Hollywood

Rating:
Summary: After the War is Over
Review: "Hollywood" is another volume in Gore Vidal's "biography of the United States". It's the sequel to "Empire", starting with the USA's entry into World War One and ending with the first days of Calvin Coolidge's Presidency. The main protagonists of "Empire" are still there; Caroline and Blaise Sanford and James Burden Day.

Vidal depicts the American political scene in World War One, the gradual disintegration (political and physical) of Woodrow Wilson with the failure to get US participation in the League of Nations, and the "normalcy" of Warren Harding's administration (along with the spread of corruption).

The most dramatic parts of the novel are the ones set in World War One and the immediate aftermath. Some things don't change: Blaise relfects that wars (invariably driven by politics and economics) are always dressed up by politicians by appeals to higher moral values. Vidal worries about the uncontrolled energy of the new nation, quoting Santayana's warning that "an incapacity for education, when united with great inner vitality, is one root of idealism."

The sections set in Hollyood itself are less interesting, even though Hollywood's new power as a means of influencing attitudes is an important theme: propaganda was already masquerading as entertainment. The establishment was already censoring what went out - the only film sympathetic to the workers' view of the world is released after it is so altered that its message turns out to be the opposite of what was intended.

After the fall of Wilson, I felt that Vidal struggled to keep the novel going. The descriptions of the Harding administration could not match the inherent drama of the war years. These parts of the novel felt more sketchy and over-extended, as if Vidal felt he had to get the the death of Harding, come what may.

G Rodgers

Rating:
Summary: An Uneven But Gifted Sequel
Review: Hollywood, at least as it stands in relation to Empire, Vidal's previous book on turn of the century power politics, is dissapointing. Vidal's old gang of power brokers, Caroline Sanford, James Burden Day, Blaise Sanford, William Randolph Hearst and the rest do return, though older and strangely out of breath.

Vidal's main focus, the joining of Hollywood and Washington as collaborating sources in producing a particular type of propaganda -- America as it must and shall be -- is only forcefully embraced at the end of the novel. Earlier chapters set in the movie capitol, though meant to support this thesis, are unfocused and star-struck. Trivial personalities, simply because they were stars 80 years ago, are given the bulk of Vidal's precious pages. The deft and conceited Caroline, one of Vidal's best all-time creations, is really not allowed to say that much.

Instead, horribly, she becomes a movie star. Nevermind that she is co-publisher of the most powerful newspaper in Washington and, if she were a more realistically fleshed out charachter, might prefer to stay there. Added to this she is given a filmmaker boyfriend.

"Yes, this was her lover. Women, Blaise noted, not for the first time, had no taste in men." With his own pen Vidal dismisses Caroline's love interest, the hapless Timothy X. Farell. As we are inclined to do also.

In spite of its flaws, Hollywood is a necessary read for those won over by its brilliant predecessor Empire. Strangely enough some of its finest writing centers around the lowly charachters of the Harding Administration -- as swinish, one senses, as their day.

Washington is Vidal's comfort zone, the place where his writing reads the most accurately, where his charachters speak the most assuredly. In Hollywood much of those gifts are wasted.

Rating:
Summary: Title should be Washington, D.C.
Review: I bought this book because it was ostensibly about Hollywood during the golden days of the silent movies. I found the beginning of the book so tedious I actually stopped reading it-- starting over again a few months later. After at least one hundred boring pages introducing endless Washington characters (trying to sort out their relationships to each other is mind numbing), you finally get a glimpse of Hollywood. The book then goes back and forth, with the majority of "action" (a term I use very loosely) taking place in the east. I enjoyed the last fifty pages or so. If you like Gore Vidal, okay read it. But if you are interested in old Hollywood--I suggest you skip this book and find something else.

Rating:
Summary: How public opinion is shaped by movies to support power cla
Review: Images manufactured with the intent of directing public opinion to support adventurers and profiteers is the tragic central theme of this novel. Our nation is in the hands of rascals and criminals, but as long as the pictures are pleasing and square with some melodramatic logic, the great unwashed stay quiet. It's enough to make you weep.

Rating:
Summary: Vidal's marriage of Hollywood and Washington
Review: The fifth novel, chronologically, of Gore Vidal's American chronicle series deals with much more than the evolution of the industry that bears the title of this book. There is at least as much political chicanery in Washington as movie-making propagandizing in Hollywood. Politics runs through Vidal's blood so he can never escape the subject entirely. The dual career of Caroline Sanford as east coast newspaper publisher and west coast starlet, while not completely implausible, seems to be a way of weaving the world of the entertainment capital into the fabric of the political capital. I was quite interested in many of the strands of both stories but I felt they were welded together more than organically linked.

I have read the American chronicle novels preceding this one and two of his early novels (The Judgement of Paris and Messiah). I had thought that Vidal had a workmanlike but non-descript style similar to Steinbeck's, at the opposite end of the spectrum from writers like Faulkner and Hemingway who announce their unique presence on every page. In the American chronicle novels, however, the god-like narrator is none other than Vidal himself, the catty, gossipy gadfly insider/outsider who can't resist giving you the inside scoop on every major development that occurs in his world. There are passages of spectacular wit and irony as well as a few in which he seems to be straining for an effect. Hollywood is nonetheless quite readable and especially indispensable in Vidal's American mythology and contributes new evidence to support my belief that he is one of America's most underrated writers from the mainstream.