Players & Pin-ups
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

To understand the obstacles David Thomson faces in attempting a “history of Hollywood,” begin with his book’s dust jacket, where a blurb from Harvey Weinstein calls “The Whole Equation” (Alfred A. Knopf, 402 pages, $27.95) “a remarkable one-volume compendium of the history and the magic that we call Hollywood.” That endorsement is revealing in two ways. First, its glib, sentimental, self congratulatory tone is the accent of Hollywood narcissism, for which the movies’ historical significance, magical power, and sheer wonderfulness is axiomatic. (Mr. Weinstein’s “the history and the magic we call Hollywood” irresistibly calls to mind the fatuous slogan of the murderous studio head in Robert Altman’s “The Player”: “Movies – now more than ever.”) Any serious writer about film must take care, before anything else, to quarantine himself from this kind of rhetoric, which can only turn criticism into an annex of publicity.
The second problem comes into focus when you turn to page 367 of Mr. Thomson’s book, where he discusses the contributions to cinema of one Harvey Weinstein. “There is no one in the business today who so embodies the bullying strength of a Mayer and the taste of Thalberg crammed into one person,” Mr. Thomson writes. “He can be boisterous, aggressive, crude, and domineering; he is also smart, very alert to talent and quality, and more prepared to back his hunch on a difficult idea than anyone else around.” If Mr. Weinstein didn’t read any of the rest of Mr. Thomson’s book before giving his blurb – and the vagueness of his praise licenses the suspicion – someone surely brought this eulogy to his attention.
What’s troubling is not simply the logrolling, the quid pro quo – you can find things as bad or worse on the back covers of many novels and most books of poetry. The problem, rather, is Mr. Thomson’s tone of camaraderie, of inner-circledom: “anyone else around” unmistakably suggests that the film critic and the film producer are both “around” the same places. They are collaborators, though of immensely different ranks, in “the magic we call Hollywood.”
This uncertainty about where David Thomson belongs in Hollywood – inside or out, the sorcerer’s apprentice or the spoilsport who gives away the conjuror’s tricks – goes a long way toward explaining why “The Whole Equation” is such an unsatisfying book. Mr. Thomson is one of the most respected film critics now writing; in addition to his extensive magazine work, he has written biographies of Orson Welles and David O. Selznick, and his “Biographical Dictionary of Film” is generally admired. His subject here, “the history of Hollywood,” seems to promise a magnum opus. But “The Whole Equation” is not even remotely a history of Hollywood. Instead, it is something halfway between a meditation on Hollywood’s glamour and a handbook of its chicanery – managing, in both veins, to confirm Hollywood’s most cherished self-understandings, even when it seems to be criticizing them.
The history of Hollywood is, of course, something different from the history of film, even of American film (or, as Mr. Thomson sometimes calls it, “movie,” a singular noun). To understand Hollywood, we need to know about the movies it produced, but we also need to know about the business it conducts, the personalities it nurtures, the rites and mores of its self enclosed world. Notoriously, these are jealously guarded secrets: As Mr. Thomson notes, no one outside the studios, and possibly no one inside them, is ever sure how much money any particular picture costs or makes. The same secrecy applies to the negotiations and deals, the scandals and private lives, that give Hollywood its Byzantine fascination. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, in the passage from “The Last Tycoon” that gives Thomson his title, Hollywood “can be understood, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.”
Mr. Thomson is not one of them – which would be all right, if he at least provided enough of those flashes. But while he often makes back-of-the-envelope calculations about what certain movies cost and earned – “Casablanca,” he estimates, has made around $20 million in profit over its lifetime, though Bogart was paid just $36,667 – nowhere does he elucidate the economics of the whole studio system. Still less does he cover the whole range of directors, actors, producers, and technicians who invented and perfected the Hollywood movie. Instead, he returns again and again to certain favorite, emblematic figures – Irving Thalberg, Charlie Chaplin, Robert Towne – as launching-pads for speculation. As it emerges in bits and pieces, his vision of Hollywood history is the conventional one that even non-movie buffs will easily recognize: the smart glamour of the Golden Age, the narcotized 1950s, the adventurous 1970s, the blockbuster 1980s.
When Mr. Thomson is most intent on being insightful, in his large ruminations on the Meaning of Movies – their connections with politics, morality, art – he only succeeds in bearing out the truth of Auden’s phrase: “to ask the hard question is simple.” In attempting to link the movies with the rise of divorce, the decline of reading, the power of fascism, and the alienation of the individual – even, finally, with the alleged “way we went mad or gave up the ghost on reason” – he assumes, rather than demonstrates, their actual power and significance. This kind of credulity is closely related to Hollywood’s own conviction of its importance, which perhaps explains why even Mr. Thomson’s suspicions have a way of turning into homage: “even in the age of increasingly unhappy endings,” he writes on his final page, “the American movie maintained its courage, its grace, its optimism.”
In the end, this distractible, mannered book is simply not curious enough about fact to resist the pull of Hollywood’s myth. All Mr. Thomson can do is reflect that myth back to itself, hymning “movie” in all its own favorite terms: “It is surreptitious; it is illicit. … It is vicarious, it is fantastic, and this may be very dangerous. But it is heady beyond belief or compare. And it changed the world.” Harvey Weinstein couldn’t have put it better.