90 | Sight&Sound | November 2019
BOOKS
LETTERS FROM
HOLLYWOOD
Inside the Private World of Classic
American Moviemaking
Compiled and edited by Rocky Lang and
Barbara Hall, Abrams, 352pp,
ISBN 9781419738098
Reviewed by Pamela Hutchinson
Sometimes the best stories are
those that happen off screen.
Archives, interviews and
letters provide the film
historian with not only hard
evidence of how movies get
made but also a slew of
appetising anecdotes: the
tantrums and tribulations of
clashing egos and conflicting demands. Anyone
who relishes the discovery of who said what to
whom and why on which soundstage will devour
this handsome book, with its reams of previously
unpublished Hollywood correspondence.
Letters from Hollywood, compiled and edited
by Rocky Lang and Barbara Hall, comprises
facsimiles and transcripts of letters between
Tinseltown correspondents from 1921 to 1976. It
begins with Houdini angling for an appointment
with Paramount Pictures co-founder Adolph
Zukor, and concludes with Jane Fonda petitioning
director Fred Zinnemann to allow her to meet an
apparently disinclined Lillian Hellman before
playing her in the screenwriter’s autobiographical
Holocaust drama Julia (1977). In between
these two points, the studio system rises and
falls, careers are launched and sunk, and the
film community collectively struggles with
bedevilments from the Breen Office’s censors to
the House Un-American Activities Committee
and the vogue for 3D. Each letter is presented
with its evocative handwriting and marginalia
intact and accompanied by a contextual note.
It’s a beautifully produced and absorbing book.
The first revelation is that, if you ever doubted
it, the movie machine doesn’t run without
grease. There’s an abundance of mash notes and
herograms here – whether it’s the director of
Humoresque (1946), Jean Negulesco, attempting
to soothe his star Oscar Levant’s hurt feelings
after his grizzles during the film’s production;
Joseph Stefano, the screenwriter of Psycho
(1960), thanking Janet Leigh for her “high and
shining” performance as Marion Crane; or Stuart
Heisler congratulating his friend Boris Leven
on the production design for West Side Story
(1961): “If your wife isn’t the proudest woman
in Hollywood, she should be run out of town!”
There’s more admiration and affection here
than sniping, which does nevertheless trickle
down through the cracks in Hollywood’s
generation gap, as seen, for example when Joan
Crawford is snotty about Marilyn Monroe and
Anita Ekberg’s clinging frocks in an aside. But
it’s not all good clean fun – there’s a considerable
amount of anguish too, not least during the time
of McCarthyism, which Charlie Chaplin calls
young actress found dead in his hotel suite after
a party in 1921: “Perhaps I needed a bump to
wake me up but I think I got considerable more
than was coming to me.” Sol Wurtzel, head of
production at Fox, sends starlet Madge Bellamy
a grim little note to say that “either something
is wrong with the photography or you have
been adding a little weight”. A telegram from
a vacationing Greta Garbo as late as 1938 reads
“newspapermen making my life unbearable”.
The recipient was Marion Davies, and the
implicit request is for her to intervene with
“this deplorable police system”. Early Hollywood
appears a tough neighbourhood. The silent star
Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle sends a pained message
to studio boss Joseph M. Schenck protesting his
innocence in the demise of Virginia Rappe, the
‘Turn backward, O time in thy flight’: the actor Gilbert Roland’s letter to his former lover Clara Bow
Books
Anyone who relishes the discovery
of who said what to whom and
why on which soundstage will
devour this handsome book LETTER FROM GILBERT ROLAND: FROM THE CLARA BOW PAPERS, MARGARET HERRICK LIBRARY, AMPAS. COURTESY OF GYL ROLAND
A RT
PRODUCTION
CLIENT
SUBS
REPRO OP
VERSION
Books, 1
