Moguls & Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood (2010)

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

I should be clear that I am a film history buff, and i really thought I knew pretty much everything there was to know, until I saw Moguls and Movie stars.The documentary starts off in the penny arcades, where we are told that films are considered the entertainment choice of the poor and less educated. This quickly dismissed medium soon takes the world by storm.We then learn how powerful women where at the beginning stages of Hollywood, working as writers and directors, and producing some of the biggest films of the era. The documentary examines the pre-Hayes code films, and what Hollywood did to clean up its own image.Hollywood's handling of Hitler and World War II is told with amazing insight, and it contains a real eye opening story on how Casleblanca may never had been made if it weren't for Pearl Harbor.We then move on to the films of the 50's and 60's, and the story of James Dean is told. The series does end way too soon, as the 1970's, and the era of the cheap drive in flick don't get this stories told.Christopher Plummer is amazing as the narrator, and makes the entire series enjoyable. Hopefully, another installment will be produced, connecting a hundred plus years of Hollywood. This is a must series for not only the true film buff like myself, or the novice with a new interest in the history of Hollywood.

This series shown during the holiday season on TCM has recently been re- broadcast. Narrated in part by the prolific Christopher Plummer, it gives one the sense of the origins, of film, the earlier Swanson and silent film era, and the later studio system, and then TV culture.You will see many different episodes here, and the facts are well-delineated. The early silent films, with the candle light effects of the film "Queen Kelly" starring Gloria Swanson and produced by financier Joseph P.Kennedy (JFK's father.) This type of series is so very valuable when we see other networks offering serial tripe (Greg Kinnear as JFK on "Reelz" channel).The era of the movie moguls, Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, and his grandson, talking about the business.We also see the era of the 1950's, Monroe, John Wayne, Jane Russell and the power of Howard Hughes at that time.There are also some wonderful interviews with Carl Laemmle's niece who recalls the experience of working on "The Phantom of The Opera" ( an amazing original DVD collection now available). There remains an historical Laemmle theater on the Santa Monica promenade today.Visit it if you are in town.Overall this is a wonderful series which delineates old Hollywood, the star system and many of the past actors who now only leave their indelible, yet fleeting presence. James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, Billy Wilder, Marilyn Monroe, Lana Turner.How amazing those films were, and we know we shall not see a repetition of this history ever again, sadly, in American cinema. 10/10.

If you're coming to this seven part series expecting something like Brownlow's encyclopedic work "Hollywood" you'll be disappointed. This history really limits itself to the joint story of Hollywood and the moguls that formed and sustained the industry from the 1890's until the 1960's. The end of this period is marked by the retirement of Jack Warner, the last of the founding fathers of the industry and the last movie mogul.What may confuse some people is that the first episode of the series really concentrates on the beginning of the movies and what led up to the invention of the motion picture. The early moguls are mentioned but not stressed in this first episode as they are in all the others. Movie stars are mentioned throughout the series as are important directors, but ultimately it is the story of the men who founded the first motion picture studios and how they navigated an industry through the changing times and the first 80 years of film history.

This series of documentary shows which has been running on the Turner Classic Movies cable station in the United States, gives a very good if standard view of the history of motion pictures -- anyone who has read a lot on the subject will find many 'facts' offered which he or she 'knows' to be false.Nonetheless, this is a very good introduction to the history of the movies and will give people just discovering old films a good idea of the general thrust of their evolution. Filled with sound bites from experts as well as clips and images, it shows, first that movies did no arise from nowhere, but grew out of half a millennium of technical evolution and the peculiar combination of events that led diverse people to become the leaders in what was the major entertainment industry for a good part of the 20th century.