THE WHOLE EQUATION
A History of Hollywood
By David Thomson. Knopf. 402 pp. $27.95
History, it is too often said, is written by the winners -- which is true, except in Hollywood. If there were no losers there, there would be no history.
Since those who make films and those who watch them all seem to be losers in the eyes of David Thomson, he's got an awful lot of history to cover. The author of the daunting, exhaustive New Biographical Dictionary of Film and an itinerant critical gun-for-hire at some of the nation's loftier publications, he virtually pleads for an argument in titling his latest tome The Whole Equation. Then again, histories of entire nations have been condensed into single volumes, so why not the merely century-or-so-old cinema?
Thomson, writing history the way he wrote biography in Rosebud (his 1996 biography-as-conversation with Orson Welles), covers the Important Men (Edison, Chaplin, Arbuckle, Cagney, Selznick, Welles, Brando, Reagan and Wasserman), the Important Movies ("Greed," "Gone With the Wind," "Red River," "Night of the Hunter," "Cleopatra," "Easy Rider," "The Godfather," "Jaws," "Star Wars," "Mulholland Drive" and "The Passion of the Christ") and the Phenomena (silents, sound, musicals, noir, the Red Scare, independents and Miramax). He sees not a hopeful trajectory in the lot. Which raises the question of why the author bothers with a medium he holds in such seething contempt.
"Why take Hollywood seriously any longer?" he asks toward the end of the book (wisely: it isn't the kind of thing you'd ask at the beginning of nearly 400 pages of text). "Why waste time on event-ized nonsense aimed at teenagers? Why cling to any hope that a zoo for dinosaurs is going to produce anything worth discussing?" He answers his own question sometime earlier, by quoting the once-blacklisted writer and director Abraham Polonsky: "Filmmaking in the major studios is the prime way that film art exists. . . . the fact of the matter is, that's the only choice." Polonsky said this only a few years before his death in 1999, and it remains true that Hollywood, by virtue of having the most money, also has the best sound people, cinematographers, set designers, special-effects technicians -- in other words, the resources. What it does with those resources is akin to Michelangelo cornering the market on Carerra marble and then spending his life making bobble-head hood ornaments for SUVs. It's criminal, but people buy the hood ornaments.
Whether Thomson likes it or not, the movies are market-driven. Actually, it's not clear whether he does like it, or know it. Much of what passes for critical thinking in The Whole Equation is at best contradictory or at worst crackpot.
"Greed," Erich von Stroheim' s largely lost masterpiece -- lost because producer Irving Thalberg, a Thomson favorite, cut it in 1925 from eight or nine hours to two and a third -- isn't such a loss, Thomson says. Why should a director be permitted such indulgence as to make a 24-reel movie? On the other hand, Thomson is still whining (flashback to Beneath Mulholland, his 1997 collection of essays) about Robert Towne, screenwriter and apparent close personal friend, who sold his "Chinatown" screenplay to Paramount, where producer Robert Evans let Roman Polanski change the ending.
Anyone who's seen "Chinatown" -- if you haven't, you really should -- knows well enough that it's a near-perfect picture. Still, Towne was violated, though paid well for it, and Thomson can't forget this. He decries the unerring ability of the Oscars to recognize the wrong movies, adding, "Of course, it doesn't matter too much as long as all the films last so that new viewers can reach their own decisions." "Greed" at its full length will never be seen. So you want to ask Thomson what he wants: preservation or pragmatism?
Thomson wants to burst critical bubbles and goes about with his hatpin like a crazed matador. Is D.W. Griffith cinema's first auteur, the man who invented many of the techniques that have become common film language? There are certainly reasons to hate his "Birth of a Nation" (1915), but Thomson considers it rational critical analysis to compare Mahler's Ninth Symphony, which was first performed in 1912, with the early shorts Griffith was making for Biograph at the same time. "Listen to that music," he writes of Mahler, "and you cannot ignore the naiveté, the coarseness, in Griffith." No, and if you look at a Vermeer, you can't help noticing that bluesman Robert Johnson scratches the strings while playing his guitar. What are we talking about?
Well, how about why people go to the movies? "The appeal of movies is beyond the sensible the rational or the hard-working," Thomson writes. " Going into the dark, after centuries of progress in which mankind has staggered toward artificial light, smacks of delicious perversity." Sure. Unless, of course, audiences are not going into the dark for the dark but for the artificial light bouncing off the screen. Or simply because movies are easier to see in an unlit room. •
John Anderson is chief film critic at Newsday.
