No Respect

When the first movie studio opened on Sunset Boulevard in 1911, Hollywood was a prudish community of around 4,000 inhabitants. Eight miles of unpaved country road separated it from the larger (around 120,000) although no less conservative community of Los Angeles; there, in 1907, on a vacant lot at Olive and 7th streets, a Chicago company had made the first dramatic movie shot in California. “Picture people” were unwelcome in both communities, as they were in the entire area known as the “Seacoast of Iowa” (so called because--from Hollywood and Los Angeles to the shoreline, from Venice to Long Beach--it was mainly populated by Midwestern immigrants). But as commercial success made movies respectable, the area soon changed beyond recognition.

The change was not just economic, with seven major studios creating thousands of new jobs and thousands of new immigrants arriving in search of employment and/or excitement. A remote Victorian pocket of the world woke up to find itself relocated to the 20th century. As the Hollywood boom coincided with a Los Angeles boom in oil and real estate, another mutation occurred, no less spectacular than the movie industry’s: The area began to shift from Iowa Seacoast to extraordinary urban conglomerate.

Immigrants from all over the world, especially Europe, settled across the entire area, with Hollywood attracting a large concentration of artists: Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schonberg, Thomas Mann, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Arthur Rubinstein, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Richard Neutra, Oscar Schindler and many others. The movie moguls and many movie stars also came from Europe, and, with no cultural tradition of its own, Los Angeles looked to Hollywood, which looked in turn to Europe. Not surprisingly, the first impact of the movies was visual. The old architecture of Victorian Gothic and Midwest bungalows gave way to restyled Spanish Colonial, French Provincial and Georgian; set designs by MGM’s Cedric Gibbons popularized Art Deco and Moderne for both public buildings and private houses.

Hollywood, in fact, put Los Angeles on the cultural map, and the movie boom triggered the vast cosmopolitan city, industrial complex and tourist center of today. Architects Neutra and Schindler, artists David Hockney and Ed Ruscha would never have settled here; the Los Angeles Philharmonic would never have existed; the movie costumes designed by Adrian and Travis Banton would never have raised Los Angeles to a fashion center; and Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain would never have created a new genre of fiction that later became the source of film noir.

And yet the put-downs seldom let up. They abound in “The Grove Book of Hollywood,” an anthology of writings about the movie capital by screenwriters, directors, producers, actors and all kinds of outsiders. Christopher Sylvester, its British editor, is clearly an outsider; and although it was a good idea, to trace Hollywood’s development by decades, from the 1910s to the 1990s, the result lacks any coherent historical perspective. The book tilts relentlessly toward Sylvester’s preferred subjects, the “charms and lunacies,” “social whirls” and “abject philistinism” of the place he describes as an “an extraordinary village.”

In his introduction, Sylvester also remarks that although screenwriters “had to contend with the obtuseness of studio executives on a daily basis,” they provided “some splendid anecdotes.” His contributors of choice have a good supply of anecdotes (the more derisive, the more splendid); and Hollywood as a creative workplace is demoted to fewer than 100 of the anthology’s almost 700 pages.

The 1910s come off best, with firsthand accounts of the great silent era: actress Constance Collier and cameraman Karl Brown on working with D.W. Griffith, Frank Capra on his experiences as a gag man for Mack Sennett and Agnes de Mille on her uncle Cecil. But this section also includes a sneering dismissal of Erich von Stroheim by Harry Reichenbach, the publicist of “Foolish Wives”; and the 1920s contain nothing about the art of Charlie Chaplin, Rex Ingram, Ernst Lubitsch, King Vidor or Josef von Sternberg. In the sound era, the same silent treatment is accorded George Cukor, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, Orson Welles and Billy Wilder, not to mention musicals from Busby Berkeley to Vincente Minnelli, film noir, black cinema and blacks in white cinema. “The Grove Book of Hollywood” also ignores the careers of major screen icons like Humphrey Bogart, Lon Chaney, Greta Garbo, Lillian Gish, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck and James Stewart.

The prevailing tone of supercilious or patronizing distance on display here is really a hangover from British visitors since the 1920s, and it hardly varies in the more than 70 pages that their compatriot editor devotes to later and earlier Brits. For instance, in 1989, actor Richard E. Grant notes in his diary: “The same conversational weight is given to talk about one’s nutritionist, masseur, publicist, agent, favorite eaterie and Gorby’s current invasion of Lithuania--’D’you think there’s a movie in there?’ ” In 1954, Kenneth Tynan notes in his diary: “Tone of party dismayingly intellectual. No guest lolls naked on leopard-skin divan. Baths in champagne patently things of past.” In 1947, Evelyn Waugh’s diary is a series of complaints, notably that he has to train “our chauffeur not to ask us questions. There is here the exact opposite of the English custom by which the upper classes are expected to ask questions of the lower.” The loftiest pages come from Baroness Ravensdale, vice president of the National Assn. of Girls’ Clubs, who describes her 1925 visit to a “fantastic, faked world, where everyone in or off the ‘set’ seemed to have to play a part.” But when her “dear friend Elinor Glyn” introduces her to some of its famous inhabitants, she finds that “many of these people are simple and unostentatious, in spite of their vast fortunes.”

