THE HOLLYWOOD NOVEL: AN AMERICAN LITERARY GENRE A Dissertation Presented to The School of Graduate Studies Drake University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctorate of Arts by Nancy Brooker-Bowers September 1983 © 1984 NANCY BROOKER-BOWERS All Rights Reserved THE HOLLYWOOD NOVEL: AN AMERICAN LITERARY GENRE by Nancy Brooker-Bowers Approved by Committee: A ('I J,j\l.V }6Li "", Richard Abel, Chairperson Karen Conner Earle L. Canfield C Dean of the School of Graduate Studies THE HOLLYWOOD NOVEL: AN AMERICAN LITERARY GENRE An abstract of a disseration by Nancy Brooker-Bowers September 1983 Drake University Advisor: Richard Abel The Hollywood Novel is an American regional fiction genre that treats characters working in the film industry either in Hollywood or with a Hollywood production company on location. Although pre-Hollywood film novels set in the eastern filmmaking capitals flourished as early as 1912, the Hollywood Novel per se first appeared in 1916, after the film companies had nearly completed their move to Hollywood. The genre grew up and developed with the Hollywood film industry, mirroring the rise of powerful moguls, the decline of the studio system, and the advent of location shooting, in the United States and abroad, as well as influential events, pUblic concerns, and fads of the times. From 1916-1963, the genre intersected with other popular literature, creating eight sub-genres of novels: historical, cornie-epistolary, detective, and semi-pornographic--as deter­ mined by Carolyn See in 1963--as well as romances, adolescent fiction, religious tracts, and romans a clef. Many novels within the sub-genres were penned by persons involved with filmmaking. After 1964, novels written by people within the industry and romans a clef, as well as historical and detective Holly­ wood Novels~ continued to flourish and reflected more contem­ porary concerns: current politics, including espionage; feminism; alternative life styles, such as homosexuality; and the counter-culture movement. As the studio system waned and foreign cinemas exerted influence, location shooting became commonplace. Hollywood, thus, declined as a picture-making center, and a strong adjunct genre of location and inter­ national filmmaking novels developed. In addition, novels which were not about filmmaking and which dealt with the characters' Hollywood experiences peripherally, if at all, became common. The novels' setting--the town of Hollywood--has been overwhelmingly influenced by the film industry and the illu­ sions it produces, so that, as in the movies, anything is possible there, but nothing is as it seems. The symbiotic relat.ionship between the town and the industry is reflected in the novels, the only American regional genre determined by a specific industry_ In them, distinctions between illusion and reality collapse, owing to the timelessness, artificiali­ ty, physical unconventionality, unusual atmosphere, and the reality/illusion dichotomy at work in Hollywood and the film industry_ TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION •••••• • ••••••••.•.••.•• ii CHAPTERS 1 FICTION AND THE FILM INDUSTRY: THE HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE HOLLYWOOD NOVEL, 1916--1981 1 2 THE CONTAINING LOCALE: THE HOLLYWOOD NOVEL AND ITS SUB-GENRES, 1916--1963 ••••••••• 44 3 BEYOND THE LIMITATIONS OF PLACE: THE HOLLYWOOD NOVEL, 1964--1981. •.• 104 4 THE HOLLYWOOD NOVEL AS A REGIONAL GENRE 169 BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PRIMARY SOURCES 195 BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SECONDARY SOURCES 216 INTRODUCTION This study examines the historical development of the Hollywood Novel, an American regional fictional genre that treats characters working in the film industry either in Hollywood or with a Hollywood production company on location. In sheer numbers alone--my own count is in the 700's for the period 19l2-l98l--these novels are an imposing presence in our literature and take their place alongside those of other popular American genres such as detective, mystery, and west­ ern fiction. Hundreds of them have been best sellers in this country and abroad. Some are ephemeral and of little liter­ ary value; others are regarded as good popular literature. A number of the novels, however, have a more lasting place in our literature by virtue of being written by novelists who are regularly treated in university literature courses: F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Last Tycoon), Nathanael West (The Day of the Locust), Norman Mailer (The Deer Park), William Saroyan (Rock Wagram), John O'Hara (Hope of Heaven and The Big Laugh), Horace McCoy (They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and I Should Have Stayed Home), and Joan Didion (Play It As It Lays), to name a few. Despite the fact that Hollywood Novels and other novels about filmmaking or people involved in filmmaking have been ii written since 1912 and are so numerous, there has been rela­ tively little literary criticism dealing with them. Novels