Hollywood

“ If you say that Hollywood is not America, I answer that you have only to wait. Hollywood is young America.
Of course our hundreds of churches are not entirely inactive. We have revivalists, who furiously denounce the sins of Hollywood, using the most up-to-date slang; and groups of men and women, instead of going to the movies, gather in Bible classes and learn the history of the Hittites and the succession of the kings of the Jebusites. You can hear sermons over the radio—that is, if you have a high-priced set, and can tune out the jazz orchestras. ”

“ In its rosier days, Hollywood Boulevard saw glamour by the carload on Oscar nights. Movie fans drove in, goggle-eyed, from every state in the Union to see the stars; a hundred searchlights would crisscross the sky. Bleachers set up on the sidewalk overflowed. Flashbulbs flared by the thousands as the queens slid out of their limousines, owned or rented, in minks and sables, which the studio would lend to dress up the show if your wardrobe didn’t run to such luxury. They’d glide across the sidewalk like some special, splendid race of the beautiful and the blessed ”

“ Learned about the beauty business from Elizabeth Arden in her Fifth Avenue salon. Made64 three trips abroad, one to England on business. Put on fashion shows. Have a radio program.
And today I begin laboring in a new field and am hoping it will bring me as much happiness as that major event which took place twenty-three years ago. I can only write about the Hollywood I know. About my neighbors and fellow workers. Amazing stories have been written—many true. Hollywood is mad, gay, heartbreakingly silly, but you can’t satirize a satire. And that’s Hollywood.... ”

“ There was no Hollywood in that halcyon day, no picture Hollywood. That “particularly irrational” corner of the universe had as yet neither name nor fame. The Biograph studio was in Los Angeles, on Pico Street, a building thought to be rather large, being one hundred or one-hundred-and-fifty feet long—a narrow shack, used chiefly as a carpentry shop, and for dressing-rooms—one each, for men and women. ”

“ Don’t pay any attention to stories of the glamour and excitement of Hollywood. It’s just a dull place, a grand spot for winter golf, but a wash-out for any mature person who depends in the least upon mental stimulation; there isn’t any. The picture business is the second, or the third, or the first or some such silly number among the world’s industries, which is probably what’s the matter 216with Hollywood and with the motion pictures. ”

“ Here in Hollywood we see these magic castles arise on the movie lots; we see the costumes reproduced with minute exactitude, and then surmounting them we see the heads of screen dolls, male and female, lounge lizards and jazz dancers and queens from department stores and manicure parlors. ”

“ We actors are mere details of an artistic conception. We have now been in Hollywood for five months, yet few people who casually notice us at the hotel or on the streets have any idea that we act for the 'movies.' Sometimes we appear publicly in the streets, in characteristic costume, and proceed to enact our play where all may observe us; but there are so many picture companies in this neighborhood that we are no longer looked upon as a novelty and the people passing by pay little attention to us. ”

“ To be sure, an observer who piqued himself upon his cleverness once described her as a woman whose face was saved from acknowledged tragedy only by means as strenuous as those which save some women's from the admission of age. But for the most part the cleverness of Hollywood was not psychologic. ”

“ There isn’t any game in the world that’s tougher. I’ve seen it around the country: stage-struck kids working in crummy night clubs or picking up a few dollars from movie houses that run Saturday vaudeville. I’ve seen it at Hollywood: movie-crazy kids storming the Central Casting Bureau because they’ve won a two-bit beauty contest or have a straight nose. But at least, if you work at Hollywood, you get paid. There’s no such thing at Hollywood as a sustaining movie. Hollywood doesn’t fatten itself on gratis talent. Radio’s just a little tougher than any other part of show business. ”

“ You couldn’t pick up a magazine without coming across publicity shots of Betty Grable out marketing, Bette Davis washing dishes, or Alice Faye changing diapers. Nobody had ever seen a picture of Dietrich hanging out wet wash or Jack Barrymore in a life-with-father layout. We were busy bringing stars down out of the sky, lousing up the act, cutting our own throats.
Realism strangled the dream stuff, and it’s slowly slaughtering Hollywood. I see very little hope unless glamour is given its rightful place again. ”

