Becoming Something: The Story of Canada Lee / The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry

[February 23rd, 2005]

^Becoming Something: The Story of Canada Lee

By Mona Z. Smith

(Faber and Faber, 430 pages, $27)

The great African-American actor Canada Lee accomplished much in his short life. After an early stint as a boxer, he launched a career of firsts, as a black producer on Broadway, and then the first black man to appear on a national stage in whiteface. His impact on cinema allowed new opportunities for the young black actors who followed.

Mona Smith's sympathetic, if bare-bones, biography should help champion this great, forgotten man, as the book joins other recent works, such as this year's film Ray, in exploring how talented African-American artists dealt with their own country's backward policies of segregation.

Lee's promising boxing career was cut short when he lost an eye in a rough bout, and he found himself broke and adrift in Depression-era America. Smith's book recounts two happy accidents that changed the young man's life: First, Lee wandered into a play audition and won the part, and then later he saved the life of a young man named Orson Welles.

Welles never forgot Lee, and the director became one of the younger man's greatest supporters. Welles cast Lee in his famous "voodoo" production of Macbeth, which established Lee as a leading classical actor. Awarded with fame, the actor became a fighter in the ring of American racism. But by lending his name to such projects as outlawing lynching, Lee was branded a Communist by powerful Republicans. In the ensuing McCarthyite witch trials, Lee was blacklisted and soon after died from stress at the age of 45.

Readers of this new biography of Canada Lee will marvel at anti-Communist America's almost Soviet-like efficiency in erasing individuals from the official national narrative. Considering the exploding anti-immigrant and anti-gay rhetoric in this country, Lee's life suddenly reads as a cautionary tale for our own times. (Steffen Silvis)

^The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry

By Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osborne

(620 pages, ReganBooks, $27.95)

It's a tremendous undertaking, chronicling the history of the American porn industry. When you stop to think about all the stories there are to tell—the empires built, the shattered lives, the sordid affairs, the salacious gossip—a five-decade overview seems all the more ambitious. The Other Hollywood serves as a sort of Porn 101 primer, concentrating on the modern era that began in the early 1970s with Deep Throat (see also Inside Deep Throat in Screen listings, page 56) and tracking through the late 1990s with the first major HIV outbreak in the industry. Ironically, the sex is the least compelling part of The Other Hollywood. More interesting are such topics as the industry's Mafia connections, the episode of a former FBI agent who went under deep cover as a porn distributor and lost his identity, and John Holmes' involvement in the infamous Wonderland murders. McNeil and Osborne build a narrative using quotes from a variety of sources, such as interviews, news articles and police reports. This structure can offer an interesting read, especially when two people offer conflicting accounts of the same thing, but the style also becomes confusing. The book's biggest flaw is that it relies too heavily on the voices of everyone who has been interviewed, without developing its own voice or establishing the authority of its authors. (David Walker)