Capturing Tinseltown Rising

MARC WANAMAKER and Steven Bingen's "Hollywood Behind the Lens" is a visual history of the film industry as drawn from the Bison Archives, a photographic collection focused on Hollywood history.

Founded in 1971 by Mr. Wanamaker, Bison Archives has contributed extensively to various forms of print and online media over the years. Mr. Bingen, a former archivist at Warner Bros., notes in an introduction that there "has hardly been a book about Hollywood published in recent decades that has not been enriched" by Mr.

Wanamaker's participation.

In "Hollywood Behind the Lens," there are none of those lush photographs of impossibly handsome leading men nuzzling equally stunning leading ladies that prop up innumerable coffeetable books. Instead the book tracks the evolution of ramshackle buildings on dusty street corners. The time is around 1915 and the place is Hollywood, but