Hollywood Remembered: An Oral History of Its Golden Age

by Paul Zollo

In Hollywood Remembered, a wide array of Tinseltown veterans share their stories of life in the city of dreams from the days of silent pictures to the present. The 35 voices, many of whom have come to know Hollywood inside-out, range from film producers and movie stars to restauranteurs and preservationists. Actress Evelyn Keyes recalls how, fresh from Georgia, she met Cecil B. DeMille and was soon acting in Gone With The Wind; Blacklisted writer Walter Bernstein tells how he transformed his McCarthy era-experiences into drama with The Front; Steve Allen speaks out on how Hollywood has changed since he first came there in the 1920s; and Jonathan Winters relates how he left a mental institution to come work with Stanley Kramer in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Composers, cinematographers, bartenders, bit-players, publicists, and others add to the portrait of a place where, in days gone by, the idols of a nation walked down the famous boulevards daily, and nearly everybody-in and out of the movie business-knew one another.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, History

376 pages, Hardcover

First published October 22, 2002

About the author

Paul Zollo is a singer-songwriter, author, and music journalist. Since 1987, he's dedicated himself to interviewing the world's greatest songwriters. From 1987 to 1997, he was the editor of SongTalk, the journal of the National Academy of Songwriters. He's currently the senior editor for American Songwriter. Born in Chicago, he studied English and Music at Boston University and is the author of The Beginning Songwriter's Answer Book, Songwriters on Songwriting, and Hollywood Remembered.

Reviews

[Kristy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating history of the early days of Hollywood. Zollo gives us a narrative history of the town (going all the way back to the days of the dinosaurs!) and a location by location run down of important landmarks, but the best part of this book is the longest, the oral histories. Zollo sat down with a wide variety of Hollywoodians: famous actors (Steve Allen, Jonathan Winters, Karl Malden), screenwriters, cinematographers, lingerie models (Fredrick's of Hollywood's first!), bartenders, secretaries, and munchkins. With such a wide scope the book is a little unfocused and there is a lot of repetition and some old-age exaggeration, nostalgia, and crankiness, but for the most part the voices of the interviewees really come through and the combination of kiss-and-tell gossip and evocative descriptions of the old Hollywood of Raymond Chandler couldn't be more engaging.

[David Fulmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that will delight any fan of Hollywood. Whether you are interested in movie stars, movie studios, architecture, restaurants, bookstores, theatres, or anything else that you can find there, this book will enlighten, entertain, edify, and satisfy you.

The subtitle is “An Oral History of its Golden Age” and the focus here is from the beginning of commercial film production in 1911 up to roughly the 1950s when the Supreme Court’s 1948 Paramount decision started to take apart the movie studios. That’s also when the freeway was built through Hollywood, another catastrophic landmark that brought the golden age to its end.

The book is divided into 3 parts: part 1 is a history of Hollywood. These 50 pages cover the land, the business, the studios, the Black List, and it ends with the Walk of Fame (it’s a very film industry-oriented history). Part 2 consists of 37 memoirs of Hollywood. These oral histories range over 7 decades and include almost every aspect of life in Hollywood. People ranging from actors to movie theater cashiers to Hollywood bookstore owners to Musso and Frank waiters tell all kinds of stories about the silent pictures and the talkies, the studios and the clubs along the Sunset Strip. Favourite restaurants and vanished hangouts are remembered and studio bosses are described from their dinner parties to their business decisions. Charlie Chaplin makes a lot of appearances throughout these stories and it is fascinating to hear all the different recollections from people who met him and worked with him and sold books to him at the Pickwick Bookstore. There’s a particularly funny story about an event put on by the owner of the Chinese Theatre, Sid Grauman. He held a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest that Chaplin entered, only to come in second place.

Throughout the book these many voices of Hollywood really convey what it was like to work in the industry as well as the leisure activities and the streetscapes over the years. They talk about the public transit that got wiped out by the Hollywood Freeway and beloved theatres, restaurants, and shops that helped to make Hollywood Hollywood for many years.

After the memoirs comes part 3, A Tour of Hollywood. This section describes the restaurants, studios, shops, parks, and buildings that are distinctive Hollywood landmarks. It’s a great addition since so many of the memoirs describe different places in the town and this section acts as a kind of glossary, giving you the address and history of what the memoirists mention.

Fundamentally, this book is a superb instance of local history which transcends the genre because of the importance of the locale it takes as its subject. As the author says, “Hollywood persists in existing as both an actual place and as a metaphor for the entertainment industry that extends far beyond its physical borders.” This book focuses on the actual place through the eyes of a representative group of people who lived there. It aims to reveal the concrete site behind the metaphor as it developed over the decades and it paints a portrait that is beautiful, entertaining, and fully conveys the spirit and atmosphere of the place that symbolizes the film industry around the world.

[Cary Cotterman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is worth reading for the interviews, in which Zollo stays out of the way and just lets the subjects talk. They're all interesting. On the other hand, the first and third sections of the book, consisting of a history of the Hollywood area, going back to the formation of the Earth, and a tour of Hollywood sites, are weak points. For some reason, these parts are double-columned, in footnote-size print, which makes them a bit difficult to read. But more importantly, they are poorly researched. For example, Zollo tells us, on page 341, that famed costume designer Irene Sharaff committed suicide by jumping from an eleventh-floor window of the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood. It would be interesting to know where he got this bizarre piece of information, because in reality Sharaff died at the age of eighty-three in New York, of heart failure and emphysema. The non-interview sections of the book have quite a few more such gems. If I could go back in time, I'd skip them and just read the interviews.

[Malcolm Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whilst the oral histories contained in this book are very interesting they are very repetative.How many times for example can you mention Musso &Franks.
The 35 interviews are blended by a superflouous history of no
Plywood and a list of places of moye.Trouble is that information is duplicated.For example RKO studios history is thrice repeated.
There are numerous errors.For example W.C. Fields
was at the 1948 memorial for DW Griffiths,when he died in 1946.
Finally the use of such small print have me eye strain

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

An insightful and fascinating look at Hollywood the physical place from ancient times through 2000, as well as the idea/ideal of "Hollywood". Told through meticulously researched history, oral memoirs from a broad range of folks and buildings. Quite a fascinating read!

[Bruce Sullivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

More then I knew and I knew alot