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The Grove Book of Hollywood
The Orlando Sentinel described The Grove Book of Hollywood as "a marvelous overview of the mythical world of Screenland through the eyes of those who observed it firsthand." In pieces by bemused outsiders like P. G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh and consummate insiders like Jack Warner, Ben Hecht, and Budd Schulberg, it tells the story of Hollywood's birth as a dusty village outside L.A., through the blacklist, to its present-day role as a high-stakes cultural capital of power players, touchy egos, schlock, and genius. Full of priceless bits -- Jean Harlow's satire of young hopefuls, John Huston's fistfight with Errol Flynn, Frank Capra on working for Mack Sennett, and William Goldman on the ubiquitous Hollywood meeting -- The Grove Book of Hollywood is a must for anyone who loves movies. "A superb anthology.... A feast for those who love Hollywood and those who hate it." -- J. G. Ballard, The Observer (London) "Enchanting ... I marveled at [its] resourcefulness.... Have you gone out to buy this book yet?" -- David Thomson, Bookforum "....strange tribal rites, and tarnished idols of the celluloid jungles, the book is a feast." -- L. S. Klepp, Entertainment Weekly
- GenresFilmNonfictionHistory
720 pages, Paperback
First published November 30, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 29, 2015
It is an anthology. It is a tome. It is a very good history of the Hollywood we grew up watching. All entries are taken from the writings of Producers, Screenwriters, Directors and a few actors. This is bot an exercise in sensationalism or gossip, but rather, it is a serious look at how movies are made, what drove the moguls of the 40's and hat drives the conglomerates who finance and produce the movies of today.
This book is for any avid movie fan who cares to get behind the glitz and glamor and look at what lies beneath. The book is separated by decades. The 1940s and 50s are particularly of interesting in that there is fairly in-depth commentary about the shameful period when Congress was seeing a Communist behind ever lamp post. People were accused, constitutional guarantees were suspended, people were jailed and careers and lives were ruined. It was a terrible time not only for the movie industry, but for the entire country. This alone makes the read more than worthwhile.
This book is for any avid movie fan who cares to get behind the glitz and glamor and look at what lies beneath. The book is separated by decades. The 1940s and 50s are particularly of interesting in that there is fairly in-depth commentary about the shameful period when Congress was seeing a Communist behind ever lamp post. People were accused, constitutional guarantees were suspended, people were jailed and careers and lives were ruined. It was a terrible time not only for the movie industry, but for the entire country. This alone makes the read more than worthwhile.
February 5, 2008
Stellar anthology of primary sources on the history of Hollywood.
May 30, 2025
The Grove Book of Hollywood is a selection of articles and excerpts sifted from the many essays, letters, autobiographies, and memoirs of Tinseltown's insiders--the producers, studio execs, writers, scriptwriters, directors, actors, agents, as well as people in their periphery--family, friends, staff. It feels like I just read a compilation of the juiciest, most riveting entries from a hundred of Hollywood's most iconic players' memoirs and autobiographies.
Curated in chronological order, the book maps the industry's pre-WWI bumpkin beginnings all the way to the by now redundant excesses of the nineties. The choicest reads are the entries chronicling the decades in between, from the 1930s to the 1970s and, as is usual in stories involving the rich and famous, the best narratives are the first person accounts, with their anecdotal asides and candid digressions; David Niven's long entry on gossip queens Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper exemplify this. The worst entries were the few vanity project sketches, typified by John H Richardson's shadowing of the overly pretentious Joel Silver.
Among the first person accounts I particularly enjoyed were excerpts by the acerbic, sardonic George Sanders, especially his comic retelling of l'affair Zsa Zsa Gabor/Porfirio Rubirosa (Gabor being his yet-to-be ex-wife); two of Sanders's four wives were the sisters Gabor--Zsa Zsa (#2) & Magda (#4). Equally amusing was Eleanor Coppola's sober reportage, presented in a mania-inducing series of phone calls, of her husband Francis's casting process of that mess of an opus, Apocalypse Now.
