Less than the sum of its parts

You can measure David Thomson’s ambition by his title. “The Whole Equation” is the famous phrase from the first page of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Last Tycoon,” in which the narrator insists that only “half a dozen” men have fully solved the higher (or possibly lower) mathematics of moviemaking. With this volume, Thomson intends to elbow his way into their company.

You can measure the originality of his approach on his book’s first page. Not for him that dreary slog through the prehistory of cinema, with its dutiful allusions to “Fred Ott’s Sneeze” or “The Kiss” or “Life of an American Fireman,” with which most movie histories begin. No, his first chapter is about “Chinatown,” inarguably, I think, one of the great Modernist gestures of contemporary cinema. This is in medias res with a vengeance.

You can measure the extent of his failure to live up to the large promise of his subtitle, “A History of Hollywood,” merely by noting that his 22 chapters are, in fact, a collection of linked essays on a historical theme -- episodic, idiosyncratic, often rather lazily researched -- not by any stretch of the imagination a coherent work of history. Which is a way of saying that “The Whole Equation” is much more a literary production than a historical one, perhaps predictably so from a man who, in his introduction to everyone’s favorite movie cheat sheet, “The New Biographical Dictionary of Film,” confesses, “I love books more than films.”

This is not necessarily a bad thing. So much writing about the movies is sub-literate piffle of either the academic or the journalistic kind. The sheen and sparkle of Thomson’s prose, the way it gracefully asserts his particular sensibility, deserve celebration. That said, however, I think the conceit driving his book -- Fitzgerald’s romantic belief that there actually is a “whole equation” that will explain the movies -- is nonsense.

There is no “whole equation.” And there never was one. Or, rather, there have been many of them that worked for a while and then failed to work -- a fact that Fitzgerald himself more or less acknowledged when he wrote that Hollywood could be understood “only dimly and in flashes.” What Thomson has given us -- and I’m not sure he’s fully conscious of his own limits and bias -- is one of those flashes, a bright flicker of lightning illuminating a darkling plain, the monuments of which are almost universally of a particular kind.

What the man likes in movies is literacy of a very traditional sort -- witty dialogue, novelistic structure and (much harder to come by) intensely explicated characters. He is not particularly concerned with purely visual -- or “cinematic” -- representations of reality. His taste in films of this kind is impeccable, ranging as it does from “His Girl Friday” to “Letter From an Unknown Woman” to “In a Lonely Place,” all of which are, in differing ways, wonderfully written films. On the other hand, his bias toward conventional literacy in film flaws his consideration of other aspects of “the whole equation.”

It is not exactly news that American movies, besides being presumptively an art form, have always been a furiously chugging economic engine. A movie historian has an obligation, nearly as intense as any studio production chief’s, to acknowledge the bottom line. But Thomson’s attention to that matter is, putting it mildly, highly selective. He scarcely mentions, for example, Adolph Zukor, who, more than anyone else, organized the industry along the lines that prevailed in the days of its highest power -- that is to say, as a vertical oligopoly. Similarly, he pays relatively little attention to the raffish, fractious Warner brothers, whose studio produced most of the American movies of the 1930s and 1940s that still matter. The same is true of his cursory treatment of the monstrous (and very smart) Harry Cohn at Columbia. And he has nothing pertinent to say about William Fox, who lost control of his studio in complicated legal wranglings that predicted, in primitive form, the mergers and acquisitions frenzy of a later day.

Of the traditional major studios, only Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer much interests Thomson -- he writes well about the way its sainted head of production, Irving Thalberg, model for Fitzgerald’s highly romanticized “last tycoon,” applied the reins to movie-mad (or ego-addled) Erich von Stroheim on “Greed”; about how Thalberg got his comeuppance a few years later from his boss, Louis B. Mayer; and on the tangled relationship among Mayer, his daughter Irene and her husband, David O. Selznick, producer of the elephantine and (to me) virtually unwatchable “Gone With the Wind.”

Perhaps, you say, Thomson intends the MGM story as a typification of “the whole equation.” Not so. It just happens to be the one he knows the most about. For in the course of writing a wretchedly excessive (792 pages) biography of Selznick, he became friends with his jilted wife, the darkly glamorous, profoundly neurotic Irene Mayer Selznick, and this book is almost fatally unbalanced by his continuing obsession with the Mayer-Selznick axis. Yes, MGM was for a while the grandest lion in the Hollywood jungle. But Thalberg, Selznick and to a lesser extent Mayer shared Thomson’s affection for inert adaptations of novels and plays, which when we encounter them now seem mostly to be deadly parodies of the classy literary values they once aped.

