Sober and worldly, Thomson's book is both a disenchanted defense of the movies and a wearily, stubbornly enchanted grievance about same. For Thomson, his buddy Robert Towne's Chinatown is a metaphor for Hollywood's trade-offs, what with its story of how greed and the crime of incest created Los Angeles and all its big-city opportunities. (Thomson's worldliness is sometimes an implausible pose; to a great extent, he has assimilated Hollywood's ambience of implausibility.) On the one hand, as Thomson sees it, the bottom line looms too large in Hollywood to bear out studio executives' self-deluded claims of commitment to any kind of artistic vision. But the urge to create storytelling magic also remains too strong among some Hollywood figures to entirely squash hopes of making emotionally and even intellectually satisfying films, if not works of art.

And money is not always the enemy of those ambitions. While it's hard to share Thomson's inexplicable raptures over Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter, studio executives threw $15 million at Cimino to help him realize his (crude, cynical, puerile) vision of the Vietnam War and Vietnam-era America. It's not that money unfailingly corrupts art in Hollywood; it's that movie money is often drawn to mediocre art; and hyper-socialized hustlers, not introspective deep-feelers, are often drawn to movie-making. But Thomson can also cite a score of artistic triumphs like The Godfather and Blue Velvet (the latter produced, he notes, by "one of the ancient whores of the picture business, Dino De Laurentiis") that dipped deep into Hollywood's pockets while surviving its stupefying embrace.

In other words, Hollywood's sullying innocence and soiled idealism fit neatly into the parameters of American society--and vice versa. The larger the audience sought, the more the gravitational pull of higher numbers bends the quality of art. That could change. It could be that home videos and DVDs will someday allow movies to ignore the mass market altogether and bypass onerous distribution arrangements; maybe such films will, like books, acquire the integrity of a solitary art. Yet nothing in America that is meant to please even a small number of people seems to stay un-mass for long if it's successful.

Thomson is good, if somewhat dense, on the changing economics of Hollywood. (The Movie Business Book, just published in its third edition, is the best source for information about the green behind the silver screen.) But he's mainly interested in the movies' social and psychological nature, and he has many interesting, sometimes fascinating things to say in this regard about silent film ("in silent pictures characters actually talk a good deal of the time") and about filmmakers like Griffith and Stroheim, and about the human event that was Chaplin. On Chaplin's womanizing, Thomson is at his noirest and most macho: "Charlie fucked like a very wealthy man with an utterly private life." Infelicitous as that sentence may be, it presents a caustic paraphrase of celebrity. Thomson is at his best when he's exercising his gift for looking, as if for the first time, at worn, familiar phenomena like celebrity--and sex.

There's plenty of talk about sex in movies. There is no talk, however, about sex in the culture of movie-making. Yet the sexual opportunities available to most Hollywood scriptwriters, directors, actors and producers go way beyond the experience of the average, non-Hollywood American. Movies are often used to explain society, as if they were mediated yet fairly clear reflections of social experience. But behind the movies is a special society, trapped in its particular experience, that explains the movies.

Thomson is very explicit about the expectation, on the part of the old (and no doubt some of the new) Hollywood moguls, of sex from ambitious young actresses, especially the act of fellatio. With a kind of flaunted candor, Thomson writes in a discussion of Louis B. Mayer's conduct with young starlets: "Joan Crawford swallowed her share of cum, and her lips shone in close-ups. How do you think lip gloss got invented?" I'm not sure what the cosmetics industry would say about this--it would probably depend on whom they were talking to. And in an odd Barthesian turn, Thomson suggests that those names, often invented by male studio executives, that ended in an open vowel--Garbo, Harlow, Monroe--had something to do with that expectation. Whatever you make of his conceit, you see what he's getting at. (Bogey and Coop's lips certainly never shone.) Hollywood and Hollywood movies have always revolved, and still revolve, around what men want, expect, demand from women. Of course, such desires aren't exclusive to Hollywood. (Recall the Lewinsky scandal; though whereas Hollywood is libertine, sex in the nation's capital is a hypocritical mix of lasciviousness and prudery.) But they have a formative influence in Hollywood, the likes of which are rarely found outside Hollywood, whose products radically shape society. (Think Monica, from Beverly Hills.)

The effect of Hollywood's portrayal of sex as both the literal and symbolic center of existence is incalculable, especially the political effect. The tacit bargain used to be that working-class and middle-class Americans expected, in exchange for playing by the rules, that the popular culture they turned to for relaxation would reflect back to them positive images of people who played by the rules. Or at the very least they wouldn't be made to feel foolish or excluded for dutifully following the rules. The function of a generation of romantic comedies à la Doris Day, and sitcoms à la The Honeymooners or The Dick Van Dyke Show was to ennoble disappointment, limitations, and the postponement--sometimes forever--of gratification. There's scarcely any delay between a wish and its fulfillment in today's movies, where beautiful-looking people are regularly, and graphically, gratifying themselves with other beautiful-looking people. The decline of the sitcom means that the terms of the old tacit bargain are slowly being ignored on the small screen, too, which is an even more consequential development, given that medium's domestic immediacy.

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