The Glamour Factory: Inside Hollywood's Big Studio System - Softcover

Davis, Ronald L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0806160306 ISBN 13: 9780806160306

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018

Synopsis

In its heyday Hollywood’s big studio system mirrored the corporate ideology that catapulted the United States into economic prominence. By the mid-1920s power was consolidated into four major studios: Metro-Goldyn-Mayer, Paramount, Fox, and Warner Bros., all appropriating the assembly line approach of the Detroit automobile manufacturers. The Glamour Factory is the story of the motion picture business, told with the help of hundreds of insiders—from stars, directors, and producers to stuntmen, hairstylists, makeup artists, and publicists—who watched and contributed to the industry while magic was being made. Much of this story is drawn from the Southern Methodist University Oral History Collection on the Performing Arts, which the author founded.
 

About this title

About the Author:

Ronald L. Davis is Emeritus Professor of History at Southern Methodist University, where he was Director of both the Oral History Program on the Performing Arts and the De Golyer Institute for American Studies. He has written many books on the performing arts in America, including the best-seller Hollywood Anecdotes.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A history of the Hollywood factory system that leaps, handy- dandy, between the intimate and the commonplace, drawing from hundreds of interviews with Tinseltown folk conducted by the Southern Methodist University Oral History Program, which Davis (Hollywood Beauty, 1991) founded. Davis's foreword thanks his undergraduate students who took his ``American Society through Film'' course, youngsters who in most instances ``were delving into Hollywood's Golden Era for the first time....'' Meanwhile, older film buffs may begin reading with the terrible feeling that they've read all this before, many times- -but they'll find that tasty garnishings to the familiar are added by the intimate thoughts of film editors like Robert Wise, who slaved on his own over the timing of the famed breakfast scene in Citizen Kane, or of staffers like Lillian Burns, secretary to Columbia Pictures studio head Harry Cohn, who belies Cohn's reputation as an obscenity-spouting ogre. Davis covers all the major studio chiefs, directors, and producers; the creating of stars; lives of actors and actresses (who discover that despite being stars, they're only human); supporting players (``Who am I and what stage are we playing on?''); publicity; writing; music; editing; and much more. Despite a framework of obligatory material erected with no personal voice, Davis keeps most pages lively with the unexpected quote: Asked about his method, Claude Rains says, ``I just learn the lines and pray to God.'' Eventually, the stars grow restless with the contract system, the independents arise, and TV takes over. ``Now, studios are nothing but the Ramada Inn,'' says Billy Wilder. ``You rent space, you shoot, and out you go.'' A cake you eat for its raisins. (Twenty b&w photographs) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0806160306
• ISBN 13: 9780806160306
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464