The Hollywood Style

The Hollywood Style by Arthur Knight and Eliot Elisofon, published by The Macmillan Company in 1969, is a lavish look at the visual language of Hollywood in the era when glamour was not merely encouraged but apparently considered a production requirement.

Arthur Knight provides the commentary, while Eliot Elisofon’s photography helps capture the studios, stars, costumes, sets and carefully constructed illusion that made Hollywood look less like an industry and more like a parallel civilisation in which everybody owned better lighting.

This is a book about style in the broadest sense: not simply clothes, but the entire machinery of appearance. Hollywood understood very early that a successful image could be as important as a successful performance, and whole departments existed to ensure that actors, interiors, cars, parties and even staircases looked exactly as impressive as audiences expected.

The great studios did not merely make films. They manufactured fantasy on an industrial scale.

Everything mattered. Hair, tailoring, furniture, architecture, publicity photographs, hotel lobbies, swimming pools and the careful positioning of a cigarette could all contribute to the finished effect. Reality was welcome to attend, but was expected to wait outside until filming had finished.

The book captures that peculiar balance between elegance and artificiality which became one of Hollywood’s defining characteristics. A drawing room could be constructed from plywood, a mansion might exist only from one camera angle, and an actor photographed beside a swimming pool might have been contractually forbidden to enter it.

Yet the illusion worked magnificently.

Published in 1969, The Hollywood Style arrived at an interesting moment. The old studio system had already begun to fade, and the culture of Hollywood was changing rapidly. This gives the book the feel of a retrospective glance at a world that was still familiar but already beginning to look historic.

That makes it particularly appealing now. It does not simply document famous people or famous films, but an entire visual culture built around confidence, excess and the assumption that there was no problem which could not be improved by satin, chrome, dramatic lighting or an unnecessarily large staircase.

For readers interested in film history, photography, costume, design, architecture or twentieth-century popular culture, this is the sort of book that rewards slow browsing. It is also ideal for anyone who believes modern celebrity culture might be marginally more tolerable if people were required to wear evening dress before appearing in public.

The photographs are a major part of the attraction. Elisofon was one of the leading photographers of his generation, and his eye for composition gives the book a strong visual identity. Even readers with only a casual interest in cinema can enjoy it simply as a record of a very particular aesthetic world.

Condition: Good. A sound used copy with normal signs of age and handling. The dust jacket is complete, but there are a few small snags/tears around the bottom of the spine area. The jacket remains present and substantially intact, which is always a bonus on a book of this age and infinitely preferable to discovering that somebody discarded it in 1974 because they thought the bare boards looked tidier.

No ISBN stated.

A stylish and very period piece of film and design history, full of the visual confidence of old Hollywood and the comforting reminder that glamour has always involved considerably more organisation than it pretends.

Sold by Crappy Old Books — where the dust jackets may have survived a few decades of reality, but the glamour remains intact.

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