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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD!,
By
This review is from: Moviola (Mass Market Paperback)
Garson Kanin used an accumulated lifetime of Hollywood memories and experiences to create this very entertaining, if highly improable, novel.Ben Farber is an eminent Hollywood mogul, on the level of Warner and Goldwyn, who, at age 92. has seemingly lost none of his zest for the movie business. Nevertheless he is seriously considering selling his Farber Studios to a rapacious Saudi businessman, who has sent a young agent from NY to Los Angeles to bid for the operation. The agent, however, takes a personal interest in Farber, and soon enough the Great Man is relating the story of his sojourn through seventy years of movie history. A Russian Jewish immigrant to NY, Farber stumbles into the movie biz by accident, but he sees great potential for this new entertainment medium and sticks to it, eventually becoming the co-worker and confident of such early movie luminaries as Max Sennett, Mabel Normand, D.W. Griffith, and the man who started it all, Thomas Edison. Farber winds up a kind of Forrest Gump of Tinseltown. He is present at almost all the legendary events of early Hollywood. He's there during the notorious Fatty Arbuckle rape/murder trial. He's there when the great Garbo, a chunky Swedish gal with limited knowledge of English, arrives on American shores for her HOllywood debut with her director/friend/mentor Mauritz Stiller by her side. Garbo, of course, goes on to movie immortality; Still, however, is shunted aside by an industry that did not appreciate his genius. Farber's there when David O. Selznick launches the greatest casting call in movie history, to find just the right actress to play Scarlett O'Hara. He's there when a homely teenage girl named Norma Jean Mortensen blossoms into the greatest movie sex symbol ever, Marilyn Monroe. This is a fun book, as larger than life and bombastic as a lavish old Warner Brothers musical. While not completely successful as a novel, the book offers any number of marvelous and amusing set pieces. My favorite is the David O. Selznick party thrown for all the potential Scarlett O'Haras, Joan Crawford, Carole Lombard, Better Davis,Tallulah Bankhead, and Paulette Goddard among them, which degenerates into a real bitchfest. But the Arbuckle episode is also a highlight, sensitive and touching, as we watch a huge talent (literal and figurative) destroyed by the avarice and self-interest of others. I also love the early chapter where curious onlookers come to Ben's general store in New Jersey to watch the first primitive movies projected on a makeshift screen. Kanin plays games with the narrative structure. One minute he's narrating in past tense, the next in present. Sometimes Farber's our narrator, other times it is the agent, still others it is an omniscent third person narrator. But that's all right. Kanin obviously wasn't writing to win a Nobel Prize or the close scrutiny of literary deconstructuralists. He was writing to entertain. And he does that admirably.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Hurray for Hollywood.,
By
This review is from: Moviola (Mass Market Paperback)
This book laid on the shelves in my Mother's house for years. It sometimes lived in the bathroom, sometimes her bedroom, but most often in the hallway bookshelf. It looked well loved and one day before a trip I picked it up on a whim. I thought the cover looked iinteresting.It was quite an epic tale that chronicles the history of motion pictures in America and of one man's survival in the business. I recall reading another book by Garson Canin that talked about working with Samuel Goldwyn and the stories that Goldwyn would tell Canin turn up in this book so it came across as a loosely biographical/fictional account of his life beginning with the Nickelodeons, Immigrants in New York and the common theme of the American Dream. I suggest this to those who love anything old Hollywood, the behind the scenes, and multi-generational stories.
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