Good blog, as usual, Moira
-Andrew

http://moviemorlocks.com/2007/04/28/the-moviegoer/

“A Pictorial History of the Western” by Jack (?) Parkinson really made an impression on me as a kid.

“The American Cinema” by Andrew Sarris and “Talking Pictures” by Richard Corliss are both essential in my view.

“Harold Lloyd, the Shape of Laughter” by Richard Schickel really gave me an interest in silent comedy.

I mostly stuck with the books I started discovering around the age of 12 that helped make me start on the lifelong road to “enlightenment through movies”, so many that I didn’t stumble across until relatively recently (like Goodman’s books or Thomson’s New Biographical Dictionary of Film) didn’t make the cut.

Thanks to MovieMan0283 for starting this ball rolling, and to R.H. Sweeney for throwing it our way here at the Movie Morlocks perch. I hope that the other readers and members of the pack join in baying at the moon over our discovery of books about a favorite topic.
All the best,
Moira

I read the McBride book and the Hitchock/Truffaut opus, which had new material and insights. However, after a while, I grew tired of most of Hitchcock’s interviews because he always seemed to tell the same stories. I do recall that he regretted the stunt with the man crawling under the merry-go-round in the conclusion of Strangers on a Train. It was too dangerous. Imagine if Hitchcock had accidentally killed someone like John Landis allegedly did during the making of The Twilight Zone. We might have been deprived of his subsequent, wonderful movies.

I suppose you saw my list of books that I sent Whats-his-name.

I’d strongly recommend reading the Decline and Fall of Hollywood by Erza Goodman, if you can get hold of it. It was published in 1961 and was out of print when I bought it.
It starts with the major coup that reporter Goodman achieved in 1947. He interviewed D.W. Griffith in an apartment room in a hotel before his death. Sad to say, he did this by bringing a blonde and a bottle of gin to the great man’s room. He kept grabbing at the blonde who playfully eluded him, or, in Goodman’s words, “kept deftly manuevering out of his reach.”
Griffith gave his opinions of recent movies: “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek is the greatest comedy I have seen in a long time…It’s a Wonderful Life was a piece of cheese, The Best Years of Our Lives just okay, My Darling Clementine lovely.”
“There has been no improvement in movies since the old days. What the modern movie lacks is beauty, the beauty of the moving wind in the trees…Today they have forgotten movement in the moving picture. It is all still and stale.”
“I loved Citizen Kane and particularly loved the scenes he stole from me.”
After some rejections the story was printed in March, 1948 and caused a small sensation.
Four months later Griffith died and some celebrated producers who he couldn’t get on the phone attended his funeral.

Goodman wrote about publicists, critics, reporters, directors, producers, screenwriters – and some great movie stars, like Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, Frank Sinatra, William Holden – and Humphrey Bogart.
Bogart played gangsters so effectively that he got fan mail from San Quentin. When he switched to portraying good guys, the convicts wrote asking how he could go back on them.
“When I was making Action in the North Atlantic, Raymond Massey and I had big mock arguments over whose double was the bravest.”

There’s lots more there. And it is all good.

*A note to your readers: I will be compiling a master list of everyone’s responses to “Reading the Movies” exercise. To do so, I need blogs to link up to, so if you have a blog, make sure you put up your list there (instead of just leaving it in a comment). And leave a comment here or on my blog with the link so I’ll know. Thanks, and enjoy…

I took a two-part class on Ford last year at Facets (don’t get jealous), and the instructor quoted from the McBride book quite a bit.

Okay, I have to take the plunge and put together a list for my post. Thanks for the idea, R. Emmet Sweeney.