A few isolated peaks tower above the long narrow valleys of parties, publicity stunts, script conferences with the obligatory dumb producer and 20th Century Fox’s disastrous mismanagement of “Cleopatra.” Preston Sturges is acerbic and illuminating on his graduation from screenwriter to director; Irene Mayer Selznick describes the unrelenting pressures that “Gone With the Wind” exerted on everybody, not least herself as the wife of its producer, David O.; David Niven is shrewd on the absurd yet sinister Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons; screenwriter-actress Salka Viertel and director Robert Parrish recall how two wily artists, Bertolt Brecht and John Ford, challenged the communist witch-hunters; and Steven Bach, senior vice president of United Artists at the time, gives a cool, precise account of the company’s failure to prevent a director’s “monumental” self-confidence and self-indulgence from quadrupling the $8-million budget of “Heaven’s Gate.”

Another isolated peak is “Los Angeles,” an article written in 1947 by Isherwood for the British magazine Horizon and foolishly retitled “Wake Up, Wake Up” by Sylvester. “The short history of California is a fever chart of migrations,” Isherwood wrote, “the land rush, the gold rush, the oil rush, the movie rush.” In fact the movie rush is a fever-chart in itself and registers the codependency of Hollywood and Los Angeles that began after the enormous popular success of “Birth of a Nation” in 1915. A work of questionable artistic value but unquestionable importance, Griffith’s movie speeded the growth of an industry, its technical innovations speeded the growth of an art, and it created African American stereotypes that persisted for more than 40 years.

But when “Birth of a Nation” proved that movies had a future as big business, it stimulated many other kinds of business; and as if to memorialize the codependent embrace of Hollywood and Los Angeles, the Great Western Bank (later on the submerging end of a corporate merger) commissioned a statue for the courtyard entrance of its downtown branch. The imposing figure was not one of the bank’s founders. It was John Wayne on horseback. The local economy was quick to court movie stars to publicize hotels, nightclubs and department stores, and stars were soon endorsing national products like cigarettes and cosmetics. In 1934, when novelist Upton Sinclair ran for governor of California on a radical anti-poverty campaign, right-wing movie and advertising executives in Los Angeles joined codependent hands and defeated Sinclair by financing a “documentary” that raised the specter of communism and was shown in theaters across the state.

The Sinclair episode marked the beginning of Hollywood’s involvement with national politics as well as a political divide within the community. More than 50 years ago, the House Un-American Activities Committee pitted right-wingers against star liberals; this year, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins endorsed Ralph Nader for president, and Charlton Heston continues to stump for the NRA. Hollywood’s corporate greed matched that of the rest of Los Angeles; just as real estate developers destroyed many of the area’s finest architectural landmarks, movie studios junked scores of important movies after their immediate commercial value was exhausted.

But though the corporate majors produce few movies of interest now, cable TV celebrates Hollywood’s golden past. The video boom sent studio search parties to retrieve potentially valuable celluloid from their vaults. The ironic result has been that Turner Classic Movies and American Movie Classics remind us (as “The Grove Book” does not) how many Hollywood productions succeeded as both entertainment and art long before the term “crossover” became current.

Apart from a few one-of-a-kind movies (Chaplin, Max Sennett, Vidor’s “The Crowd” and Welles’ “Citizen Kane”), the beat of Hollywood reinvented popular genres from theater and fiction, the horror story (“Bride of Frankenstein”), the crime story (“Vertigo”), the western (“My Darling Clementine”), the romantic epic (“Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”) and the romantic comedy (“Trouble in Paradise”). And as Cukor pointed out almost 30 years ago, the moguls who approved them, unlike today’s executives in thrall to market research, didn’t need popularity polls, and made their own decisions.

In “The Grove Book of Hollywood,” Ben Hecht dismisses Hollywood’s past as “half mirage and half bad writing.” But that past continues to stimulate some remarkably good writing (on directors, actors, the studio system) and to attract tourists from all over the world. They stand in the footprints of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in the courtyard of Mann’s Chinese and photograph one another beside Hepburn or Grant’s sidewalk stars. At the same time, enough signatures have been gathered to validate a petition for Hollywood to secede from Los Angeles; after 80 years of codependency, divorce proceedings are about to begin.

But L.A. itself will have little to lose. It will keep its business center, Performing Arts Center, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Central Library, UCLA, USC, LACMA and MOCA. And what does Hollywood stand to gain? Its civic authorities apparently believe that the past is its strongest asset. Their latest plan for a new tourist attraction is a replica of the Babylonian court from D.W. Griffith’s “Intolerance,” diagonally across the street from the hotel where the drunken neglected pioneer died. It will be an ironic reversal of history if, should Hollywood become single again, it no longer sets the pace.