Thomson, David 1941-

PERSONAL:

Born 1941 in London, England; immigrated to the U.S., 1975; married Lucy Gray (a photographer); children: two. Education: Attended Dulwich College, London, and London School of Film Technique.

ADDRESSES:

Home—San Francisco, CA.

CAREER:

Film critic and biographer. Former teacher of film studies at Dartmouth College.

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

Movie Man, Stein and Day (New York, NY), 1967.

A Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema, Secker & Warbur (London, England), 1975, third edition, 1994, published as A Biographical Dictionary of Film, Morrow (New York, NY), 1975, third edition, Knopf (New York, NY), 1994, revised and expanded fourth edition published as The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, Knopf (New York, NY), 2002.

America in the Dark: Hollywood and the Gift of Unreality, Morrow (New York, NY), 1977.

Scott's Men, Viking (New York, NY), 1977, published as Scott, Shackleton, and Amundsen: Ambition and Tragedy in the Antarctic, Thunder's Mouth Press (New York, NY), 2002.

Overexposures: The Crisis of American Filmmaking, Morrow (New York, NY), 1981.

Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes: A Life and a Story, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1987.

Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick, Knopf (New York, NY), 1992.

Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles, Knopf (New York, NY), 1996.

Beneath Mulholland: Thoughts on Hollywood and Its Ghosts, Knopf (New York, NY), 1997.

The Big Sleep, British Film Institute (London, England), 1997.

In Nevada: The Land, the People, God, and Chance, Knopf (New York, NY), 1999.

Hollywood: A Celebration, Dorling Kindersley (New York, NY), 2001.

Marlon Brando, Dorling Kindersley (New York, NY), 2003.

The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, Knopf (New York, NY), 2004.

Nicole Kidman, Knopf (New York, NY), 2006.

FICTION

A Bowl of Eggs, Macmillan (London, England), 1970.

Hungry as Hunters (novel), Gollancz (London, England), 1972.

Suspects, Knopf (New York, NY), 1985.

Silver Light (western stories), Knopf (New York, NY), 1990.

(With Marlon Brando and Donald Cammell; and editor) Fan Tan (novel), Knopf (New York, NY), 2005.

OTHER

Author of screenplay for The Making of a Legend: Gone with the Wind a documentary. Contributor to periodicals, including Vanity Fair, Boston Globe, Film Comment, Movieline, New Republic, and Esquire.

SIDELIGHTS:

David Thomson is a renowned film critic, biographer, and fiction writer. Thomson's A Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema, published in the United States as A Biographical Dictionary of Film, was a compendium of biographical and critical entries on some 1,000 actors, directors, screenwriters, cinematographers, and producers from the film industry. The Dictionary was first published in 1975. According to New Statesman & Society contributor Sean French, Thomson's work was too selective to be a truly representative overview of the industry, but the work "became addictive. Thomson's passion for the cinema, the ruthless confidence of his judgment, made most critics seem shallow and thoughtless."

Thomson's third edition "at once more brilliant and more cranky than ever," according to Gregg Rickman in Film Quarterly, adds an additional 200 entries as well as revisions of original entries. Critics were enthusiastic in their reception of the third edition even if some of Thomson's opinions proved controversial. "Thomson is the Dr. Johnson of film," wrote New Republic critic Guillermo Cabrera Infante. "He has compiled a dictionary, he is English, and he knows what he is talking about even when he talks about something else." Infante also praised the book because in addition to being a reference work, it is also "a delight to browse through." The critic concluded: "Had he lived, Dr. Johnson could have said that a dictionary cannot embalm moving pictures. In the same way, Thomson's dictionary is not definitive, it is merely pioneering. But this book is more than a dictionary. It is a toll and a roll and a poll." "Many of us have been waiting for this revision for years," remarked French. The expanded and updated fourth edition of Thomson's work, titled The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, appeared in 2002. In an interview on the New York State Writers Institute Web site, Thomson stated: "I hope it's a seductive book: once you're in, it's hard to get out. I wanted it to be a book to read—not just somewhere where you look stuff up. One thing leads to another. And I hope that the style takes you over, leads you on. A bedside book. A browsing book. A book that works like a conversation, egging you on, drawing you into your own opinions." Writing in the Nation, Lee Siegel called The New Biographical Dictionary of Film "a masterpiece of rich insight into the culture of movie-making."

