Jeanine Basinger is the Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies, founder and curator of the Wesleyan Cinema Archives, founding Chair of the Film Studies Department, and a recipient of Wesleyan’s Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching. She is the author of SILENT STARS, which won the National Board of Review’s William K. Everson Prize, and THE STAR MACHINE, which won the Theatre Library Association Award. With Sam Wasson, she is the co-author of HOLLYWOOD: The Oral History.

Basinger is a trustee of the National Board of Review and the American Film Institute, a member of Warner Brothers Theatre Advisory Committee at the Smithsonian Institute, and a former member of the Board of Advisors of the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers. She also served as advisor to Martin Scorsese’s film foundation project, The Story of Movies. She lives in Middletown, Connecticut.

Books by Jeanine Basinger

Hollywood: The Oral History

by Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson - History, Nonfiction, Performing Arts

From the archives of the American Film Institute comes a unique picture of what it was like to work in Hollywood from its beginnings to its present day. Gleaned from nearly 3,000 interviews, involving 400 voices from the industry, HOLLYWOOD lets a reader “listen in” on candid remarks from the biggest names in front of the camera (Bette Davis, Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Harold Lloyd) to the biggest behind it (Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg, Alfred Hitchcock, Jordan Peele), as well as the lesser known individuals who shaped what was heard and seen on screen. The result is like a conversation among the gods and goddesses of film: lively, funny, insightful, historically accurate and, for the first time, authentically honest in its portrait of Hollywood. It’s the insider’s story.