is one of the last studios to be taken over and run by corporate thinking. The rest of the studios are really very large corporations that are in many businesses, especially Universal, which even owns a savings and loan.
>
>**[SUE MENGERS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sue_Mengers)**: Therefore they’re not as adventurous as they were when they were going through their youth syndrome.
>
>**JOHN PTAK**: In 1936, Warner Bros. made sixty pictures. In 1940, they made forty-five. In 1950, they made twenty-eight. And in the last twelve years, it’s vacillated between thirteen and twenty-two.
>
>**[DAVID PUTTNAM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Puttnam)**: And I see the day when a lot of the things that I treasured as a kid have ceased to exist, because they don’t make any economic sense in a worldwide corporate environment.

> **[JACK NICHOLSON](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Nicholson)**: Anybody who had a pancake at the International House of Pancakes on Sunset when it first opened and then goes there today understands why conglomeration deteriorates the quality of the product.

All in all, this book is a look back at highlights and lowlights that are related to Hollywood. There's loads of industry talk in this book, funny recollections, bad memories, and overall, a lot of witty comments. It's a long laugh. Should be, the book is almost 800 pages long.

Keep a cool head as you're reading it, and you'll get a lot of insight. Film students probably know most of this already, but there's enchantment to hear straight from the mouths of people who were and are *there*.

I was impressed by Chinatown when I first saw it, and it would continue to rank near the top on a list of my favorite films, if I had such a thing. It's extraordinary in many ways - acting, directing, story, overall "feel". A classic noir with a somewhat updated sensibility.

Which is why this book caught my eye. I also remembered that many fine movies were released in the mid-70's, and I was intrigued by the "last years of Hollywood" part of the title.

It was, for me, a slow start, and I was tempted to DNF about an hour in. Wasson begins with basic background information about the individuals most closely involved with the making of the film: Roman Polanski (director), Robert Towne (script writer), Jack Nicholson (actor and connective tissue among the other players), and Robert Evans (producer).

Polanski is first up, and it was tough sledding reading about his childhood in Warsaw and Krakow during the years leading up to and including WWII, his mother being murdered by the Nazis, his father telling Roman to run away as he himself was being rounded up. This horrific history becomes backdrop to the murder of Sharon Tate, his wife, by the Manson family. That event becomes a kind of jumping off point for the rest of the book.

And that is where the book really takes off, and when I couldn't stop reading (listening, actually). Wasson skillfully weaves together the stories of those four principals, their friends and lovers, and other individuals peripheral to the making of the movie. His chief points are that although Towne had come up with the original story, it was bloated and he was incapable of paring it down, and that it was the friendships among these people that made it possible for a brilliant movie to emerge from their sometimes competing artistic visions.

Even Wasson's lesser points are fascinating. John Huston's character (one of the creepiest I've encountered in film) is not that far from his actual personality (OK, with the absolute worst elements missing). And he illustrates Fay Dunaway's legendary status as "difficult to work with", but makes it clear that everyone knew it was worth it for the sake of her remarkable performance.

Wasson describes how the problems deciding what type of score would be best weren't resolved until days before it was released. When he described the vintage jazz style solution, I vividly recalled the trumpet solo that set such a perfect starting tone.

That "last years of Hollywood" part of the title? Wasson seems to conclude that a combination of studio takeovers by corporations interested in boosting profits, and excesses of cocaine, were at the root of the conversion from "people" based pictures to high concept blockbusters.

One final observation: You can't (well, at least I couldn't) read about Polanski's role as director and script doctor without being confronted with that question about whether you can continue to love the art after learning that the artist has some reprehensible qualities, an attraction to girls in their young teens in Polanski's case. Clearly I didn't lose my enthusiasm for this film after I learned, years ago, of his conviction and permanent relocation in Europe. By contrast, I don't think I could ever rekindle my enthusiasm for Bill Cosby's humor. Somewhere in the middle is a film that may or may not permanently drop off my favorites list - The Usual Suspects, given what we've learned about Kevin Spacey.

If you're interested in film history, and especially if you like Chinatown, I heartily recommend this book. I may have to pull time away from my reading soon so that I can give it another viewing.

Wasson's writing is buoyant, busy, and magnetic; it pulls you in. Good writer. Great book. One of the better books I've read in the last few years. The book bogs down a bit from the middle toward the end, but Wasson's writing holds it up enough.

