Hollywood: Actors and Politicos, by Norman B. Schwartz

Since the invention of the microphone and the newsreel camera, the men and women who entertain us, who govern us, no longer need be godlike creatures sharing their feelings and beliefs from high above on the silver screen; they now must be folks just like us…or appear to be. Handed a scene or speech someone else has written, our heroes, our leaders need only read their lines off a teleprompter. In this our celebrity culture, every citizen has not only been guaranteed life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness but the bonus prize of a quarter hour of fame. It is only natural then that the art of acting and the job of politics should have somehow morphed into one shared profession.

Hollywood Actors & Politicos is a collection of twenty or more essays about larger-than-life personalities – some were actors, some were politicians, some both. From Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States, who performed the role of the benevolent aristocrat to perfection to Ronald Reagan, a professional, who played both the boy next door and the 40th President with competence, we meet Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, the Kennedy clan, Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy-and-Onassis, the brothers Warner and Marx, the Bushes Sr and Jr, Dorothy Parker and Scott Fitzgerald, Bogie and Lauren, Laurel and Hardy, Sacco and Vanzetti. As Louis B. Mayer once boasted about his studio: “More Stars Than There Are In Heaven.”

Norman B. Schwartz spent over forty years in Hollywood and Rome, working as a sound and film editor. He was the first ADR editor / post-production dialogue director admitted to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.