Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today. But it was still really interesting reading about the early days of filmmaking, and how it transitioned into the studio system. The intention behind Basinger and Wasson’s cutting-and-pasting is to produce the impression that all these interviewees are in the same room at the same time, bouncing off one another. Film historians Basinger and Wasson splice and dice 10,000 hours of interviews conducted by the American Film Institute since 1969, as they chart Hollywood's evolution from a ramshackle start-up in an orange grove to the agent-dominated industry of today. Prolific film historians Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson generally succeed in knitting together some key historical stories.

It's often the impression I got reading, that the person who we'd actually like to be hearing from, who might actually have been in the room or who might have had some insight, just didn't figure into the trove of interviews Wasson and Basinger worked from. Yes, I know this was probably an expensive book to produce and it's a long work, but spend the money, Harper, and provide an index. The fact, for instance, that many of the early Hollywood men were first world war veterans (from both sides) who had been trained in aerial photography and wanted to carry on doing something similar on civvy street. The next speaker will begin talking about Errol Flynn until someone mentions Katherine Hepburn, and so on.What we are seeing slowly created is the Studio system being created again as Netflix and Prime Video set up their own studios. But the idea that the only way to make good movies was under the studio system where 4 or 5 studios monopolized every aspect of movie making was somehow better and produced better product than any other time in moviemaking history is idiotic.

The whole book is made up of short one paragraph quotes from different Hollywood veterans beginning with comments from people who worked and created silent movies. What wasn't so great was the way the interviewees talked about the studio system and the studio heads and producers.It really shows that the average person in the early 20th century was cucked hard by capitalist structures and the idea that people with money were inherently better than people who had less money.