More and less than Greed David Thomson’s singular Hollywood history BY RICHARD C. WALLS
	The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood By David Thomson. Alfred A. Knopf, 416 pages, $27.95.

David Thomson isn’t the first person you’d think to go to for a just-the-facts history of Hollywood, or a history of anything else, for that matter. His main claim to fame is his Biographical Dictionary of Film, now in its fourth edition, and even those who think it’s an impressively informative, entertaining, and insightful work (I’ve kept a copy nearby since ’76) will also admit that it’s eccentric or at least more subjective than you might expect from a book that has "dictionary" in its title. The pleasure in reading Thomson is two-fold: it derives from his style, those smoothly quotable mini bios, and from his occasionally surprising and well-reasoned opinions. He’s a critic one is happy both to agree with and to argue with. He tests your own critical mettle; if you like John Ford’s movies, for example, but can’t defend them from Thomson’s dissent, then you’re probably wrong.

And so this book is, as the title says, "a" history, one of several possible ones, and informed by Thomson’s well-established likes and dislikes. It’s also very ambitious. The title comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished final novel, The Last Tycoon: "You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don’t understand. It can be understood too, 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." And what is the whole equation? "So when I talk about ‘the whole equation,’ " Thomson writes, "I mean not just the history of American movies, but the history of America in the time of movies" and "the history of the whole thing 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."

The implication here is that Thomson means to counter the romanticism of the auteurists and the notion that moviemaking sometimes involves creative artists being beaten down by studio pigs. Not that it doesn’t, in some sense, it’s just that the whole equation renders a more complicated picture. His best-made case involves studio wunderkind Irving Thalberg (who was the model for The Last Tycoon) and his handling of Erich von Stroheim’s 1925 film Greed, which the director had whittled down to a monumental eight hours and which Thalberg then cut down to just over two. In Thomson’s telling, Thalberg comes across as more a practical facilitator of getting the movie into the marketplace than a mere philistine outraged by Stroheim’s gall. "For those of a mind to believe that the American movie was within reach of ‘art,’ it has always been easy to describe Greed as a tragic loss. But for anyone willing to allow that American film is something else — not an art so much as a business based on moving us — then what happened is not only understandable but reasonable. It shows Thalberg as a model of fairness. As if fairness had anything to do with art — no, it is the mealy-mouthed language of common sense and business and politics."

Thomson loves movies, it’s clear, but he worries that people sometimes overestimate them — he insists on context, on mentioning that in 1912, the year Mahler’s Ninth Symphony was first performed, D.W. Griffith’s "art" was still naive and coarse. And he knows this is a provocation. "This harping on what other arts were doing may seem like the thin edge of snobbery’s wedge. But it’s only an attempt to see film as the art it might be," he argues when discussing the Virginia Woolf–inspired The Hours, a film that he likes very much but that he says "suffers terribly in comparison with Mrs. Dalloway."

But the main part of the whole equation, the part that gets the most emphasis, involves the business side of moviemaking and the structures of the film factories and the assorted types that are needed to oil and exploit the machine. And that’s my only complaint about the book — it can get a little dull, something I wasn’t expecting from this particular writer. At one point, Thomson says, writing about the machinations of the Music Corporation of America and the Screen Actors Guild during the early days of television, "I hope this doesn’t sound too technical." But it does, as does a lot of the stuff that follows the money, dissects the byzantine structure of power, lists annual profits, and speculates on where the money really went — at least in the sense that it’s something you read and think, "I’ll come back to this and really try to grasp it when I think it’s something I should really know, which may be never."

That’s me, of course: business remains a thing forever opaque, and though I’ve been a paid movie critic long enough to doubt my sanity, I still don’t care about the details of the David Begelman scandal (just the juicy bits). But there’s so much more here. There are familiar stories like Chaplin’s rise and fall, Griffith’s rise and fall, Selznik’s rise and fall, stylishly retold, a clutch of interpolated thumbnail bios, meditations on California sunlight and what it means to be a member of an audience. B-movies get short shrift — they’re addressed only when post-WW2 noir arrives — and the development of the modern rating system is barely mentioned. But Thomson is thorough in shoring up his view that Hollywood movies were never quite an art, that they’ve descended from a golden age that never quite happened, and that things are just getting worse. You may want to argue with that, but I highly recommend you read the book first.