This, implicitly, is what Thomson acknowledges when he speaks of the movies he loves best. Very few MGM pictures from the classic age make his cut. (Ernst Lubitsch’s sublime “The Shop Around the Corner” is one exception.) His attention to directors and stars is similarly eccentric. He does not notice, for example, how the auteur theory -- so easy to comprehend and apply -- has granted directors unprecedented power in today’s Hollywood equation, even though there are among them no more true artists than there were back in the days when they were regarded more as construction foremen. Similarly, he does not notice that the celebrity system has replaced the studio system as the dominant force in Hollywood’s “equation.” By not showing how that happened, Thomson misses the opportunity to make an invaluable and original contribution to film history. Instead, he pumps up enthusiasm for Harvey Weinstein, who has lately determined that the high road to the Oscars consists -- you guessed it -- of making old-fashioned literary adaptations. If your idea of movie greatness is snoozing through “The English Patient” or “Cold Mountain,” then I guess we can regard “the whole equation” as, for the moment, solved.

Though that does leave the whole question of Nicole Kidman’s nose unanswered. We are speaking now of the prosthetic proboscis she ludicrously donned to impersonate Virginia Woolf in “The Hours.” OK, Thomson has the hots for her, and these curious connections between audience and actors are not to be shuffled off; he is correct to insist that they, too, must be part of his “whole equation.” Some of his best and most daring writing in this book is on that topic.

But he worries that the pretty, bubbly Nicole he saw subsequently on the Oscar broadcast seemed emotionally unaffected by her thespian stretch (never mind that it occurred at least a year previously and she may have experienced some interim distractions). He also worries that even though he quite liked “The Hours” -- literature’s fatal attraction again -- he was not as moved by it as he was by Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” which inspired it.

Where, he wonders, “has there been a movie that comes anywhere near catching this tapestry of human movement in an actual city, with the flash of ideas and feelings that goes with it” as the novel does? “I cannot hold back the realization that maybe the movies have never been good enough. Good enough for us and for life. For we deserve more.”

But wait a minute. His complaint is misplaced. This movie is a reasonably faithful adaptation of a popular, prize-winning “literary” fiction. To say that this may not be ideal material for the screen is probably true. But to suggest that this proves there is something inherently inferior about the movies as a medium is absurd. The things they do best in their rambunctious, half-romantic, half-realistic way is antithetical to what Woolf did. It is neither better nor worse (think of all the rotten novels you’ve read), just different.

Let me end where Thomson begins -- with “Chinatown,” that most novelistic of movies. It fully meets Thomson’s criterion for greatness because it succeeds in “catching the tapestry of human movement in an actual city,” though in terms heartbreakingly cinematic rather than literary. But still, it lacks for him the purity of a great novelist’s endeavor. For the screenwriter, Robert Towne, spent months, day in, day out, hammering out revisions to his original script with the director, Roman Polanski. In the course of their wrangles, the former’s original, rather subtle, ending was famously replaced with a more melodramatic one, which Towne finally came to think worked better.

Impure fellow that he is, Towne accepted an unshared Oscar for the work. “Tsk,” goes Thomson, apparently forgetting the long tradition of heavy, unremunerated editing on literary works (Ezra Pound on “The Waste Land,” Maxwell Perkins on Thomas Wolfe). Worse, Towne “traded off” copyright control of his creation, which was also unwriterly of him. “Tsk-tsk,” goes Thomson, though “trading off” is an inappropriate phrase. The idea that a writer might hold the copyright to a screenplay and merely license it temporarily to a producer, as playwrights do their plays, is a pretty one. And 80 years ago, people actually discussed it in a theoretical sort of way. But nothing came of it: Movies were even then too expensive for such niceties. I don’t know why Thomson is so persnickety about these matters, though my suspicion is that for some reason he abhors the very quality I most value about movies, which is the accidental way they occasionally achieve greatness. It is the source of their mystery, their seductiveness, their charm, their lunacy.

In the end, despite its many stylistic felicities and provocative theories, “The Whole Equation” is movie history for people who don’t much like movies, which is all right as long as the rest of us are stirred to argument rather than bored to tears. That, surely, Thomson accomplishes. I do wish, however, that he would abandon his fastidiousness, this pose about movies not being quite “good enough” for him, that has become a feature of his recent writing. We all have to do something to occupy the interval between cradle and grave, and writing about the movies is by no means the worst available way to pass that time. “Forget it, Dave, it’s Hollywood.” *