Tales of old Hollywood are always entertaining – even when they’re apocryphal

Despite being known as a visually driven town, Hollywood has a rich oral history. This may be due to the fact that it is (like most literary communities) a small, gossipy village in which everybody knows everybody else and what everybody is saying about them. It also testifies to the fact that while Hollywood’s ‘players’ may often produce stupid films, they aren’t actually stupid themselves. Most of the time they know exactly what they’re doing – which is what makes them so perplexing.

According to this hefty book, which assembles more than half a century’s worth of interviews conducted by the American Film Institute, Hollywood’s early days weren’t as glamorous as the later ones, but they certainly seemed a lot more fun. As Henry Hathaway recalled of the early 20th century, after Carl Laemmle established Universal Studios in the San Fernando Valley, the industry attracted bright, restless people who had trouble keeping their jobs: