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'What Price Hollywood?'
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10629 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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7 / 1993 |
3,546 Words |
| Author
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John C. Tibbetts
John C. Tibbetts, an associate professor of theater and film
at the University of Kansas, contributes regularly to national
music publications and is editor of the recently published
Dvorak in America.
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SHOWMAN: THE LIFE OF DAVID O. SELZNICK
David Thomson
New York: Knopf, 1992
816 pp., $35.00
In one of David O. Selznick's finest pictures, What Price Hollywood?, a corrosive satire on the movie business, a producer and director argue about how to describe their latest movie.
"I like stupendous better than tremendous. Don't you?" asks the producer.
The other replies, "One's as bad as the other. They use them both to describe flops."
"Make it terrific, then," comes the reply. "It sounds successful. Terrific box-office. Terrific crowds. Terrific talent. That's the word. Terrific."
All these adjectives pretty well describe the man who made Gone with the Wind. David O. Selznick was America's most important independent movie producer, and a new biography, Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick, by David Thomson, gives his life its most informed and detailed treatment to date. It is a magnificent achievement and deserves a special place beside those other "musts" in the Selznick canon, particularly Ronald Haver's superbly researched and pictorially splashy David O. Selznick's Hollywood (1980); Rudy Behlmer's pioneering Memo from David O. Selznick (1972); Irene Selznick's autobiography, A Private View (1983); and even the least of them, Bob Thomas' affectionate Selznick (1970).
Thomson is a respected novelist, biographer, and film scholar, author of the indispensable A Biographical Dictionary of Film and the screenplay for the documentary film The Making of a Legend: "Gone with the Wind." For his new book he has had the participation and blessing of Selznick's two sons, Daniel and Jeffrey, and Selznick's first wife, Irene Mayer Selznick, as well as access to the "vast, sprawling, and neurotic" collection of Selznick papers--some three million items--in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center archives at the University of Texas in Austin.
It is a massive book, seven hundred pages of text and almost another hundred pages of acknowledgements, source notes, and other information. The early chapters on Selznick's youth are particularly valuable. David (he later added the "O." as a balance between the outer
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