The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood (review)

David Thomson's The Whole Equation takes the reader inside the Hollywood dream factory while concurrently examining the culture from which these films emanate. Thomson breezes through Hollywood's history, putting it up as a vehicle transporting audiences from the beginning of the twentieth century until its wheels began to come off in the fifties. This period was a bumpy ride, mixing myth making and often questionable morality. To begin with, Hollywood was constructed by neither aristocrats nor philanthropists. According to Thomson, consequently, the road was paved by "magicians, con men, hacks and scoundrels" (22). The mixture of all these elements created a hot cauldron that in turn fermented "the hopes of art and the dream of money," turning Hollywood into the world's biggest dream factory, with a particular resonance in the lives of billions of people (17–19). Hollywood's history, therefore, is one of business, corruption, and social climbing unfolding under a combination of glamour and money, incarnated in the book by the marriage of Norma Shearer and Irving Thalberg.

Thomson writes about the movies at a time when, more than art and pleasure, Hollywood served as a form of social engineering incorporating new flows of working-class natives and immigrants coming to America for the gold rush and the glamour embedded in the American dream. Hollywood's lights did not burn only for the sake of their own glory; the industry helped millions of people access a better life for themselves. This knowledge explains why from the beginning Hollywood was a global production. It also helps explain the level of the intense worldwide engagement in the process.¹

There is a great deal of nostalgia in The Whole Equation. The book only covers Hollywood from 1927, with the coming of sound, up to the 1970s, with movies such as Chinatown (1974). Thomson focuses on the 1930s and 1940s as the heyday of the studio system, registering little but decline afterward. The jaded tone David Thomson uses to address contemporary films makes his nostalgia for Hollywood's golden age more poignant.²

Thomson writes this book as a nostalgic cinephile and a scholar, and The Whole Equation combines primary research, insightful analysis, and juicy gossip. He tackles Hollywood at a time when its shining light was capturing the global imagination, uncontested by other forms of media. It was a time when going to the movies was a communal experience, creating a particular form of cinephilia akin to religion. This book manages to reduce the generation gap between Thomson and me and the transition between movies as a communal experience versus the self-selected exposure and cultishness of contemporary movie experience.

Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I understand what Thomson means when he claims that he is no longer sure that young people today feel the same stealthy rapture of the novelty and glamour of cinema or are inclined to take it as seriously as their parents' generation (157–58). In Cameroon we did not get television until 1985. The movies reigned supreme up to that point. Having grown up watching the movies with my grandfather, an avid cinephile who built a movie theater for himself so that he could indulge his passion, I also look at the cinema with the same fondness and nostalgia. Today, in the age of DVDs and Netflicks, one cannot help but wonder with Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard how the movies have gotten smaller these days.

The strongest parts of The Whole Equation feature Thomson's analysis of the inner working of the studio system during the golden age of Hollywood, as reflected in the lives of powerful movers and shakers such as Irving Thalberg, Louis B. Mayer, and David O. Selznick. On the one hand, the portrayals of Eric Von Stroheim, Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, Frank Capra, and Francis Ford Coppola are powerful. On the other hand, women and minorities are given short shrift, reducing the history of Hollywood to a handful of powerful white guys...