HOLLYWOOD REMEMBERED

Pure gold, as Zollo does a Studs Terkel on Old Hollywood.

To show his seriousness, Zollo opens with a lengthy history of Hollywood that goes from its geological beginnings up to William Mulholland’s colossal waterway and dam. His tour of many famed places includes the Alto Nido Apartments, where screenwriter Joe Gillis lived in Sunset Boulevard, adding wealth to his poignant sheaf of oral histories. The histories are arranged by age, starting with Frederica Sagor Maas, a screenwriter for silent (Garbo and Gilbert’s Flesh and the Devil) and sound films, a chipper 101 years old at the time of the interview. As a writer, Maas is not terribly impressed by film actors—if they were intellectuals they wouldn’t be able to act. Lothrop Worth, only 100, was a cameraman for D.W. Griffith and later shot the first commercial 3-D film. Naturally, folks like these remember houses, backyards, and empty lots long gone, not to mention fabled restaurants like Musso and Franks (still there). David Raskin, a child of 90, Chaplin’s arranger and unacknowledged co-composer on Modern Times, helped write “Smile (while your heart is breaking),” and over a four-month period of daily meetings with Chaplin helped write the film’s 90-minute score. Ex-steelworker Karl Malden, also 90, proves a charmer, telling about his early Broadway career in the ’30s and about working later with Marlon Brando on Broadway in A Streetcar Named Desire, then making that film with him, then On the Waterfront, and working for Brando in One-Eyed Jacks. Malden found Brando a genius who never sounded as if he were reading a line, even after two years of Streetcar. Jonathan Winters gives a marathon monologue that includes affecting memories of filming Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, with very kind words for Kramer.

A human sunrise.