Thomson's essays and reviews have appeared regularly in periodicals, including Vanity Fair, Film Comment, and Esquire. Many of these have been gathered together in essay collections, including Overexposures: The Crisis in American Filmmaking. The collection criticizes, in Thomson's provocative style, the American film industry for using monetary success as the criterion for a successful film (as opposed to an artistic measure of quality). "In framing his indictment," argued Michael Dempsey in Film Quarterly, "Thomson ranges over a broad landscape of popular culture: the Tonight Show, Jerry Lewis's annual muscular dystrophy telethon, slash'em-up horror movies, the bizarrerie of Los Angeles, personal observation of Rafelson struggling to prepare his first studio picture Brubaker … close readings of Alfred Hitchcock and his work … But through it all he writhes in furious, liver-gnawing, amazed ambivalence, as an Englishman entranced by movies since childhood, as a literary intellectual who moved here to teach respectably at Dartmouth only to find his senses awash in American garishness, and as a potential moviemaker who shamefacedly wants in on the racket." Richard W. Grefrath in Library Journal compared Thomson's writing style to Tom Wolfe's satire, arguing that the "provocative book should be widely read and is highly recommended."

Thomson is also known for his biographies of well known personalities from the film industry. In 1987, Thomson wrote Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes: A Life and Story. The biography is "a collage of fact, critical analysis, speculation and pure fiction," according to Gerald Peary in Maclean's. The biography also includes, noted Young, a chronological evaluation of Beatty's films and "sophisticated critical reading[s]" of some of his films, including Splendor in the Grass and Reds. The most unusual feature of the biography, however, is that Thomson juxtaposes the narrative nonfiction biography with a fictional novella, Desert Eyes, about a movie star similar to Beatty. This is not to suggest, claimed John Blades in the Chicago Tribune Books, "that Thomson, who has solid but quirky credits as a film critic and a novelist … has simply fictionalized Beatty's life. His research is sound, if not extensive … His book is ‘admittedly discursive, playful, speculative,’ not to mention intermittently entertaining, windy and provocative. It may also be unique: Just as Hollywood pioneered the screwball comedy, Thomson has invented the screwball biography."

Critics were mixed in their assessment of Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes: A Life and a Story. This "heavily playful and relentlessly discursive book makes shameless love to stardom and openly massages its erogenous zones: power, glamour and excitement," remarked David Coward in Times Literary Supplement. "It is a pity that Thomson seems to have surrendered to the perverse unreality of the world of movies which he himself analysed very sharply in America in the Dark." Other critics concurred. John Wyver in the Listener argued that the approach to biography was intriguing but that the speculative nature of the work was not "securely anchored in substance…. [Warren Beatty] teases and flirts delightfully with the reader, but then frustrates far more often than it satisfies." Peary concluded: "Some readers may skip the novella inserts simply because the details—real and made-up—of Beatty's own life are fascinating enough. Still, the spicy ingredients of Thomson's biographical stew are delectable reading."

In 1996, Thomson released Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles. Similar to the work on Beatty, Rosebud is "a vivid patchwork," according to a Publishers Weekly critic—an "almost novelistic examination of" Welles' life. Bonnie Smother in Booklist noted that most of Welles' most famous stories have been told many times before. But Thomson, according to Smother, "trots out the myths and reinterprets them in Welles' favor, which he fits into his ingenious conceit of Welles as the antihero Kane." "Thomson gives us the life of Welles," summarized Donald Lyons in Film Comment, "complete with humane and knowing portraits of many who crossed Welles's path; he gives us passionate but unblinkered readings of the films; but finally he's after bigger game. He wants to see Welles—the whole of Welles—as telling something about cinema, about America, about life. This is critical biography as poem, as lyric elegy."

Reviewers were also largely positive in their assessment of Rosebud. Malcolm Jones, Jr., writing in Newsweek, called the work a "superb critical biography." A critic for Publishers Weekly recommended the work as not "by any means the only book on Welles to read, but a stimulating and diverting one." Smother ultimately found the book "at once, a brilliant and maddening inquiry." "It is, I hope I've made clear," writes Lyons, "a pleasure to argue with this beautiful book…. The book is a meditation, a dialogue—with Welles and with Thomson himself and with his publisher/audience—a questioning full of rue and wonder and love…. It's time he [Thomson] be generally recognized not just as one of our sharpest writers on film, but as one of our wisest and best writers, period."

