Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...juxtaposition caused problems in the stage version, none of which is corrected in Oz' big-budget Hollywood musical. Whatever thematic points--largely an assault on the Eisenhower-era vision of idyll--the staged version had to make are ignored here, as is the head-on assault on pop culture. Instead of consistency, Oz has subscribed to the youth comedy formula in force since The Blues Brothers: the bigger the blast, the louder the laughs...
...course, if Hollywood learned that the colonel syphoned a few of the Ayatollah's bucks and planned to abscond to Bolivia, it would make a movie. And North and Poindexter would become the new Redford and Newman...
During the '30s Hollywood became a roost for an astonishing assortment of wanderers and political refugees. Playwright Bertolt Brecht despised Hollywood but scuttled about trying to get work (his evil city Mahagonny, a net for pleasure lovers, gives Friedrich his title). Igor Stravinsky, Friedrich relates, tried to write movie music but never succeeded. When Producer Irving Thalberg offered $25,000 for a score for The Good Earth, the distinguished and threadbare atonalist Arnold Schoenberg demanded $50,000 and the right to direct the actors, who, he felt, should chant their lines...
...energy and arrogance stayed intact through the war years, but then its charmed life began to bleed away. One cause was Red baiting by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. TV cut into attendance. It became commonplace to shoot movies abroad, beyond the easy control of studios. Hollywood's civility, soured by the blacklist that the studios said did not exist, was further strained by the expulsion of Actress Ingrid Bergman in 1949 for her adulterous love affair with Director Roberto Rossellini. Ancient history now; the author must explain that adultery once was shocking, and in other chapters...
...Hollywood did not really need an epitaph, but Mogul David O. Selznick produced one anyway, appropriately overblown, in a moody conversation with Ben Hecht: "Hollywood's like Egypt, full of crumbling pyramids . . . It'll just keep on crumbling until finally the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands...