Pirates of the West

...Not a synthetic item like an automobile, but a grimy, snorting bus, old-fashioned for memory's sake, the trundling equivalent of the cottage with lilacs and picket fence that everybody pines for and nobody would live in without major alterations...

...So I want all maximum gimmickry—that will be aerodynamic-ally feasible, of course...

...Dolittle, for instance, an $18-million bestiary shot on location everywhere, the 20th Century Fox brass went on tampering even after the first preview, which got a hostile middle-of-the-country reception in Minneapolis...

...Gene Kelly talks to an engineer about a film called Tom Swift which he is directing but was never made: "We want an exciting visual concept...

...The youngsters saw what the intercutting was all about, an Oedipal dream-cheese sandwich...

...and repeat his remarks with added conviction...

...the only sound stages large enough to do justice to the Hollywood settings are in Cinecitta, outside Rome...

...What comes through most strongly is a colorful composite of the money, the product, and the men...

...each character becomes his own unintended chorus...

...And if, in the parting shots, Dustin and his girl were closed off from each other by two separate window frames at the back of the bus, well, that was tricky Mike Nichols again trying to gainsay his soft heart...

...Funnily enough, the directors are not standing up for art (though they talk as if they are), but for literal-ness: 150 extras on the scene, rather than the 30 allotted, so that a take of The Boston Strangler bears witness to a genuine Hub rush hour...

...Some faintly reheated social statement devastated the over-50 gaggle in the audience...

...Dustin Hoffman kept diving into his parents' pool and Anne Bancroft...

...Well, she's an ug who's getting a million bucks from this studio to do Hello, Dolly...

...Streisand, she's an ug...

...Well, thank you . . ." Joe Pasternak reminiscing about the pictures he directed with Esther Williams: "I used to keep her in the water 99 per cent of the time...

...Their function is to chew the fat with one another, reassure one another, find a consensus, support the guy next in line above...

...Another of these men takes half a million a year from the payroll, walks in peace marches, and worries about Watts...

...Fine...

...The life of the Fox studio has everything to do with budgets...

...He has edited his material, gathered during a year spent listening to Fox executives, in a way that folds the implications back into every line of conversation...

...Warner's married Seven Arts, and the W-7 insignia became the property of Kinney Parking Lots (this last being an image of Hollywood's physical new look...

...Maybe it had a better screenplay to start with...

...McQueen—the people Jack Warner used to call the 'ugs.' They've got the sense of anarchy, right, and that's what the kids like...

...They have resonant titles...

...An acting teacher laments the disappearance of beautiful people from the silver screen: "It's the kids who buy the theater tickets, kids from 14 to 25...

...In the case of Dr...

...The prologue was chopped to bits and a sequence in which Rex Harrison suddenly appears riding a giraffe and wearing a frock coat was pushed up and wedged between two segments showing him hiking through the Sea Star Island jungle in a shirt and pants...

...And the producers would have 90-odd libel cases on their hands even if, as I strenuously believe, every word in the book is true...

...That means a lot of gimmickry and pizazz—that's a show business word—on the space ship...

...They're short-handed in Sacramento with everyone taking vacations up there...

...Hollywood doesn't make films so much as change them...

...Richard Zanuck, executive vice president of Fox, summarizes a phone conversation: "Ronnie Reagan wants to borrow a lawyer...

...Only one such potted biography (out of dozens) pays off, a description of George Axelrod as "a tall, nervous man in his mid-forties wearing chino pants, a windbreaker and black velvet pumps on which his initials were stitched in gold...

...It could make quite a movie, a nice antidote to The Oscar...

...It must have been The Graduate...

...Dunne's cunning lineup of his scenes gives a telling picture of the perennial conflict, right up to exhibition time, between production men and executives on the one side, directors on the other...

...The book consists of brief scenes harnessed into arbitrary chapters and could also qualify, I suppose, as a nonfiction novel, although I would not like to compare Dunne with Truman Capote, who is a sentimental hack...

...The tenth...

...This picture is about Tom Swift and his aeroship, and if we have an aeroship that looks like an uncooked hot dog, well, I know I don't have to tell you, Jerry, we don't have a picture...

...The men, the producers in particular, see themselves as picaros fidgeting within the confines of the system and are flying off to Europe or some other place periodically to seem to escape...

...or a specially constructed collection junks and rickshaws for The Sand Pebbles because "the ones they had in Hong Kong and Taiwan weren't period...

...Love won out after a lot of blurred background motion (remember Jules and Jiml...

...The Studio is not a revelation...

...John Gregory Dunne doesn't draw them...

...Of course, there wouldn't be any motion picture rights for something like a book on the riots...

...The jacket blurb rightly characterizes The Studio as "an extraordinary cinema-verite study of Hollywood at work...

...foreign filmmakers started borrowing from Hollywood's eastern banks...

...Fox would have liked to excise the prologue altogether, but they had big money tied up in an ad campaign devoted to a frock-coated Harrison aboard his giraffe...

...Too many other documents have taken Hollywood apart...

...Probably not, though it was almost surely different...

...Or had he just teed off...

...Wet she was a star...

...A bulky list of inferences could be drawn from this piece of information...

...the fat agencies began to hand-wrap talent packages...

...A publicity man calls a country club on learning that a Fox producer dropped dead there during a round of golf: "Was it a twosome or a foursome...

...They would have to shoot it on location...

...But I doubt if any writer since Nathanael West has done it quite so mercilessly and served up as many cruel laughs...

...It makes for rich, salty reading virtually all the way through, even allowing for Dunne's one irritating stylistic mannerism: He insists on introducing each character with a thumbnail sketch—a monotonous three-line recital of the man's height, accent, garments, thickness, and hairline—that is a waste of time and borrowed from Time...

...Dunne manages a lethal portrait of David Brown, husband of Helen Gurley Brown and number two man to Richard Zanuck, who is number two to his father, Darryl F. He does this innocently by having Brown sit in conferences with Zanuck Jr...

...Despite the informality of the dialogue, each scene has a carefully arranged dramatic structure, which is more than one can say for most of the "theater of fact," the recent namby-pamby Oppenheimer play, for instance...

...Check the legal department and see if we can spare one, and if we can, let's throw him one for four weeks...

...And what hole was he on...

...We had a good time for the first half-hour or so...

...At the end, Dustin and his girl had driven off in a bus...

...To those of us who have given up on Hollywood's output but remain fascinated by the industry as a phenomenon, The Studio will be a valuable piece of firsthand journalism, worth putting on the same shelf as the books of Terry Ramsaye, Benjamin B. Hampton, Lewis Jacobs, and Hortense Powdermaker...

...Just a twosome...

...But it would give me the feeling of accomplishing something...

...We left depressed...

...A friend of mine got $175,000 paperback for a book he wrote...

...Rugoff or whoever distributed it let me in free because I was with a party of teenagers from Harlem...

...Maybe I will...

...the so-called "independents" grew up and blew up...

...Money first, naturally...

...as Dustin gunned his convertible back and forth across Californian bridges...

...There are 90-odd characters in the cast...

...I see...

...Then the story sloped away into a dismal chase...

...A few examples follow...

...He typifies Hollywood's (and television's) brand of anguish today, an air-conditioned hangover inherited from the Warner Brothers paladins of the '30s: "I'd like to take a year off and do a book on the Detroit riots...

...It never hurts to have a friend in Sacramento...

...And the people the kids identify with are Belmondo, Streisand...

...Otherwise, the book is a polished account of what has happened on the Coast since television muscled in: Most of the "majors" went under...

...They are deliberately nonproductive producers...

...A Minneapolis theater owner speaks after the Dolittle preview flop: "You've got to realize that what we had here tonight was your typically sophisticated Friday night Minneapolis audience...