In 1997 Thomson published The Big Sleep, a brief critical study of Howard Hawks' epic film. Thomson "is convinced that The Big Sleep is ‘one of the most formally radical pictures ever made in Hollywood,’ because it so recklessly abandons narrative coherence," noted Michael Wood in the New York Review of Books. Jeffrey Meyers in the Virginia Quarterly Review wrote: "Thomson finds the abandonment of the story a radical triumph that turns the movie into a work about ‘movieness.’" Wood disagreed that this is true, and calls the work an "affectionate little book." Meyers concluded that Thomson's study is "clever, eccentric, meandering, and self-indulgent."

In Beneath Mulholland: Thoughts on Hollywood and Its Ghosts, a collection of twenty-one essays written between 1980 and 1996, Thomson "delivers an offbeat and often trenchant spin on the culture of Hollywood," a Publishers Weekly reviewer observed. In essays like "The Technical Sense of Money," a parody of Hollywood dealmaking; "Not Available for Interview," a profile of legendary film producer David O. Selznick's wayward niece; and the title piece, a hymn to the famous highway that runs above Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, Thomson "progressively constructs a Hollywood devoid of artistic integrity and human community," wrote Booklist critic Bonnie Smothers. The author "uses the traversing of Mulholland Drive as a metaphor for exploration of the underside—the part hidden from the public and not in the film—of the world of Hollywood films and the people who write, direct, produce, and act in them," wrote Lloyd Eby in the World & I. The critic added: "Nearly all the essays in this book have something to do with ghosts, real or imagined, with distinguishing the fictional from the bogus, or with the deformations to life and character that have been wrought through the beguiling and powerful charms of Hollywood and its money." The "search into dark places and dream spaces leads Thomson down some strangely haunting paths," noted Evan Wiener in Video Age International. "He studies the topography of Los Angeles (a city famous for having no there there), presupposes that James Dean survived his car wreck and imagines what might have happened to famous screen characters after their film lives ended. The unifying subject is nothing less than life and death in the movies and, conversely, the movies' effect on our lives and deaths."

In 1999, Thomson released In Nevada: The Land, the People, God, and Chance, an "entertaining side trip through Hollywood's ultimate back lot: the wide open spaces of the Nevada desert," summarized a Business Week critic. The "impressionistic series of sketches," wrote a critic in Publishers Weekly, "gives readers the feeling of having a well informed sidekick riding shotgun through sage strewn stretches of Highway 376." The work covers the varied history of Nevada from the mob to the rat pack to the atom bomb to UFOs. "To the crowded gaming tables and the stark mountains that surround them," wrote the critic in Publishers Weekly, "Thomson brings an appealingly philosophical frame of mind, an ability to throw sophisticated musings—about transience, history, place—out into the landscape as if waiting to see if they will take root." The Business Week critic concluded: "[What] makes Thomson's book so original, and so deeply satisfying, is the way that he pulls all his disparate subjects together in a highly personal and at times lyrical contemplation of close-of-the-century American life."

Since 2001, Thomson has published a pictorial tribute to motion pictures titled Hollywood: A Celebration, biographies of Marlon Brando and Nicole Kidman, and The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, "a philosophical meditation on the myriad ways the movie industry has inspired and influenced L.A. and America, and vice versa," according to Booklist contributor Jack Helbig. In The Whole Equation, Thomson "explores personalities (Louis B. Mayer, David O. Selznick) and specific films (von Stroheim's Greed, Spielberg's Jaws) to explain the 20th century's shifting sensibilities." "Strictly speaking, The Whole Equation isn't so much a history of Hollywood as a very impressionistic response to Hollywood's unique confluence of art and money, a marriage arranged by the men who ran the studios," remarked Lee Siegel in the Nation. Drawing his title from a line in F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel The Last Tycoon, Thomson suggests "that the Hollywood ‘equation’ includes not just films and directors, but greedy businessmen, stars, artists, and audiences, all of them seeking transformation through celluloid," noted a critic in Kirkus Reviews. According to Roy Liebman, writing in the Library Journal: "The author has synthesized his longtime fascination with cinema into a most readable but challenging work."

"I have never ‘decided’ to become a film critic," Thomson stated in his interview on the New York State Writers Institute Web site. He added: "I think I'm a writer whose natural subject is film and all the ways it affects us. Thus I like looking at careers, at the history of film, the sociology, what it has done to the world—questions like that. And I love all the ways—and all the new ways—that come along for writing about film."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Back Stage West, June 26, 2003, Jamie Painter Young, review of Marlon Brando, p. 8.