Except for a bog in the middle, quite readable. Also, I hate books with proper chapters. The tale of the making of the movie Chinatown is the story of the writer Robert Towne, the producer Robert Evan’s, the director Roman Polanski, and the actor Jack Nicholson. While the book is revealing and interesting, it is also sad because the end of the book is the end of Hollywood, now a place where art doesn’t matter, only money.

An easy, fun read about the making of Audrey Hepburn into a star and the behind the scenes filming of Breakfast at Tiffany's. I never read Capote's book and only saw the movie once. However, this book has made me decide to enjoy it one more time at least.

Although the gist of the book concentrates on Hepburn, there are great pieces about Capote, Blake Edwards, Henry Mancini, Givinchy and scores of other big names who were in Hepburn's orbit. Growing up we had a neighbor who blasted Moon River constantly. To this day that song always makes me smile.

Recommend for those of you who like the Hollywood bio's and anyone who loves vintage Hollywood.

This substantial and very well researched biography of Bob Fosse is also beautifully and clearly written. Fosse was a dancer from a young age as a boy in Chicago. His dancing became a source of income for his family. Vaudeville and burlesque followed. His early sexual experiences with dancers as a largely unsupervised teen affected the rest of his life. One stripper he worked with said “He is the greatest lay I have ever had in my life. There is absolutely no one more sexually competent than this man.” Apparently that skill translated to dancing and choreography.

Fosse was a complicated man. Addicted to Dexedrine and cigarettes, “sex and work” seemed to be the only things to make him feel whole. Success was as debilitating as failure, and Fosse didn’t have much failure, although he felt like one.

Sam Wasson interviewed over three hundred of Fosse’s “dancers, friends, family, lovers, collaborators and enemies.” What he uncovered was “the common theme was love: Fosse’s for them, theirs for him.” It shows in this book.

Outstanding biography of a complex, driven, self-destructive artist plagued by doubt and distrust.

Starts off excellent then drags after the midpoint.

An interesting and quick read about the making of Breakfast at Tiffany's.

The Big Goodbye satisfies my main criteria for a book about a specific historical subject: the author has interviewed a vast number of people who were in a position to know about the things he's writing about (including the producer Robert Evans, who died last year at age 89); and he's documented his sources in extensive footnotes. That means I can trust what he's telling me—despite the over-the-top, enthusiastic style he uses to write it.

It's hard to explain the breathless way this story is delivered without quoting it or parodying it. Another reviewer calls it "film noirish," but that's not quite it. It's almost closer to a romance novel, or a teen confessional. Again and again, crazy, hard-to-believe anecdotes are delivered, but when you check the footnotes, you find he didn't make it up. I think in a couple of instances the sources indicate that the story should be taken with a grain of salt, but for the most part, they're reputable. The one device that I found went too far was the author's way of quoting the words of someone long dead and adding, portentously, "He meant it." Or, "She meant it." The readers can decide for themselves how much the speaker might have meant what they said; no one, not excepting the author, is in a position to know for sure.

Although the book is about the making of the movie Chinatown, it's told in the form of a multiple third-person memoir. First you're introduced to director Polanski, a young, charismatic force of nature still making his reputation in America, horribly haunted by a heartrending and brutal childhood. Then to screenwriter Robert Towne, a similarly talented young man with his own demons, scraping by on borrowed money and hocked property as he nurtured his pet project year after year. Shorter sections take us into the worlds of Nicholson and, to a shallower extent, Dunaway, as well as the production designer and cinematographers. The author understands the craft of movie making very well. The time, place, and project are all brought so vividly to life that it becomes easy to imagine oneself a bystander or bit player, maybe a lighting technician or assistant to the assistant director, unable to affect the course of events, but with an excellent view of them. Wasson portrays his subjects—Polanski, Towne, Nicholson, Evans, and the extended cast and crew around them—fairly, not avoiding the awful things they sometimes did, but putting them in the context of their lives and times. Maybe I would have written the book more soberly, but maybe a more serious style wouldn't have done justice to the subject.

worth reading, entertaining

This is a book about a state of mind: Chinatown, not to be confused with a physical locale. It is also a book about the persons who made Chinatown, the film, and how they affected others. Additionally, the book is one big sign-o’-the-times of the 1970s.

The main players are Robert Towne, scriptwriter extraordinaire, Roman Polanski, prodigal director and mess, Robert Evans, film-studio exec-cum-playboy, and Jack Nicholson, Hollywood noveau-golden-age Goose.

