City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940’s - Otto Friedrich

Written by Otto Friedrich
Read by P.J. Ochlan
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc.
Release date: March 9, 2022
Duration: 26:15:05

In 1939, fifty million Americans went to the movies every week, Louis B. Mayer was the highest-paid man in the country, and Hollywood produced 530 feature films a year. One decade and five thousand movies later, the studios were faltering.

The 1940s became the decade of Hollywood’s decline: anticommunist hysteria excommunicated some of its best talent, while a 1948 antitrust consent decree ended many of the business practices that had made the studio system so profitable. In this masterful work of cultural history, the legendary Otto Friedrich tells the story of Hollywood’s heyday and decline in a vivid narrative featuring an all-star cast of the actors, writers, musicians, composers, producers, directors, racketeers, labor leaders, journalists, and politicians who played major parts in the movie capital during the turbulent decade from World War II to the Korean War.

Friedrich draws on sources from celebrity biographies to trade-union history, mingling lively gossip with analysis of Hollywood’s seedier business dealings and telling the stories of legendary movies such as Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, and All About Eve.

Publishers Weekly—-Taking his title from Brecht’s Mahagonny, that “city of nets” where everything is permitted, Friedrich tells the familiar story of Hollywood’s heyday and decline as part of a sweeping social and cultural history that takes in everything from Rita Hayworth’s electrolysis (to give her a higher hairline) to union corruption, the Zoot Suit riots, the gangster Bugsy Siegel inventing Las Vegas. He is particularly good on the European refugee community: Mann, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Brecht, et al.who produced some of their most distinguished work while their neighbors turned out Betty Grable musicals, and whose encounters with the studio moguls are among the most richly comic moments in our cultural history … Friedrich mixes all these elements (and more) in a narrative that is often funny and remarkably even-handed (e.g., his concise account of the HUAC hearings) a must for movie buffs and a rewarding read for everyone else.”