David O. Selznick's Hollywood

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Fourteen inches by 11, and weighing six pounds 13 ounces, David O. Selznick’s Hollywood is less a coffee-table book than a coffee table without legs. Its credits ape a blockbuster movie’s: ‘Executive Producer: Robert Gottlieb – Associate Producer: Martha Kaplan’, etc; and its first page opens like cinema curtains on a wider-than-Panavision main title modelled on Gone with the Wind. A good half of the book is pictorial – playbills, posters, designers’ sketches, views of Hollywood, facsimiles of memoranda and old newspapers, publicity stills and frame enlargements, pages of shots from David Selznick films. All it lacks is a disc in the binding with a score by Dimitri Tiomkin.And yet, despite the hype, the book repays the muscular effort of reading it. (Stonemasons’ Weekly: ‘I found this book hard to lay down.’) Selznick’s progress – through Paramount, RKO and MGM to independent production and post-war decline – makes his career emblematic. Recounting it, Ronald Haver chronicles Hollywood’s tarnished golden age, teeming with cut-throat movie moguls, touchy stars, voluptuous ‘discoveries’, toxic columnists, frenzied press-agents, writers in gilded cages, directors on assembly-lines. It’s the world of Garson Kanin’s artful factoid novel, Moviola – a glittering kitsch dream-world of overblown extravagance, ruthlessness, sentimentality and greed.