NONFICTION - Sept. 18, 1994

TALKING PICTURES: With the People Who Made Them, edited by Sylvia Shorris and Marion Bundy (The New Press: $25; 400 pp.) It was a nice notion. It just didn’t quite come off. The idea was to chat up some movie hands--property masters and producers, grips and gaffers--on how it was in a Hollywood of softer edges. A labor of love, really, and not too soon: Of 38 film people interviewed, 17 died before the book was published. The trouble is in the telling. Not that the old-timers are necessarily less-gifted raconteurs than vox pop. at large. Some are spellbinders. Some aren’t. That said, eavesdrop on some of the more colorful chroniclers of foretime:

William Fadiman, story editor: “Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, had an offer for the studio. I said, ‘Harry, why don’t you accept it? You’d have a lot more money.’ He said, ‘But who would invite me to dinner?’ ” Eleanor Wolquitt, reader: “They hired me to help (German writer Curt Siodmak) with the English idiom for ‘Tarzan and the Fountain of Youth.’ Like ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane,’ I suppose, instead of ‘Ich Tarzan, du Jane.’ ”

On second thought, there’s more than a chuckle, and instructive, too. Herbert Wrench, editor: “I needed some men laughing and I couldn’t find anything right, so I went down to the library and got some chickens clucking and ran it backwards. I put it in there and nobody knew.” That’s entertainment!