In Print

'Oscar Night: 75 Years of Hollywood Parties'

In Print

Oscar Night: 75 Years of Hollywood Parties

edited by Graydon Carter & David Friend
In Print

Knopf, 384 pp., $75

The opening photo had me in stitches – one of those images best captured by the camera, an ephemeral snap, a happenstance rendered timeless by a ready finger on a camera button. Better not to spoil the impact there with description here: The surprise of the unexpected is essential to the photo's charm. Suffice it to say that the Vanity Fair editors selected a perfect photo to open their new, mostly pictorial book Oscar Night: 75 Years of Hollywood Parties.

The second photo is my favorite in this book of more than 500. It's a shot of Marlon Brando by Life photographer Phil Stern, snapped the morning after Brando won his 1954 best actor award for On the Waterfront. It captures Brando in a euphoric mood, "howling in delight" (as the caption puts it) while reading congratulatory telegrams in his Mulholland home.

Sadly, none of the photos that follow in this 384-page coffeetable tome equals the surprise and intimacy of these first two. That's because the collection is devoted to the public spectacle of Oscar night, not the private moments. Or to be more accurate, the book dwells in the semipublic sphere of the Oscar party. Beginning in the early years of the Academy Awards, when the ceremony was part of a formal dinner dance, the book moves from the tony banquets of the Thirties to the theatrical format launched during World War II. Instead of the party being the actual ceremony itself, the Oscar soiree grew into the viewing parties of the television age and the afterparties famously hosted for three decades (1964-1993) by agent Swifty Lazar, and later, Vanity Fair.

Compiled by Vanity Fair editors Graydon Carter and David Friend, with a brief afterword by Dominick Dunne, Oscar Night gets its real thrust from photos taken during the last 10 years of Vanity Fair afterparties at L.A. eatery Morton's. Although the photographers remain mostly unidentified, well-written captions set the party tone as the photos move from the semicandid black-and-white shots (some of which have grown a bit blurry in the course of being blown up from snapshot size) of the early banquets to the sharp, colorful professional shots captured during the instant photo decades. Included in the book are random seating charts, matchbooks, pertinent quotes from the gossip columns, and other intriguing artifacts. But the real juice comes from the party photos that record the intersection of public and private lives: George Hamilton and Lynda Bird Johnson dancing together, Gen. Tommy Franks and Harvey Keitel in a pose, Elizabeth Taylor showing off her baubles, and oodles of past and present stars basking in the glow of their Oscar statuettes.

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KEYWORDS FOR THIS STORY

Oscar Night: 75 Years of Hollywood Parties, Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter, David Friend, Knopf

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