When he was nine he saw “Gone with the Wind” for the first time. Earlier, his father explained to him, it would not have been for him. Daniel Selznick happily tells this little story from his youth. He then saw the film in a special screening in his father’s projection room and invited his whole class to do it. The father was David O. Selznick, the legendary Hollywood producer, he had also produced “Gone with the Wind” in the thirties.
The film “Sunset Over Hollywood” by Uli Gaulke and Marc Pitzke, which will be broadcast on Wednesday at 10:50 pm on ARD and can already be viewed in the media library, thrives on such little stories. They are stories, told quite incidentally, they do not correct the big history of the cinema, but give a picture of life and work in the Hollywood dream factory – not of the big stars, but of the scriptwriters, editors and sound engineers, actors who work with the Stars had to do.
It looks like a children’s holiday camp, but some residents are a hundred years old
The location of the film is a small residential complex on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, with small bungalows sometimes with small US flags on them, with clean winding paths, bushes and trees in autumnal red. It looks like a holiday camp for children, and In a way, those who live here are really like children, naive and agile, but all around a hundred years old, some even more. There are a lot of walkers and power wheelchairs on the go.
The Motion Picture & Television Country House is a facility founded, sponsored, and financed by the Hollywoodians themselves, originally in 1921. Jodie Foster, for example, recently financed a fitness center, and George Clooney hosted the event to mark the 95th anniversary of its founding. Actress Anne Faulkner recalls that she once played with Clooney in the TV series “Roseanne”, and as a reminder there are – you can hardly imagine it – a few seconds from it, with a young Clooney with a curly head.
Another actress, Connie Sawyer, was 103 years old when she sat in front of Gaulke’s camera (she died two years later). She remembers playing in films with Susan Hayward or Dean Martin. She still applies for roles, goes to auditions, but of course no one wants to insure her at her age anymore.
Remembering is only a small part of the occupation here, one is extremely active and sociable, writing on his memoirs or at least speaking through the titles for it, now on the computer and with the mouse, which the elderly use confidently. The letters on the screens are bigger, but the poetry of the sentences is youthful and emotional. And new projects are discussed, for example how things will go on with Rick and Ilsa years after the end of “Casablanca”. You are well aware of how your own profession works, how fiction and truth are related, the difference between lies and fiction.
Daniel Selznick actually never wanted to get into the film business, even when his father pushed him. Eventually he did become a producer on a number of films aimed at young audiences. One of these films was “American Graffiti” directed by George Lucas.