Booklist, May 15, 1996, Bonnie Smothers, review of Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles, p. 1561; September 1, 1997, Bonnie Smothers, review of Beneath Mulholland: Thoughts on Hollywood and Its Ghosts, p. 50; August 1, 2002, David Pitt, review of Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen: Ambition and Tragedy in the Antarctic, p. 1914; November 15, 2004, Jack Helbig, review of The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, p. 543; August 1, 2006, David Pitt, review of Nicole Kidman, p. 5.

Business Week, November 8, 1999, "Gamblers, UFOs, and Visionary Mobsters," p. 14.

Commentary, July-August, 2005, Joseph Epstein, "What Happened to the Movies?," review of The Whole Equation, p. 52.

Entertainment Weekly, December 17, 2004, Andrew Johnston, review of The Whole Equation, p. 91; September 9, 2005, Lisa Schwarzbaum, "Plump Fiction," review of Fan-Tan, p. 146.

Film Comment, September-October, 1996, Donald Lyons, review of Rosebud, p. 86.

Film Quarterly, spring, 1982, Michael Dempsey, review of Overexposures: The Crisis in American Filmmaking, pp. 559; fall, 1995, Gregg Rickman, review of A Biographical Dictionary of Film, p. 65.

Hollywood Reporter, December 31, 2004, Gregory McNamee, review of The Whole Equation, p. 16.

Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2004, review of The Whole Equation, p. 954.

Library Journal, July, 1981, Richard W. Grefrath, review of Overexposures, p. 1440; March 15, 2003, Michael Rogers, review of Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen, p. 122; November 15, 2004, Roy Liebman, review of Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen, p. 63; September 15, 2006, Jim Collins, review of The Whole Equation, p. 62.

Listener, April 23, 1987, John Wyver, "The Charm is in the Imagining," pp. 27-28.

Los Angeles Magazine, January, 2005, "With Regrets," review of The Whole Equation, pp. 85.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 29, 1987, review of Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes, pp. 1, 9.

Maclean's, July 13, 1987, Gerald Peary, "Hollywood Heartbreaker," pp. 50-51.

Nation, June 8, 1998, John B. Anderson, review of Beneath Mulholland, p. 42; February 14, 2005, Lee Siegel, "The Moviegoer," review of The Whole Equation, p. 29.

New Republic, January 23, 1995, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, review of A Biographical Dictionary of Film, p. 40.

New Statesman & Society, November 25, 1994, Sean French, review of A Biographical Dictionary of Film, p. 37.

Newsweek, May 27, 1996, Malcolm Jones, Jr., review of Rosebud, p. 69.

New York Review of Books, November 20, 1997, Michael Wood, "Looking Good," pp. 27-31.

New York Time Book Review, September 18, 2005, Joe Queenan, "Last Tango," review of Fan-Tan, p. 14.

Publishers Weekly, April 22, 1996, review of Rosebud, p. 54; September 27, 1997, review of Beneath Mulholland, p. 79; September 13, 1999, review of In Nevada: The Land, the People, God, and Chance, p. 71; October 29, 2001, "Documenting Two Film Cultures," review of Hollywood: A Celebration, p. 56; October 11, 2004, review of The Whole Equation, p. 63; July 25, 2005, review of Fan-Tan p. 41; August 7, 2006, review of Nicole Kidman, p. 49.

Spectator, February 19, 2005, Johann Hari, "The Decline of the West?," review of The Whole Equation, p. 41; October 21, 2006, Roger Lewis, "Little and Large," review of Nicole Kidman.

Times Educational Supplement, October 17, 1987, David Coward, "Stars Seen Through Cloud," p. 48; August 10, 1990, p. 855.

Times Literary Supplement, July 24, 1987, p. 792.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), May 17, 1987, John Blades, "Warren Beatty: The Facts Stranger than Fiction," p. 3.

Variety, October 22, 2001, Dade Hayes, review of Hollywood, p. 46.

Video Age International, May, 1998, Evan Wiener, review of Beneath Mulholland, p. 14.

Virginia Quarterly Review, spring, 1998, Jeffrey Meyers, "Frozen Eyes," pp. 362-367.

Wilson Quarterly, winter, 2000, David Spanier, "Double Down," p. 125.

World & I, May, 1998, Lloyd Eby, review of Beneath Mulholland, p. 276.

ONLINE

Morning News Online,http://www.themorningnews.org/ (March 15, 2005), Robert Birnbaum, "Birnbaum v. David Thomson."

New York State Writers Institute Web site,http://www.albany.edu/ (February 1, 2007), "A Conversation with David Thomson on The New Biographical Dictionary of Film."