Paul Henreid's politics and written prose, specifically in his account of the Hollywood blacklist, reveal an educated, decent gentleman, as personified in most of his screen roles. As Jill Schary Zimmer, in her tangential capacity as impressionable daughter of MGM studio head Dore Schary recalls it, Henreid at a tennis match put "everyone at a disadvantage with his courtly manners. It was impossible to shout at such a gentleman, 'You SOB, that was my best serve!'" More exquisite observations from Zimmer: "It's rather ironic that the President, in swimming trunks, gets his picture taken at Malibu looking rather like a part Peter Lawford might have played years ago, but Mr Lawford, as the President's brother-in-law, saunters around dressed like a best man." Said setting for this curious visual would be Lawford's Malibu beach house which, as Irene Mayer Selznick shares here, he and wife Pat Kennedy bought from her and her sister Edith upon Mr and Mrs Louis B's passing.
The handsome actor-turned-movie-mogul Robert Evans has a few interesting excerpts from his memoirs, The Kid Stays in the Picture, such as the intriguing casting choices, bordering on horse trading, for The Godfather I and II. Most infuriating was his feud with a spiteful, unreasonable Francis Ford Coppola, who proceeded to cut off his nose to spite his face by deliberately torpedoing Evans's vanity project, dooming The Cotton Club to a lesson in impulsive, whimsical filmmaking. (If you ask me, the blame starts with Richard Gere--for begging Evans to let Coppola direct.) Speaking of Hollywood lessons, no compendium on the movies would be complete without featuring the incredible, exponential tolerance levels of United Artists in humoring Michael Cimino and his equally exponential budget with Heaven's Gate. And of course, the turbulent extravaganza that was Fox's Cleopatra which, despite the budgetary nightmares thrown his way, has producer Walter Wanger waxing nostalgic, revealing a palpable affection for Elizabeth Taylor, a sentiment echoed by Jill Zimmer years before Taylor came to define the public's epitome of a movie star.
Coppola's bizarre vendetta issues were soon surpassed by post-Sue Mengers super agent Michael Ovitz of CAA (Creative Artists Agency) who, upon learning a prized client was leaving him for a rival talent agency, promptly went into meltdown mode and dispatched unbelievably malicious, swim-with-the-fishes threats to upper echelon screenwriter and former Rolling Stone reporter, Joe Eszterhaz. Eszterhaz's written response, cc'd to the right people, is movie material gold. This unpalatable episode, however par for the course in Hollywood, was scathingly documented, with numerous footnotes, by one "Celia Brady" of SPY magazine.
By far the most fascinating anecdote I've read here was the screenwriter Frances Marion's tale of two titans: Louis B Mayer and Walt Disney. A year before a mouse scurried across the screen, making the world his Edam cheese, Disney was invited to show his unique animated cartoons at MGM. He arrived with two reels, one with Mickey Mouse and the second reel featuring the dance of the spring flowers, a Fantasia-like canvas which Marion describes as "pure magic to me. A garden in spring...a west wind blowing...the leaves on the trees stirring...butterflies on the wing...then the flowers began dancing together like an exquisite ballet." Film editors Margaret Booth and Blanche Sewell, and directors Victor Fleming and George Hill felt the same way, prompting Fleming to drag LB Mayer to the projection room. "Ridiculous. Ridiculous!" he countered, when shown the dance of the spring flowers. "Women and men dance together. Boys and girls dance together. Maybe in boarding schools girls dance with girls. But flowers! Bah!" Fleming asked that he take a look at the next reel, spotlighting Mickey Mouse. If anything, LB hated it more, and refused to finish the reel, thinking it a practical joke. When Fleming lost his temper, LB backtracked, claiming how "all over this country pregnant women go into our theatres to see our pictures and to rest themselves before their dear little babies are born...Every woman is scared of a mouse, admit it. And here you think they're going to laugh at a mouse on the screen that's ten feet high, admit it." Platitudes were invented for retrospectives like this.
But easily the book's most unforgettable entry would be Jackie Cooper's epiphanic memories with his mother's friend, Joan Crawford. Seventeen-year-old Cooper frequently played badminton at Crawford's house court, where one day she followed him into the pool house, poured him a Coke, and as Cooper tells it, "I made love to Joan Crawford. Or, rather, she made love to me."
