| ||||||
 Arts & EntertainmentBooks Comics Health & Body Media Mothers Who Think News People Politics2000 Technology - Free Software Project Travel & Food  Columnists
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - Also Today For a full list of today's Salon Arts & Entertainment stories, go to the
Arts & Entertainment home page. - - - - - - - - - - - - Search Salon - - - - - - - - - - - - Salon Columnists - - - - - - - - - - - - Recently in Salon Arts & Entertainment Music Review Music Review Music Column Music Review Complete archives for Arts & Entertainment - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
The book on film | page 1, 2
In this assortment of memos to actors, directors, writers and other filmmakers, Selznick manages to live out the god complex so often associated with producers while at the same time exhibiting a constant and touching sense of detail. Here was a man pledged to movies, to everything about movies. That meant money and promotion and popularity, but it also meant how stories are constructed and told. Selznick cared. There's a lot of the juicy, megalomaniacal behavior the reader would hope for in the rantings of a Hollywood mogul, the tastiest being a letter to David O. Selznick from Ingrid Bergman written by David O. Selznick -- i.e., a letter to himself from himself. "I forgot everything you had done for me," he has her apologize. And yet Selznick's memos during the making of "Gone With the Wind" contain wise, sophisticated thoughts on narrative structure. What is kept out of a story is just as important as what is kept in, and Selznick's notes on what to steal from Mitchell's book and what to drop are insightful, not to mention wickedly funny. Noticing that Mitchell tends to repeat herself, he informs writer Sidney Howard, "An outstanding case of this is the repetition of what you might describe as 'nights of love.' Certainly, I think one scene of husbandly rape is enough. How the hell we can even use one is going to be a problem."
Sarah Vowell Sarah Vowell's column appears on the Arts & Entertainment site every other Wednesday.
That nights-of-love euphemism also highlights one of the other pleasures of the Selznick memos. His struggles call forth what it was like to make movies in the middle of the century, telling stories about life and its racier bits before motion pictures could use any old word. The "damn" controversy -- whether Clark Gable's Rhett Butler can utter the "Frankly, my dear" line -- is instructive. Selznick's letter to the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America is fascinating propaganda from a truly other world. "I do not feel that your giving me permission to use 'damn' in this one sentence," he wrote, "will open the floodgates and allow every gangster picture to be peppered with 'damns' from end to end." (At which point Al Pacino's Tony Montana, reading along over my shoulder, pissed himself laughing and fell to the floor.) Making America safe for sacrilege. In his tales of, to use a nice word, innovation, Selznick's memos read not unlike the journals of Lewis and Clark. New countries are being discovered, streams forded, mountains crossed. We forget, nearly a century later, how the movie pioneers had to invent so much from scratch, and one of the joys of Selznick's ravings is how those inventions unfolded. For example, who now thinks about the fact that in order for sound pictures to be made, soundproof soundstages had to be constructed? And so, when Paramount's new and only soundstage caught fire, Selznick recounts his boss, B.P. Schulberg, hitting on the idea of shooting in the middle of the night, because they don't call it silent night for nothing. James Agee wrote in 1945, "I will probably always like the films of David Selznick better than reputedly condescending aesthetes like me are allowed to like such things; for I think that more than most things that come out of Hollywood they show both genuine talent, as distinct from mere professionalism, and a genuine love for movies, as distinct from mere executive concentration on them." That is what makes "Memo From David O. Selznick" the most valuable member of Scorsese's series. Concerned with everything from Gable's shirt collars to Marlene Dietrich's hair, Selznick, like Scorsese, is so in love with pictures he can't help reminding the reader why she fell in love with movies in the first place. And fandom doesn't get any more expansive than that.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - Search Salon | |||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
|||
