Abstract
[...]it makes perfect sense that the history of Hollywood as told by the folks who created Hollywood is a Rashomon multiverse. The editorial talents and film smarts of Basinger, author of way too many film books to mention, and Wasson, author of the absorbing The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood (2020), promise a blend of scholarly erudition and page-turning readability that the result makes good on. Grouped by time and topic, the chorus of disparate voices is shaped into a kind of round table conversation in which the speakers seem to talk to each other across the years, picking up on cues and answering each other's questions, the layout akin to a Twitter thread in which everyone stays on point, whether the transition to sound ("Our first talkies were trés talky," says director Tay Garnett), the Viennese import Hedy Lamarr ("The most beautiful girl God ever sent down to earth," sighs writer Walter Reisch), or the three-color Technicolor camera ("That goddamn thing would give you a hernia every time you moved it," grouses director Norman Taurog). [...]Billy Wilder is always in good form ("My God, I think there are more books on Marilyn Monroe than on World War II, and there's a great similarity.")