Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...studios, movies were products. To audiences, they were cheap entertainment. To actors, directors and producers, they were a paycheck. Why, then, were so many of the movies of 1939 so good? Clearly, something had gone wrong -- or wondrously right -- on the Hollywood assembly line: the studios were not merely churning out moneymaking products, as they thought they were, but a magic that endures to this...
Other explanations for the magic of 1939 lie more in the realm of metaphysics than economics or technology. Hollywood in those days really was Hollywood, which is to say it was the place where movies, as well as deals, were made. Very few pictures were shot on location, and inventive scouts either found or contrived every scene they wanted within a few miles of Hollywood and Vine. The Yorkshire moors of Wuthering Heights were so faithfully recreated in nearby Chatsworth that director Wyler bragged that his field of heather looked more authentic than a real field of heather...
...Hollywood was a community in which people played together and fought together but always showed up at dawn to make movies together. Commuting by jet from Los Angeles to New York was 20 years away, and only between pictures did the moviemakers and stars leave town. Travel was still a time-consuming, albeit luxurious, event: several days on the Super Chief and 20th Century Limited to New York, then on to Europe aboard the Normandie or Queen Mary. Pan American did not introduce the first commercial flights to Europe until June 1939. But even then, its majestic Boeing flying boats...
Though it liked to think of itself as the capital of sophistication, Hollywood was in fact just as unworldly as such places as Topeka, or Twin Falls, Idaho, where most of its inhabitants came from. The movies they made reflected and gained much of their strength from that innocence, and they resounded with a sincerity that no amount of artifice can duplicate. Would any scriptwriter today dare to type a corny line like this? "If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard, because...
America was to maintain an uneasy neutrality for nearly two more years, but Hollywood, that faithful mirror, soon reflected the grim reality of 1940. Never again was it to have the brash confidence and high spirits of that year of genius and glitter...