* I know I read this book over a decade ago, but never got around to reviewing it on Goodreads. Last month I noticed it for the many bookmarks, cut from white bond paper, sticking out of its pages, on the movies section of my new library wall. It was those white, unevenly cut paper bookmarks, gathering dust, which caught my attention and ire, ire aimed at the only possible culprit, Edo. And here lies the humbling importance of keeping a Goodreads journal: a cursory glance at the bookmarked pages showed pages of essays penciled with familiar check marks--mine. I had placed those paper bookmarks, to indicate my recommended reading for Edo. Indeed, platitudes were invented for retrospectives like this.
Curated in chronological order, the book maps the industry's pre-WWI bumpkin beginnings all the way to the by now redundant excesses of the nineties. The choicest reads are the entries chronicling the decades in between, from the 1930s to the 1970s and, as is usual in stories involving the rich and famous, the best narratives are the first person accounts, with their anecdotal asides and candid digressions; David Niven's long entry on gossip queens Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper exemplify this. The worst entries were the few vanity project sketches, typified by John H Richardson's shadowing of the overly pretentious Joel Silver.
Among the first person accounts I particularly enjoyed were excerpts by the acerbic, sardonic George Sanders, especially his comic retelling of l'affair Zsa Zsa Gabor/Porfirio Rubirosa (Gabor being his yet-to-be ex-wife); two of Sanders's four wives were the sisters Gabor--Zsa Zsa (#2) & Magda (#4). Equally amusing was Eleanor Coppola's sober reportage, presented in a mania-inducing series of phone calls, of her husband Francis's casting process of that mess of an opus, Apocalypse Now.
Paul Henreid's politics and written prose, specifically in his account of the Hollywood blacklist, reveal an educated, decent gentleman, as personified in most of his screen roles. As Jill Schary Zimmer, in her tangential capacity as impressionable daughter of MGM studio head Dore Schary recalls it, Henreid at a tennis match put "everyone at a disadvantage with his courtly manners. It was impossible to shout at such a gentleman, 'You SOB, that was my best serve!'" More exquisite observations from Zimmer: "It's rather ironic that the President, in swimming trunks, gets his picture taken at Malibu looking rather like a part Peter Lawford might have played years ago, but Mr Lawford, as the President's brother-in-law, saunters around dressed like a best man." Said setting for this curious visual would be Lawford's Malibu beach house which, as Irene Mayer Selznick shares here, he and wife Pat Kennedy bought from her and her sister Edith upon Mr and Mrs Louis B's passing.
The handsome actor-turned-movie-mogul Robert Evans has a few interesting excerpts from his memoirs, The Kid Stays in the Picture, such as the intriguing casting choices, bordering on horse trading, for The Godfather I and II. Most infuriating was his feud with a spiteful, unreasonable Francis Ford Coppola, who proceeded to cut off his nose to spite his face by deliberately torpedoing Evans's vanity project, dooming The Cotton Club to a lesson in impulsive, whimsical filmmaking. (If you ask me, the blame starts with Richard Gere--for begging Evans to let Coppola direct.) Speaking of Hollywood lessons, no compendium on the movies would be complete without featuring the incredible, exponential tolerance levels of United Artists in humoring Michael Cimino and his equally exponential budget with Heaven's Gate. And of course, the turbulent extravaganza that was Fox's Cleopatra which, despite the budgetary nightmares thrown his way, has producer Walter Wanger waxing nostalgic, revealing a palpable affection for Elizabeth Taylor, a sentiment echoed by Jill Zimmer years before Taylor came to define the public's epitome of a movie star.
Coppola's bizarre vendetta issues were soon surpassed by post-Sue Mengers super agent Michael Ovitz of CAA (Creative Artists Agency) who, upon learning a prized client was leaving him for a rival talent agency, promptly went into meltdown mode and dispatched unbelievably malicious, swim-with-the-fishes threats to upper echelon screenwriter and former Rolling Stone reporter, Joe Eszterhaz. Eszterhaz's written response, cc'd to the right people, is movie material gold. This unpalatable episode, however par for the course in Hollywood, was scathingly documented, with numerous footnotes, by one "Celia Brady" of SPY magazine.
