Beneath Mulholland: Thoughts on Hollywood and Its Ghosts

by David Thomson

"[Thomson is] one of the finest film
    critics in the English language."
--philip lopate, the new york times book review

If most film critics write about movies, David Thomson creates their literary counterpart with essays that are as dazzling, haunting, and moving as the pictures they discuss. In this bravura new collection, the Esquire columnist trains his eye on Hollywood's ghosts, exploring their tendency to rise from the grave or descend from the screen to intimately haunt our lives.

Thomson conjures up Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo, Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, and Cary Grant in any of the pictures where he makes every scene look like a lucky accident. With equal aplomb, he imagines a James Dean who survived the car crash and a post-Saturday Night Fever Tony Manero. We learn the "20 Things People Like to Forget About Hollywood" (Number 3: "You Are Their Playthings, Not the Other Way Around"). And on every page of Beneath Mulholland, we are educated, entertained, and enlarged by a book as savvy and incisive as any Hollywood reportage and as lyrical as the best fiction.

"Not just...one of our sharpest
writers-on-film, but...one of our
wisest and best writers, period."  
--film comment

Genres: Film, Essays, Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

David Thomson, renowned as one of the great living authorities on the movies, is the author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, now in its fifth edition. His books include a biography of Nicole Kidman and The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood. Thomson is also the author of the acclaimed "Have You Seen . . . ?": A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films. Born in London in 1941, he now lives in San Francisco.

Reviews

[Manuel Chavarria]

I don't always agree with David Thomson. In fact, I don't often agree with David Thomson. But he's a magnificent writer -- one of the very best -- and I will read and re-read anything and everything he's written.

[Dan Sendker]

Thomson's writing usually resonates with me a lot more than these essays did. Many of them were great, but the more fictionalized ones were a little uneven. For the first time, I noticed how problematic his writing on women can be.

[Sean Wicks]

BENEATH MULHOLLAND carries out a similar theme from the vast majority of David Thomson's film writing - the blur between life and what happens on the screen. In this case he presents Los Angeles as a town where the artifice has long but squashed any indication of "normal" reality (there are also a couple of articles that take place in San Francisco and New York, but the majority of the focus is on Tinseltown). They reinforce his ideas of the movie-going audience as a collection of lonely, isolated-with-their-thoughts beings watching things they should normally be appalled to be viewing such as death scenes, extreme violence and "intimate" sexual activity.

It's a collection of his essays from various publications over the years that range from observations, critical theory and fiction blended with reality. For instance, there is an essay where as a writer sent to cover a major Hollywood star for the publication Movieline, David shows up on the wrong day only to be mistaken as the new bodyguard (and he runs with it) only to be subjected to the bizarre lifestyle of a celebrity who watches movies with a bowl of cocaine nearby and keeps a recently delivered Anaconda as a pet and lets her child play with it as if it were a dog. There are moments where this section inspires memories of Bogart's strange meeting with his client in the opening of THE BIG SLEEP which somehow stuck in my mind. After having read many of the essays and believed them to be reality only to discover they were more fiction than anything else (some examples in a moment) a final paragraph hints that this could in fact be a real situation with the names change to protect those involved. Is it real or fiction? Tough to say...but it left me thinking. Another example is a REAR WINDOW-like voyeuristic relationship Thomson carries out with a beautiful woman from the apartment across the road and the ending - which I won't spoil - is a pleasant surprise that I didn't see coming. Again Thomson had me so engrossed I wasn't sure where the article was heading or what to believe.

Thomson also carries on the ideas from his book SUSPECTS where he concocted real-life biographies for movie characters with a series of them here, as well as a what-if scenario that has James Dean surviving from his fatal car crash and becoming an even bigger celebrity with a long career that eventually forces Paul Newman out of the business (and to become the mayor of Cleveland) as Dean lands all the roles that made Newman a star. This is fiction, right? James Dean died in that crash...but again the lines are blurred and the fiction starts to feel like reality. Imagine Doc Brown from BACK TO THE FUTURE II talking about that "skewed tangent" of an alternate 1985 and you'll get the idea here.

Other observations include an essay on the art of "rear projection" from older films - especially driving scenes - where someone filmed crossing the road could in theory have appeared in numerous films in a fleeting moment and had absolutely no idea of it. Or say in a gangster movie the fleeing James Cagney could unknowingly pass a police car that should be chasing him because it's part of the stock car roll. A section designed as a screenplay outlines how a major female star campaigns and negotiates with the writer, agents and studio executives for a role that could change the course of her career that she hasn't even bothered to read but she - and everyone else - is completely relying on coverage from faceless studio readers and a personal assistant. This particular segment may ring more true than people would like to believe (and it often shows in which movies ultimately end up being made).

Thomson's passion for the movies and for the mythical legends and ghosts that make up the business of Hollywood comes through clearly in these essays as does his theory that it is an art form that has overtaken reality to a point where it is impossible for moviegoers to accept life as it really is.

[Andrew Thompson]

Literate cinephile japes with David Thomson. The chapter Suspects about what they did next is great fun (Vincent Vega, Elliot from ET, Connie Corleone etc). Thomson is always happy to venture an opinion, and though you may not agree with it, it's worth hearing what he has to say.

[Valentine]

This collection is full of interesting tidbits. It's only short coming is that it reads far too much like academic research for most average readers. Me thinks that Mr. Thomson is a bit "above the crowd" at least in his writing and probably in his own mind.

[Lisa]

This is a beautiful, affecting collection of essays about Hollywood. I especially liked "James Dean at Fifty" and "Ask the Anaconda".