Hollywood is a high-stakes, high-strung business, necessarily governed by uncommonly anxious, competitive, and emotional artists, hustlers, and entrepreneurs. The writing of its history—often left, incidentally, to screenwriters with time on their hands and scores to settle or, worse, authors who never made it as screenwriters—is impeded by the national obsession with fame, money, sex, power, and other fringe benefits of making it big in America’s favorite industry (in other words, dish), none of which have much to do with who or what makes a good movie good or a bad movie bad.
It says a lot about how we see Hollywood that even a hundred years after its founding, this enduring melodrama of trivia—who slept with whom, who screamed at whom, who made the most money, who snorted what—still passes for The Record. (Let me ask you: Who did Thomas Edison sleep with? And is that why we have electricity?)
