City of Nets

by Otto Friedrich

Mr. Friedrich looks at the decade of 1940 for the Hollywood movie business. The consensus is that 1939 was the height of the American movie industry in Hollywood. The movie industry was solid for half a decade after that until the end of WWII and the beginning of television. The movie industry spent several decades after 1950 declining and adjusting to the new culture, technological advances, and economic and political re-adjustments of Post War America. In 1970, the Hollywood movie industry had a re-birth and television production came into its own.

But all this economic and political upheaval and stuff can be fun when it is analysed and illustrated with tales of Hollywood madness, folly, gossip, and envy. Bertrolt Brecht, the German playwright, always struck me as an ass when I had to read him in college. But in this book, he is a fun ass---Mother Courage, but Marx Brothers funny. Mr. Brecht's misadventures in trying to get into the movies and go Hollywood during his exile from Europe in WWII are sour human comedy that he never managed to achieve in his writings.

And Mr. Brecht is not the only European exile lost in the fragrant and fertile Hollywood Hills and landscape; Thomas Mann has a Life in Hollywood and tends his garden in Brentwood, Charles Laughton loses his garden in a Southern California mudslide, and Schonberg argues movie music with Irving Thalberg, the "Boy Genius" of movies before Orson Welles showed up to claim that title (it's all about "control"). And during the making of Fantasia, Disney declaims that he will "make" Beethoven ("Roll over Beethoven and tell Stravinsky that news.")

It is all wild and crazy fun, and travails gone absurdly wrong, in this book. I highly recommend it.