Screen Secrets: The Unpublished Hollywood Novels of Winnifred Eaton

Abstract

Screen Secrets:The Unpublished Hollywood Novels of Winnifred Eaton Thomas Allen Winnifred Eaton's late novels "Movie Madness" and "Hollywood Melody" take up subject matter that might surprise readers who know this author primarily through the romances set in Japan which she wrote years earlier under the pen name Onoto Watanna. Composed during the period in the 1920s and early 1930s when Eaton worked as a writer and editor for Universal Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Fox Films, these novels voice powerful criticisms of the exploitation of women in the film industry. In addition, their interest in questions of identity in relation to the culture of images and mass media epitomized by cinema places these novels near the beginning of a critical appraisal of twentieth-century modern culture that would continue in now-canonical works such as Nathanael West's novella The Day of the Locust (1939). However, unlike many better-known Hollywood novels, Eaton's fiction celebrates the creative and aesthetic value of popular entertainment, even while recounting the struggles of their women protagonists against the film industry's corrosive patriarchal culture. Perhaps because of their feminist themes, these novels were never published in full (although "Movie Madness" did appear as a shortened and altered serialization in a Hollywood fan magazine). Fortunately, several manuscripts representing different stages of Eaton's work on the two novels have been preserved at the University of Calgary Archives and Special Collections. These novels not only add to our understanding of Eaton's range as an author but also illuminate the beginnings of a fictional genre that would become central to our understanding of the role of cinema in twentieth-century modern mass culture. During her tumultuous five-year career in the film industry, Eaton moved between positions and employers relatively quickly. Letters and memoranda preserved in the Calgary archive reveal a string of disputes over credit for collaborative writing projects and complaints that she was paid less than her male [End Page 54] peers doing similar work. Eaton entered the industry in December 1924 in a position of authority when, thanks to connections she had made as a best-selling novelist, she was hired as the head of the Scenario Department at the New York offices of Universal Pictures.1 Her early novel A Japanese Nightingale (1900) had been adapted into a film of the same name starring Fannie Ward and released in 1918. She met Universal's legendary founder Carl Laemmle Sr. when she contributed title-card dialogue and story development for a 1921 Universal film called False Kisses (Birchall 135–36). 2 As biographer Diana Birchall recounts, Laemmle "was to become a mentor to Winnifred" (135). Film historian Vito Adriaensens points out that Eaton's role, not uncommon at the time, was to serve as a conduit between the studio and the fiction writers in her "large network of personal contacts" who produced usable source material for cinematic adaptation. Eaton joined a succession of literary writers who not only lent cultural prestige to the film companies that hired them but also helped those companies acquire new material for adaptation. She received a salary of $200 per week, and, as Birchall notes, she had "a staff, assistants, secretaries, and an important, prestigious title and position" (Birchall 155; Universal Pictures contract, 12 Dec. 1924).3 In 1925 her contract was extended an additional six months at a salary of $300 per week, and she moved to Universal's West Coast offices (Reeve, Universal Pictures contract, 22 Oct. 1925). In early December 1926, however, Eaton wrote a passionate letter of resignation to Laemmle. Although she assured him of her continued "love and respect," she complained that the credit for her work on the adaptation of Show Boat (released in 1929) had gone to a male writer who had done little work on the project, and that she was a victim of workplace gossip: "From the day I arrived I was a marked woman. Stories without the slightest basis in fact were circulated about me to the effect that I was impossible to get on with" (Reeve to Carl Laemmle Sr.). She informed Laemmle that she was taking a job offer from rival studio MGM...