As good fortune would have it, I read and reviewed Ana Salzberg’s recently published, Produced by Irving Thalberg (2020), before reading her earlier work Beyond the Looking Glass, Narcissism and Female Stardom in Studio-Era Hollywood (2014). “Good fortune” because I could recognize the clarity in the evolution in her more succinct analytical skills, and the origins of her deep and wide knowledge of motion pictures. Like Thalberg, Looking Glass is best appreciated, in fact I think can only be appreciated, if the reader recognizes Salzberg as the teacher and guide, and the movies, at least the critical ones (she identifies those; and, they are available), as required “reading.” And it’s the movie’s effect as well as its content that matters: her insightful exploration of a movie’s display of narcissism on the movie watcher, who is as much a participant in her analysis as the female actors on the screen. Although the text is not long (178 pages), Looking Glass should be savored, over time, including the periodic value of rereading the subtleties and welcoming the imagination to re-appreciate of old movies she hasn’t examined. Lurking behind and within each movie, as Salzberg emphasizes, was the “Motion Picture Code” or its lingering values after it ended as understood by directors, producers, and actors that defined how a woman’s aspirations, often the basis for her “narcissism,” were to be molded on film. As best I can tell, all the directors and producers were men: that is, well intentioned and highly skilled, they were both adhering to and interpreting the Code and its lingering values. Salzberg begins with All About Eve (1950), the perfect example for her analysis, and, just when you think she might safely end, say with Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop (1956) and The Misfits (1961), she examines Grace Kelly (in a brilliant comparison between Kelly and Hepburn in High Society (1956) and The Philadelphia Story (1940), respectively), and then Elizabeth Taylor in, among others, The VIPs (1963), in order to dwell on subtleties often missed in the external glamour (the audience expectation as viewer) of the female star and the movie’s cinematic assets.In Beyond the Looking Glass, as in her more recent work, Salzberg forces you back into the movie, to appreciate threads and ideas in it that the director, maybe the producer, definitely the lighting and cinematographer, and the writer, intended and contributed, with the actor’s skill, to transforming the written word onto the screen. Here is where melding her Thalberg into Looking Glass mattered in what we saw, or what Salzberg embraces as a cinematic moment that mattered in creating the ultimate effect of what we saw. My favorite example was the Hepburn-Kelly comparison, where the director/producer’s interpretive addition, then deletion of a singular scene in the related production, made Hepburn the more realistic character. What might be understood, once both books are read, as a “Thalbergian Moment.”My only observations, not criticisms, flow from Salzberg’s thoroughness and provocation. Would, based on their work, or did a woman director, Ida Lupino comes to mind, mold the “narcissism” differently? Before or after the Code? And, though mistakenly the media evolution of political campaigns is often attributed to Madison Avenue advertisement, early on Hollywood created the best lessons of how to do it (including MGM and Thalberg), that Salzberg, perhaps unwittingly, comes right to the edge of exploring.Finally, Salzberg, with interesting insight reflected in both books, recognizes how the high tech, social media tools of mobile and definitely small screens (compared to a theater) have provided renewed access to silent and classical Hollywood movies and actors for all to see, often as if their content was still the subject of debate and analysis. Foremost, that reality makes Salzberg’s work all the more relevant and engaging. Yet, one thing we've learned, in the late months of 2020 and the pandemic, is that as movies translate and migrate into small, unshared medium by necessity, the vast proliferation of “original movies”—until we find a better term— appears to demonstrate that the high tech social media moguls have plenty of money but, with exceptions that don't make the rule, not the artistic discernment of MGM or Irving Thalberg. In both her works, Salzberg, however unwitting or politely, demonstrates that with respect to the new, perhaps only transitory, moguls of the movies, Norma Desmond had it right: “I am big. It's the pictures that got small.”Neil Thomas Proto, January 2021