Features

Film critic David Thomson will host a wide-ranging series of films at UC Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive this month by way of illustrating the themes and opinions expressed in his latest book, The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood.  

Thomson, a regular contributor to the New York Times, Film Comment and Salon, puts forth a vast perspective on Hollywood and its history, one that attempts to encompass every aspect of the conception, construction and consumption of movies. It can be difficult to get a solid grasp on Thomson’s theory, but then that’s really the point; the history, structure and inner workings of the movie industry are so complex, with so many motives, desires, personalities and egos, that critics have rarely, if ever, attempted a compre hensive view of the entire machine.  

The book takes its title from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel The Last Tycoon, from a passage in which the daughter of a character based loosely on MGM boss Louis B. Mayer gives her view of the milieu in which she has grown up: “(Hollywood) can be understood…but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.” 

Thomson has brashly set out not only to understand that equation, but to exp lain it to the rest of us, and the book and PFA series do an admirable—if necessarily incomplete—job of it, offering a sequence of images, anecdotes and analyses that provide flashes of the big picture, if not a concise, linear narrative of the influences of, and on, the movies.  

William Faulkner, attempting to explain his discursive writing style, once said that he was “trying to put the history of mankind in one sentence…to put it all on the head of a pin.” Thomson’s prose often has this quality, as tho ugh he was rushing head-long through a dizzying maze of history and drama, breathlessly tossing off facts and thoughts and opinions and details, hoping that the links between the words and images might now and then coalesce into a discernible pattern, gra nting the reader those tantalizing yet fleeting glimpses of the “whole equation.” 

To condense such an ambitious book into a series of 19 films is no easy task. But what the program manages to do is put these titles, both familiar and unfamiliar, in a fre sh context, providing the audience with a framework for examining these movies in a new light.  

Thomson’s selection will take viewers on a rambling tour of a century of movies, from silent to contemporary drama, from musicals to horror. 

The idea for th e series began with a conversation between Thomson and Edith Kramer, senior film curator and director of Pacific Film Archive, when Thomson mentioned his latest project: a single book that would cover the entire history of the American film industry.  

“W hen David told me he was working on a one-volume history of Hollywood, I said ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’” Kramer says. She then invited him to present a series of films, coinciding with the release of the book, that would illustrate his ideas. 

“He’s not writing about his favorite movies,” Kramer says. “It’s a look at the evolution of how and why films are made, and what is expected of them.” 

The series begins Thursday at 7 p.m. with a lecture and book-signing by Thomson, followed, appropriately enough, by a screening of The Last Tycoon (Elia Kazan, 1976), a movie that Thomson considers flawed, but one that nonetheless illustrates one of his major themes—that Hollywood can be viewed as an ongoing war “between factory product and the chance of a movie th at could move the world.” 

It is this hunger for big-stakes gambling, this crazy notion that great profits are to be made from great art, that lurks behind many of these films. As Thomson states in his book, there are any number of more reliable methods t o make money, but this most un-businesslike business of Hollywood seems bent on the pursuit of a miraculously perfect marriage of art and commerce.  

And the funny thing is, sometimes it works.  

Later films in the series expand on this theme, most notab ly the great “lost masterpiece” of the silent era, Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924), a sprawling opus that pitted the director against his employer, MGM, in a battle of the auteur versus the factory system.  

Stroheim, the first of the renegade directors, wanted to adapt the gritty realism of Frank Norris’ novel McTeague to the screen, and did so, taking his crew on location to the settings described in the book: San Francisco’s Polk Street and the Cliff House, the goldmines of Placer County, to the shor eline in Oakland and the mudflats of what is now Emeryville. His obsession with detail and his passion for realism left him with a movie nearly 10 hours long. 

Irving Thalberg, MGM’s head of production and the inspiration for The Last Tycoon’s central cha racter, took the film away from Stroheim, cutting it down to just two hours. Stroheim disowned the final product, claiming that his masterpiece had been destroyed, and generations of movie buffs were left with only tantalizing clues as to the film’s original form. 

This story arc—with the charisma and reputation of a miracle-pursuing artist convincing businessmen to gamble on a high-stakes dream—recurs in the PFA series with Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino, 1981). The director’s promise of a crowd-pleasing masterpiece enticed United Artists to endure an interminable production schedule and a skyrocketing budget for a box office failure that ultimately bankrupted the studio.  

These two examples merely scratch the surface; the breadth of the series, and the book from which it stems, is an attempt, in Thomson’s words, to capture the history of the medium “in a way that could accommodate the artistic careers, the lives of the pirates, the ebb and flow of business, the sociological impact—in short the wonder in the dark, the calculation in the offices, and the staggering impact on America of moving pictures…To be whole, the equation needs all of those things. And more.” 

It’s a vast topic, an equation that does not allow itself to be viewed directly or clearly or for very long. But for the next few weeks, David Thomson and Pacific Film Archive will provide their audiences with a chance to glimpse it in the form of 19 fascinating and not-so-dim flashes.