This is a standalone class that will feature a pre-recorded lecture
“So much of Hollywood is a façade” -David O. Selznick
The most mysterious and influential and haunted real estate in the world stands beyond the tall walls of Hollywood’s seven major studios. Behind these formidable battlements lie not only the expected soundstages and artifice and casting coaches, but also what René Clair has romantically called “phantom towns” – backlot reproductions of the real world, crested specifically to evoke and to mimic actual locations.
Or is it the other way around? Sets on a studio backlot may suggest Shanghai at midnight or Dodge City at high noon, but only in the most superficial way possible. A backlot version of Casablanca need only look like Casablanca – or like an audience’s idea of what Casablanca looks like. And in fact, for most of us, that which makes us think we are familiar with Casablanca is probably born not from reality – but from watching specific films set but not filmed there. Even serious historians might not realize it, but, for the past hundred years our ideas of who we are, where we live, and what makes up our concept of the world have largely come, not from life, but from those haunted and mysterious secret cities that lie behind the tall walls of Hollywood.
For most of the 20th Century, the largest, and most influential of all of the great studios was, of course, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. So, using MGM as template to evoke the backlot era in its entirety, and featuring hundreds of photographs, film clips, quotes, and maps – many never seen anywhere before, author and Hollywood insider Steven Bingen will discuss cinema as it has never before been considered; as a fictionalization of reality created and shot inside yet another fictionalization of reality. An illusion within an illusion, all crafted within walled-off dream factories which most of us will never visit – but which will still be as hauntingly familiar to us as our own home towns.
This exciting, romantic and audacious presentation, approximately 90 minutes long, will take the adventurous cinephile on a whirlwind tour beyond the gates, onto the backlots and behind the scenes of a previously veiled Hollywood paradise. Be advised though, cinema, and real life too, may never feel quite the same way again.
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