The book reminds me of Peter Biskind’s runaway Easy Riders, Raging Bulls which is often described as entertaining, apocryphal, and filled with smear. I cannot say how true this book is, especially as some of its participants are dead and others have not been involved in the making of this book, and as such, I choose to handle it a bit like a fable, something that Werner Herzog refers to as ecstatic truth.

The book starts off with Sharon Tate.

He would stare at Sharon, unbelieving. It was impossible, someone so perfect, and yet, there she was. Wasn’t she? “She was just fantastic,” Polanski would say. “She was a fucking angel.” Her hair of yellow chaparral, the changing color of her eyes, the unqualified kindness of her face. Did people like this exist? In a world of chaos, was it naive to trust, as a child would, the apparent goodness of things, the feeling of safety he had known and lost before?

This book wins, over and over again, by invoking a film-noir atmosphere. Wasson paints such a romantic and straightforward picture of Hollywood at the time, its inhabitants, and the main players who made Chinatown, that I felt the allure of the book and kept coming back to it. It reads like an old-school detective novel.

Robert Towne is a screenwriter with a slew of legendary films under his belt. Before making Chinatown, he was revered and simultaneously forgettable. He needed something to make his mark and keep going.

Towne was in agony. Writing Chinatown was like being in Chinatown. A novelist could write and write—and, indeed, Towne wrote like a novelist, turning out hundreds upon hundreds of pages of notes and outlines and dialogue snippets—but a movie is two hours; in script form, approximately a minute a page. What could he afford to lose? He needed to be uncompromisingly objective, but not so hard on his ideas that he ended up losing what may have been good in them—that is, if there was ever anything good about them to begin with. Was there? The question had to be asked. Was any of this good, and if so, would anyone care? A civics lesson on water rights and the incestuous rape of a child? From one vantage point, it was dull; from another, obscene. Who would even make such a movie? Columbia wouldn’t even let him write forty fucks.

By 1972 Towne and Payne were nearly broke. “In those days,” Payne said, “you could not pay Robert to write if he didn’t want to write. He just wouldn’t do it. He wrote only for love.”

Warren Beatty would call Payne: “How’s it going?”
“Slow. Robert won’t put a word on the page until he thinks it’s perfect.”
“If he ever asks you what you think, don’t say anything, because he’ll stop.” And then, as it always had, the moment came. He handed her pages.

“What do you think?” Julie glanced, but her answer was ready-made.

“Shorter.”

She hocked her diamond earrings.

This book contains many glimmers of the work magic that somehow came over everybody involved, which, in the end, managed to become Chinatown. It wasn’t from lack of trying. It’s obvious that the main persons fought hard to have their way with the film, including hands-on approaches from the likes of Evans.

One crisis immediately gave way to another. “What is this?” Polanski asked of the dailies. He was in the screening room of the Canon Drive office, surrounded by his team, the Sylberts, Koch, Cortez.

“This reddish tint. We didn’t shoot this.” Polanski went down to the lab to see how they were printing the film. “Why is everything tinted?”

“Robert Evans requested it.”

“He did?” Polanski raged into Evans’s office. “Why did you do this? Everything looks like ketchup.”

“I wanted to try. Just to see—”

“Well, now we know and now we go back.” Later, Polanski and Sylbert would laugh about this interference. Evans’s artistic convictions “were sometimes quite naive,” Polanski reflected.

Knowing he had transgressed on the tinting, Evans retreated, and the intended naturalism of the Chinatown dailies was restored.

What a writing process, right in the midst of cocaine madness!

So goodbye to his endless supporting characters, goodbye to the love story of Byron Samples and Ida Samples; goodbye to Evelyn’s affair with a mystery man and Gittes’s looming jealousy, “which I felt would have been more interesting,” Towne said; goodbye to Gittes’s and Evelyn’s protracted and suspicious courtship, her violent outbursts, his many faraway mentions of Chinatown; goodbye to Julian Cross’s drug addiction; Julie’s favorite scene, containing Cross’s eerie aria to the sweet smell of horseshit; goodbye to the betrayal of Gittes by his partners, Duffy and Walsh, and his extended consultation with his lawyer, Bressler; goodbye to Escobar’s jagged history with the Cross family; goodbye to Gittes’s passion, Towne’s passion really, for Seabiscuit, intended to contain Gittes’s uptown ambitions; goodbye to Chinatown’s multiple points of view: “You [should] never show things that happen in [Gittes’s] absence,” Polanski said; goodbye to the slowly encroaching paranoia, the hurricane of subplots that swirled around Gittes; goodbye to everything that wasn’t water. Everything, Polanski decreed, had to move the water mystery forward; if they could cut it, they should cut it. But when it came to certain elements—namely, the love story (Towne wanted more scenes; Polanski, certain a good sex scene would suffice, fewer) and of course the ending—Towne and Polanski had two opposing definitions of “could.” They fought. Their arguments were painful. Each was smart enough to see the virtues in the other’s strategy; both were correct.

