Publication date:
22 December 2002Length of book:
416 pagesPublisher
Taylor Trade PublishingISBN-13: 9780815412397
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.
For most people around the world Hollywood is a state of mind, a fantasy. ... If you want to keep the place as Oz, stay away from Hollywood Remembered. But if you want to peek behind the curtain and see what it was really like, this oral history is a good place to start.