Bringing Up Oscar

November 22, 2010
Pawlak, a contributor to Arcadia Publishing's "Making of America" series, traces the lives of the 36 key figures in the cinema community who launched the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1927, the same year talkies arrived with The Jazz Singer. An opening about 19th-century Hollywood and one-reel flickers leads into brief biographies of picture pioneers Sid Grauman, Louis B. Mayer, Jesse Lasky, Samuel Goldwyn, Cecil B. DeMille, and others involved in the early expansion of the film industry: "By 1908, about 8,000 neighborhood movie theaters had opened throughout the country." The book features such actors as Douglas Fairbanks and Harold Lloyd, and the roster of directors includes John Stahl, Fred Niblo and Raoul Walsh, followed by producers Harry Rapf and Irving Thalberg. Pawlak covers only three women among the 36—actress Mary Pickford, screenwriter Beth Meredyth, and actress-writer Jeanie Macpherson, who had herself imprisoned to research her 1922 Manslaughter screenplay. By skillfully weaving such highlights of Hollywood history throughout this Tinseltown tapestry, Pawlak succeeds in recreating that colorful era when flickers turned into features and silents converted to sound.

November 15, 2010

Pawlak (Farmington and Farmington Hills, 2003) charts the establishment of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization best known for its annual distribution of the Academy Awards.

Unfortunately, Oscar fans will find little here to entice them. The author mostly foregoes any discussion of the fabled ceremonies, instead providing biographical sketches of the Academy's founders. The result is a useful but dull primer on the movers and shakers of early Hollywood, with the familiar histories of such luminaries as Douglas Fairbanks and Cecil B. DeMille leavened with those of less well-known players, including lawyer Edwin Loeb and early special-effects maven Roy Pomeroy. Pawlak has done her homework—most of the profiles include information on the salient figure's parents, siblings, employment history, marital status and financial standing—but the cumulative effect of all the data, especially as regards the relatively obscure likes of, say, Fred Niblo or Milton Sills, is ultimately stultifying and frustratingly hard to keep straight. The Academy was founded to help settle disputes, act as an educational repository for advancements in film technology and protect the industry's image amid scandals and public outrage at the extravagance of the movie-star lifestyle. Pawlak largely neglects to report on the Academy's activities in the pursuit of these goals. Instead, the author uses the founding of the Academy as a seemingly arbitrary matrix for celebrating the careers of Tinseltown's pioneering artists, technicians and businessmen. Pawlak's workmanlike prose and journalistic approach fail to elevate the material beyond an admirably detailed historical survey, but the sheer invention of the first generation of moviemakers inevitably results in appreciation.

A serviceable but flavorless history of early Hollywood.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

November 1, 2010
In January 1927, movie mogul Louis B. Mayer gathered together 36 of the leading movers and shakers in the still-fledgling film industry and proposed the founding of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, arguing that by working together this group of cantankerous individualists could ensure that business would prosper in the coming decades. From Thalberg to Warner to DeMille, Mayers big idea was met with approval, and the academy was born, eventually to give birth itself to a statuette called Oscar. In this fascinating if scattered account, Pawlak gallops through the early history of moviemaking, following the various careers of the original 36. Much of this materialespecially about the mogulsis available elsewhere, but by focusing on all the founders, Pawluk is able to re-create the peculiar form of community that existed among a group of otherwise vicious competitors. Unfortunately, the book is devoid of any real narrative structure, and the unnecessary repetition of the same stories becomes more than a little annoying. Still, for those willing to mine the rambling text for anecdotes, there are nuggets aplenty to be found here.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)