Beyond the back room: Film culture and the Hollywood novelist, 1920--1940

Much of the previous scholarship done on Hollywood writers has focused on the question of whether they were damaged artistically by contact with the film industry. Such work often leaves unexamined the body of artistic works which reflect in varying degrees the culture in which these writers found themselves. Rather than treat the Hollywood novel as a reflection of the film industry's corruption of its writers, to examine such novels as reflections of Hollywood culture is to recover these texts from the literary ghetto to which many critics have relegated them. This study examines Hollywood novels written between 1920 and 1940 by authors directly involved in some aspect of film production as analyses rather than results of the culture(s) that produced them. In one respect, these novels explicitly deny that the writer's voice was silenced by Hollywood. But in another sense, they do more than undermine the myth of Hollywood-the-destroyer. In their complexity and variety as well as their ability to scrutinize the complexity of the film industry, such novels reveal Hollywood to be multi-layered, a text in itself that can be examined not only in terms of its industrial praxis but also in terms of its existence as an ideological, cultural and even geographic entity.; Furthermore, to push the definition of Hollywood fiction further from the central and centralizing argument about Hollywood-the-destroyer and to view such novels as more than the product of literary frustrations, this study focuses on a variety of social and cultural issues brought forth in these texts. This analysis is framed by discussions of creativity and the artist's place in Hollywood culture in chapters examining F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Love of the Last Tycoon and Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust. However, the remaining chapters move away from such questions, focusing on lesser known works, such as Frances Marion's Minnie Flynn, Don Ryan's A Roman Holiday and John Fante's Ask the Dust. These chapters examine the treatment of women's work in Hollywood, reactions to the imposition of moral codes, and the question of Hollywood's place in a multi-cultural setting. In this way, the study shows that analyzing the work of the screenwriter-novelist is particularly revealing of film industry culture and practice while simultaneously expanding the debate over the cultural positioning and creative output of the Hollywood novelist.