By far the most fascinating anecdote I've read here was the screenwriter Frances Marion's tale of two titans: Louis B Mayer and Walt Disney. A year before a mouse scurried across the screen, making the world his Edam cheese, Disney was invited to show his unique animated cartoons at MGM. He arrived with two reels, one with Mickey Mouse and the second reel featuring the dance of the spring flowers, a Fantasia-like canvas which Marion describes as "pure magic to me. A garden in spring...a west wind blowing...the leaves on the trees stirring...butterflies on the wing...then the flowers began dancing together like an exquisite ballet." Film editors Margaret Booth and Blanche Sewell, and directors Victor Fleming and George Hill felt the same way, prompting Fleming to drag LB Mayer to the projection room. "Ridiculous. Ridiculous!" he countered, when shown the dance of the spring flowers. "Women and men dance together. Boys and girls dance together. Maybe in boarding schools girls dance with girls. But flowers! Bah!" Fleming asked that he take a look at the next reel, spotlighting Mickey Mouse. If anything, LB hated it more, and refused to finish the reel, thinking it a practical joke. When Fleming lost his temper, LB backtracked, claiming how "all over this country pregnant women go into our theatres to see our pictures and to rest themselves before their dear little babies are born...Every woman is scared of a mouse, admit it. And here you think they're going to laugh at a mouse on the screen that's ten feet high, admit it." Platitudes were invented for retrospectives like this.
But easily the book's most unforgettable entry would be Jackie Cooper's epiphanic memories with his mother's friend, Joan Crawford. Seventeen-year-old Cooper frequently played badminton at Crawford's house court, where one day she followed him into the pool house, poured him a Coke, and as Cooper tells it, "I made love to Joan Crawford. Or, rather, she made love to me."
* I know I read this book over a decade ago, but never got around to reviewing it on Goodreads. Last month I noticed it for the many bookmarks, cut from white bond paper, sticking out of its pages, on the movies section of my new library wall. It was those white, unevenly cut paper bookmarks, gathering dust, which caught my attention and ire, ire aimed at the only possible culprit, Edo. And here lies the humbling importance of keeping a Goodreads journal: a cursory glance at the bookmarked pages showed pages of essays penciled with familiar check marks--mine. I had placed those paper bookmarks, to indicate my recommended reading for Edo. Indeed, platitudes were invented for retrospectives like this.
August 30, 2024
This book is great. It's just a big collection of snippets from the Hollywood memoirs of dozens (hundreds?) of actors, writers, directors, producers, witnesses . . . Hollywood people of every stripe from the movie industry's long history in Southern California. It is packed with interesting and amusing stories, bits of great writing, and movie related entertainment. I bought my copy a few months ago and have been reading it (as I seem to do so much of my reading these days) in bits and pieces, and every time I pick it up I have an enjoyable twenty or thirty minutes. This is a must for anyone who loves Hollywood history.
September 2, 2021
Probably the best book about Hollywood I've ever read
I can't say enough good about this book. It covers the decades from the inception of movies until the 1980s. It's made up of selections from biographies, memoirs, magazine articles...anything written about Hollywood. From reading this, I must say that, although the old Studio System wasn't perfect, many, many good films were produced. After reading about the film business in the more recent decades, it's a wonder any films ever get made and no wonder that so many are terrible.
I can't say enough good about this book. It covers the decades from the inception of movies until the 1980s. It's made up of selections from biographies, memoirs, magazine articles...anything written about Hollywood. From reading this, I must say that, although the old Studio System wasn't perfect, many, many good films were produced. After reading about the film business in the more recent decades, it's a wonder any films ever get made and no wonder that so many are terrible.
July 1, 2020
This is one of the best books I've read about the history of Hollywood. It contains vast and well-chosen selections from other histories, memoirs, and biographies.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews