What Used to Be
You may recall Hollywood always has celebrated a bygone era as more fabulous than the present one.
Remember Gloria Swanson’s lament as Norma Desmond in "Sunset Boulevard"?
"We had faces then!
"All they make today is — and they’re making it without me," lamented an unemployed former MGM contract player during an interview a few years ago.
Dead or Alive?
Still, one remembers such things as Burt Reynolds’ sly remark when asked why he turned down the role of Rhett Butler in the sequel of "Gone With The Wind."
"I won’t compete with Clark Gable," Reynolds remarked.
"Clark Gable’s been dead for 20 years!" snapped the producer.
Reynolds smiled. "No,” he said, “Hoot Gibson is dead. Clark Gable is still alive."
“Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart and Gary Cooper did not go on ‘The Tonight Show’ or ‘Larry King Live’ and talk about taking out their garbage," observed one producer.
Private Showing Only
Once an old photographer from the glamour days of Hollywood showed me a series of photos that would never see the light of day. One was of an exhausted Clark Gable on the set of "The Misfits." Then there were a series of pictures of Frank Sinatra having a chummy conversation with bent-nosed guys who would make “The Sopranos” look like choirboys.
"If any photographer had released a photo of one of MGM’s stars in the manner that the tabloids do today, with Britney Spears or Brad and Angelina,” cracked an oldtimer, “L.B. Mayer would have had Icepick Sam bury the photographer and his camera somewhere between Needles and Death Valley."
But then Hollywood has always looked its worst when it took itself seriously.
This Oscar No Wiener
Nominated as the "worst movie ever made" was a rancid piece of 1966 ham called "The Oscar." The plot: A friend of a movie star recalls his chum’s rise to fame on the night of the Academy Awards. Snapped one critic, "Squalid, sensationalist account of Hollywood mores. One hopes it isn’t quite true."
Richard Schickel wrote about "The Oscar" as “that true movie rarity, a picture that attains a perfection of ineptitude quite beyond the power of words to describe."
No Aging in Hollywood
A friend who now lives in Atlanta witnessed the red carpet parada at the Kodak on Oscar night last month.
"Isn’t there anybody left in Hollywood with wrinkles?” she asked me the next day. “The Walk of Fame should be re-named Botox Alley."
Several Laughs Left
Hollywood hasn’t totally lost its sense of humor.
For me, the high points of the evening were host Ellen DeGeneres’s candid camera bits with Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielberg. There was more flair in the Coca-Cola commercials shown at intervals than in many of the nominated films.