that are regarded as "serious" by virtue of being written by critically well-received writers, such as West, Fitzgerald, and Mailer, for examples, are frequently treated in scholarly writing. But literary attention for the genre as a whole has been sporadic and scant. Only two book-length studies of the genre exist: Jonas Spatz's Hollywood in Fiction: Some Versions of the American Myth (1969) and Walter Wells's Tycoons and Locusts: A Regional Look at Hollywood Fiction of the 1930's (1973). Franklin Walker's ~ Literary History of Southern California (1950) and Edmund Wilson's The Boys in the Back Room (1941) treat Hollywood Novels and their authors in passing and in a somewhat condescending manner as part of larger overviews of California literature. Leslie Fiedler attempts to debunk Wilson's claims about the genre and, later, to place the genre within American literature of the 1930's in essays appearing in Man and the Movies (1967), edited by W. R. Robinson, and his own Waiting For the End (1964), respec­ tively. Only four other anthologized essays on Hollywood Novels exist. Periodical articles dealing exclusively with the genre are equally scarce: there are merely four, pub­ lished in 1940, 1948, 1955, and 1961. Four dissertations have treated the SUbject. Virgil L. Lokke's liThe Literary Image of Hollywood" (State University of Iowa, 1955) applies a Marxist critical approach and deals iii largely with anti-Semitism in the genre. Erik Richard Hazel f s "The Hollywood Image: An Examination of the Literary Perspective" (Case Western Reserve, 1974) attempts to explain the negativism in the Hollywood Novels by prominent novelists who also wrote Hollywood screenplays. Bruce Lewis Chipman's "America's Dream-Dump: A Study of the American Hollywood Novel" (Tufts University, 1981) examines the genre as a symbol for the collapse of the American Dream. But by far the most ambitious and comprehensive study of the genre to date is Carolyn See's liThe Hollywood Novel: An Historical and Critical Study" (University of California, Los Angeles, 1963). She endeavored to codify the various facets of the genre and to establish definitional parameters; in addition, she provided a 513-entry bibliography of Hollywood Novels and related novels which were partially set in Holly­ wood. See's study is considered a landmark in critical work on the genre and most of the subsequent writing about Holly­ wood Novels refers and/or defers to it. Because of this, I have chosen to focus, in part, on the See dissertation in my study. My study first traces the history of the genre, to show how it parallels and is shaped by the development of the American film industry. Then a close analysis of Carolyn See's dissertation critiques her definition and classifica­ tions for the Hollywood Novel through 1963. In my own re­ search, I eliminated many of the novels in See's bibliography which do not qualify as Hollywood Novels and were erroneously iv included in her study, annotated the remainder of her entries which do qualify, and added some 400-500 more which she either failed to include or which were written after her dissertation was completed. This work has enabled me to make judgments about the accuracy and reliability of her assess­ ments and redefine the Hollywood Novels of this period based on my own findings and ideas. A third section describes the course the genre has followed from 1964 to 1981. I show the effect on it of the decline of Hollywood studio filmmaking, the advent of loca­ tion filming, and the thriving of foreign cinemas: and I de­ tail the influence of contemporary concerns, politics, and lifestyles on the novels. A fourth section summarizes the genre's characteristics and singles out its regional nature as one of its primary facets. This section also examines the symbiotic relationship between the town of Hollywood and the film industry and the effect that relationship has on the genre, particularly in terms of the blurring of distinctions between reality and illusion. My research on the Hollywood Novel genre has occupied the better part of four years. I began with Carolyn See's bibliography, filling out the incomplete bibliographical entries for each novel and providing a full annotation for each. Her overly-brief annotations categorized the novels with only phrases from definitions established in her disser­ tation. Mostly, these revealed little about the novels' contents. I annotated the novels by reading them (or, if v they were not available, by reading several reviews of each), by describing the plots, and by making some sort of evalua­ tive comment. The bibliography of primary sources at the end of this dissertation lists all novels from this research which were cited in the text but presents them without anno­ tations. In addition, I supplemented her bibliography by includ­ ing entries she had omitted but which are provided by Alice Kesone Melcon's California in Fiction (1961) and Newton D. Baird and Robert Greenwood's An Annotated Bibliography of California Fiction: 1664-1970 (1971).