Latest Readings by Clive James Page B

Cleopatra , UA totally ruined by Heaven’s Gate —but in fact the structures underwent decades of early testing and usually could be shaken only when it made business sense to merge or be absorbed.
    Hollywood is a scale model of corporate America. Soon I will once again read The Genius of the System , by Thomas Schatz. I can tell I will, because I never really stop reading it. Exhaustively researched in the studio archives, the book shows how the survival of any filmmaking enterprise depended on Poverty Row: there had to be ordinary product to make the money, so that the occasional extraordinary product could aim at prestige, and thus act as a loss leader even when it failed. It was all worked out before sound was invented. And although many of the men who built the system loved the movies, they could just as well have been selling gloves. Most of them were Jews, as Neal Gabler describes in An Empire of Their Own . Good at finance, they used their expertise to move into a businessterritory that didn’t yet exist. It was a collective act of imagination, which would attain such an all-pervasive reality that we can’t now imagine our lives without it. My own business has always been with serious books, yet I have spent a large proportion of my life—years, when you add it up—watching movies and their television derivatives, and a lot of the books I have read have been about those movies. Some of them felt like a waste of time, but usually I felt as if I was learning something, unless the book was devoted to the kind of film theory that briefly surfaced in the 1960s and struck anyone intelligent as simply begging to be ignored. (The word “semiotics” was always a tip-off: head for the hills!) When I classify film books now, as time gets tighter, I ask myself whether the book is likely to contain anything I don’t know already. I have just read Tom Shone’s lavishly illustrated monograph on Scorsese . Shone writes well, but I would probably not have read his book if I hadn’t been asked to review it; whereas his wide-ranging treatise Blockbuster is a book I would like to read again. Books that give you the cultural scope of Hollywood are valuable right up the point when it is some sub–Frankfurt School pundit writing them, and even then, Otto Friedrich’s City of Nets , written from a loftyEuropean viewpoint, is full of crunchy moments. (It was Friedrich who revealed to me that in California during the Nathanael West period there was a cult fad billing itself as Brain Breathing: The Secret of the Aztecs.) The glossy book in a large format, on the other hand, is rarely worth the effort of lifting it. David Thomson’s Moments That Made the Movies ranks nowhere beside his often-revised Biographical Dictionary of Film , which is even more batso but at least gives you a shower of judgments you can argue with. On that level, film books are a way of quarrelling while alone. They are popcorn reading for people who are glad not to have to share their popcorn. I exempt from this stricture any collection of pieces by a proper film critic such as David Denby or (the incomparable, in my view) Anthony Lane, but I wonder whether the collection of critical journalism, as a form, might not die with the print media. If so, it could live again on the web. As a print journalist who still remembers the sweet smell of hot metal, I would like to think that my principal means of expression will not survive my passing, but the truth is that nothing stops the kids. On my own website I have provided a gateway (in the Web section) to a blog called Self-Styled Siren . Sane in judgment and global in scope, the Siren, whose real nameis Farran Nehme, seems to have seen every movie in the world. Even more annoyingly, she writes like an ace. You can cruise her site for a long time before remembering that time is not infinite, even though the love of art might seem to make it so.

Extra Shelves
    WHEN IS AN EXTRA bookshelf not really an extra