“ I discover that everything is Los Angeles in my compartment, with the exception of my cousin and Sonny. Here I am in the midst of Hollywood. I have travelled six thousand miles to get away from Hollywood. Motion pictures are universal. You can't run away from them. But I am not bothering much, because I am cannily figuring on shaking the whole lot of them after the usual dinner and getting off by myself.
And I am getting new thrills every minute. There are people waiting all along the line, at small stations, waiting for the train to pass. ”

“ Hollywood set the social style for thirty years of our history, until TV came along. Clara Bow wore a cupid’s-bow lipstick job; fifty million women copied her. Clark Gable shucked off his undershirt; so did fifty million men. The studios stuck to a simple rule and coined fortunes with it: “Show the stars like kings and queens in a glamorous setting, and the crowds will flock to see them.” Today it’s a calculated risk to put a man on the screen in evening dress in case the popcorn-munching customers decide that he’s a square. ”

“ I'll never forget the first planning session when we realists were underdogs, yet swung the basic direction. By then, the Hollywood Mind had appeared. The Hollywood Mind is definitely a real thing, a vicious thing, a blank thing, that paternalistically insists It knows what the public wants. ”

“ Among the films Hollywood sends abroad are the grim gangster melodramas and teenage delinquency films and the gaudy sentimental dream-stories with happy, wealthy endings. Our paintings and our literature give a truer picture of real Americans and for the direct, most meaningful impressions on the largest number of people, there are only our soldiers and our tourists. ”

“ Certainly her residence in Hollywood did much to dispel the horror which the mere mention of California evoked in the minds of many screen performers of that day. Into that former community with its few shops and its unpretentious homes Fanny moved with a suggestion of Eastern pomp. Having been married to a wealthy man and being therefore independent of her salary, she took the largest house in Hollywood and filled it with a fine blend of gold plate, servants, and bric-à-brac. ”

“ Have you ever heard of the Finer and Better Motion Picture Company of Hollywood, Cal.?"
"No, sir."
"That's the wonderful thing," said Mr. Waddington in a sort of ecstasy. "Nobody's ever heard of it. It isn't one of those worn-out propositions like the Famous Players that everybody's sick and tired of. It's new. ”

“ Why do you have to work so late so often?”
It can get irksome. I am certain one reason for the flight of movie making from Hollywood to Europe has been the pressing desire for producers, writers, directors, and top-money stars to escape from nagging wives. The wives, if they’re lucky, may be given a week or so in Paris or Rome or London in the course of production. Then back they go to the house and the children while the husbands live it up for months on end. It’s a pattern that has set Hollywood on its ear. And it’s crowded our divorce courts. ”

“ Have our kids seen the day where Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill had a beer over their differences, or have they learned that to lead, you must tweet, and sometimes all in caps, because now this is Hollywood, fame is the ultimate goal? ”

“ The early runners of the television industry326 came on their knees to Hollywood and begged the movie men to help them. “You’ve got the factories to make the product, we’ll get the outlets to show it,” they said. “Let’s co-operate, and we’ll all grow rich.”
Oh, but the studio heads were too smart for that! They could have held television in the palms of their hands. Instead they jeered: “Who’s going to stay home and watch a little box?” They sneered: “What have you got—women wrestlers and bike races? It’s a fad like Yo-yo. It can’t last. Movies are better than ever.” ”

“ Directors from the theaters, like the De Milles, and others of the men who learned values in the library and the university, know of course the folly of such childish story building, but in the great volume of production their share is small. In spite of this the big man in Hollywood is the director—they are strong men, tireless, and creative. ”

“ Hollywood had been getting all the Publicity and selling all the Real Estate through their Scandal, and here was Beverly Hills who could put it on just as Wild as they could, and we couldn’t seem [Pg 195] to get anywhere. ”