On the coffee table there was a bowl of cash to take from—to remind his many friends and lovers that he was still, despite his earnings, very much the Weaver of Pupi’s. There was also an opulent cocaine pyramid, pointing skyward in a help-yourself bowl in the foyer. For Polanski, this was a welcome change from the Lotus Apartments. At Nicholson’s, the ghosts were slower to find him. But when night came and the living room dimmed, city lights stalked the windows, and the mood moved down and away, to Sharon and to Chinatown. Polanski saw why he had come back: It was because he had never left.

There are many great things about this book. The main gripe that I have with it, is that the rhythm of the book is unwavering in its hard-boiled film-noirish sensibility; it becomes a kind of parody of the times that it wants to display.

Yet, there is more behind the surface than the above. Wasson does go into Polanski’s rape of a child, Sharon Tate’s murder, the follow-up film—The Two Jakes—but leaves very little to chance. Reading this book is akin to a whodunnit by Christopher Brookmyre: a well-written tale that twists and hints throughout, and delivers well. I recommend this to all who are interested in the second golden age of Hollywood and who want to see a true work of art come into existence.

Really interesting background of a classic.

Since I don't remember seeing Breakfast at Tiffany's and know almost nothing about Audrey Hepburn, I don't remember what caught my eye about this book - it's been on my Kindle for 10 (!) years, so thought it was time to read it or dump it.

A short, quick read of only 230 pages, I finished it in a day - it was more interesting than I expected. I didn't know that the movie is based on a Truman Capote book, was directed by Blake Edwards with music by Henry Mancini and was the debut of Moon River written for the movie. The book actually opens with a brief history of Capote and how he viewed women and came to write the book.

Though ostensibly about Audrey Hepburn and the making of the movie, it is just as much about the changing views about women and sex in film. The more puritanical viewpoint of the 50s (Doris Day, Sandra Dee) was gradually evolving to the more realistic and evolved woman of the 60s. 'Breakfast' was one of the first in portraying that change.

Well researched and written, it was a pleasure to read and learn more about the Hollywood of the 50s and early 60s. I liked the behind the scenes scoop on making movies, making movie deals, and how the whole Hollywood machine works. Recommended for film buffs and readers who like memoirs or Hollywood history.

The style - titled short sections of a few paragraphs - took a bit of getting used to, but the book seemed well-researched and was really interesting. I enjoyed the way the notes in the back were structured; rather than just listing sources, the author gave a bit of explanation for each.

This volume has everything you've ever wanted to know about famous choreographer (and actor) Bob Fosse. Still known for his distinctive style and thru the movie "All That Jazz," Fosse led a remarkable life. He was the epitome of a narcissistic, brilliant, charismatic, but ultimately troubled artist. I don't generally read biographies but I found this one fascinating (if a bit overfull of details). Amazing guy.

I won this book in a Goodreads Giveaway, and received the book (an ARC, which I didn't expect) in mid-January 2018. Improv is a topic I am interested in, so I expected to enjoy the book. I gave up ten and-a-half pages in because Wasson's writing style got on my nerves. He started out with Viola Spolin, then suddenly launched into Del Close's story. Then he abruptly returned to Viola Spolin. And that was just in the first five pages. Usually I give a book at least fifty pages, but despite the fact that I felt obligated to read the whole thing and give what would likely have been a more balanced review, I just couldn't do it.

I don't know that this is A Great Book but it met my needs at the time. I was looking for something that didn't ask a lot of me. It didn't but it kept my attention, I enjoyed it and I learned some things.

I don't know that this is A Great Book but it met my needs at the time. I was looking for something that didn't ask a lot of me. It didn't but it kept my attention, I enjoyed it and I learned some things.