Moguls & Movie Stars: The Birth of Hollywood (2010)
*** (out of 4)
The second entry in TCM's "A History of Hollywood" series takes a look at the big studio system as features came into play with the likes of Cecil B. DeMille and THE SQUAW MAN and movie stars like Charles Chaplin and Mary Pickford began to make large sums of money. As with the previous episode, I think there's just way too much footage thrown into such a short running time that it's nearly impossible to get a real view of this era. The film covers nearly thirteen-years worth of productions and trying to push this into 55-minutes was certainly a big challenge. I'm sure those unfamiliar with these early days are going to enjoy the stories and film clips but I think some people are going to know more than what's on display here and they'll probably know even more that isn't discussed here. We get brief talk about animation, Mabel Normand and Roscoe Arbuckle, Mack Sennett and of course THE BIRTH OF A NATION, which ended up changing everything. We briefly hear about Hollywood's need to have political groups in their back pocket and we learn how some filmmakers were willing to push the boundaries with nudity and more exploitation type matters. Again, for those unfamiliar with this portion of Hollywood then I'm sure they're going to learn quite a bit and I'm sure they'll get plenty of great clips that they'll want to check out. I just think as a whole the series doesn't have enough scope and especially when you have so many documentaries out there including Hollywood plus countless other works that take a fuller look at several of the people discussed here.