“ Hence the fireworks.
18Anytime you see an “it” on the streets of Hollywood wearing English riding breeches wider than an embarrassed pancake, leather puttees wound round legs thinner than a producer’s heart; a waxed and pointed mustache sillier looking than shirred humming-bird’s eggs—lay a hundred to one bet that you are looking at a moving picture director pulling down a measly thousand a week. The question of the Sphinx: Must movie men of the studios look like Asses? ”

“ Also because all the picture people have dug in around the plants. Nearly every good actor has his permanent home here, likewise most of the bad ones; and those who do get a job in the East hurry back as soon as they finish up, so as not to be among the missing if they're wanted for another job. You can cast almost any picture perfectly in a few days in Hollywood, whereas any place else, except maybe New York, it would take weeks to locate your people and bring them together, and there'd be transportation to pay for into the bargain. ”

“ Source of the silver screen of existence, which Hollywood ingeniously reflects with a silver screen of its own on which appear the animated shadows of thespians, whose fine art makes fiction seem truth, so differently from many of us poor preachers who succeed only in making truth seem fiction ”

“ This may seem a little rough, when we apply it to the great movie industry, but it is the truth. That is, it is the truth about the movie beginnings, the first years.
For instance, there were a couple of men who did reporting, off and on, for a Los Angeles newspaper. They drifted into motion-picture work when the first studios came into Hollywood—because they had no steady jobs to keep them from trying out this new gamble. But the star reporters and the influential “desk” men on the paper didn’t have any time to fool away on the new wildcat schemes. ”

“ But in the long run, as with other American industries, the PRC may be less interested in cooperating with Hollywood than in co-opting Hollywood—and eventually replacing it with its own homegrown productions. ”

“ Even though our cultural leaders in Hollywood, network TV and the national newspapers routinely jeer at them, I think that most of us in this room know that some things are good and other things are wrong. ”

“ Miss Williams had often wanted to ask that question just to satisfy her own curiosity, but the opportunity had never opened before.
“Dad’s working under pressure on the coast, long hours and a terrific strain, and he says some of the things that are said about Hollywood are true. Most of the people are fine and hard working, but a small, wild crowd gives the rest a bad name and he doesn’t want to take any chance on my getting mixed up with that bunch.” ”

“ It takes avaricious agents with calculating machines for108 hearts to encourage stars like Brando to behave as they do. Now that no studio any longer has its own roster of stars tied by contracts, the agents and actors run Hollywood, as they always threatened to. The studio has to go cap in hand to the agent to sign up the big star for a single picture. No more than a half dozen actors and actresses alive today can attract an audience big enough to give a picture a hope of success at the box office. ”

“ There is absolutely no swank about her. An illustration of the quality which has so endeared her to many other members of her profession is found in a benefit performance given last year at Hollywood. Space was limited and when the dressing-rooms were assigned no such poignant cry of outraged property rights has been uttered since the little bear whimpered, “Who’s been sitting in my chair?”
“What!” cried one of the motion-picture duchesses only just recently elevated to the peerage. “Do you mean to say that I have to dress in a room with three other people?” ”

“ When you reflect that to-day he receives approximately five thousand dollars a week, together with a large percentage of the returns on every production, it helps you to realise that the jinnee of the screen has functioned almost as well as did his ancestor of the “Arabian Nights.”
And in no place is the magic more apparent than in California. When De Mille went out to Los Angeles to look around for a site, Hollywood promised nothing of its present pomp. The vast studios, the beautiful villas, the famous pleasure-places—all21 have arisen in the past decade. ”

“ On Sunday they took a motor trip through the mountain boulevards and on their way home passed the extensive enclosure of the Continental Film Company. A thriving village has been built up at this place, known as Film City, for many of those employed by the firm prefer to live close to their work. Another large "plant" of the same concern is located in the heart of Hollywood.
As they passed through Film City Uncle John remarked:
"We are invited to visit this place and witness the making of a motion picture. ”