Authors out here: Fitzgerald, West, Parker, and Schulberg in Hollywood

Abstract

This is a bold reevaluation of the screen-writing years of a quartet of iconic writers often at odds with the film industry. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, Dorothy Parker, and Budd Schulberg exercised as much of an impact on Hollywood as it had on them during their respective screen-writing careers, Tom Cerasulo argues in Authors Out Here. Cerasulo explores the often tense relationship between these accomplished writers and the film industry in which they were immersed and finds that this marriage of talent and power was mutually beneficial if not always happy. Combining film studies with literary analysis, this alternative view of the creative negotiations between representative writers and the studio system advances our understanding of the meaning of authorship in the first half of the twentieth century. Cerasulo's quartet of subjects wrote for and about the burgeoning film industry during the halcyon days of the studio era. Popular accounts of this period characterize the Hollywood careers of these writers as motivated by revenge, mocking the studios and their hold over literary creativity. Cerasulo argues that, rather than ruining talent, time spent in the film industry benefited artists such as Fitzgerald, West, Parker, and Schulberg by providing the financial, creative, and social resources each needed during a complex moment in American cultural life. In texts from West's The Day of the Locust and Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run? to Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon and Pat Hobby stories, Cerasulo finds these writers capable of interrogating the film industry while simultaneously offering some of the earliest examples of American film theory by carefully examining studio culture and the writer's place within it. Screenwriters and the producers and directors to whom they reported not only battled over creative control of individual texts but over larger notions of authorship and authority. As paid employees crafting screenplays for a collaborative mass medium in which words were not primary and writers resided near the bottom of the hierarchy, many authors were forced to question their callings. But recognition that they were collaborators in a culture industry was never artistically devastating, and it was never a vocation killer. Cerasulo illustrates how this realization that writers were creative workers in a larger endeavor also served to inspire some of this group's best creative work and invigorated their post-Hollywood careers.