Lectures

Lecture 6

John Fante and Ask the Dust

The movies came to Hollywood in 1909. Director D. W. Griffith made the first movie in Hollywood: a 17-minute film called In Old Hollywood. It was released in 1910, and was shot entirely in the village of Hollywood. The first movie studio, Nestor Studio, was launched in 1911; it was housed in a vacant tavern at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street. In 1913, Cecil B. DeMille and Jesse Lasky rented a barn at the corner of Selma and Vine and began making movies. Word spread, and by 1922, four major studios (Paramount, Columbia, RKO, and Warner Brothers) and numerous minor studios and independent filmmakers had established themselves in Hollywood.

By 1928, Hollywood was a boom town. The strawberry fields that had lined Hollywood Boulevard had been replaced in the last few years by stores and office buildings. The orange groves that had dotted the hills that rose above the town were giving way to luxurious homes as real estate developers, scenting monet, bought up huge tracts of land in the canyons and laid out streets. There were millions of dollars to be had, and thousands flocked to Hollywood hoping to grab a chunk of fame as well as fortunbe. They had to be housed, too, so hundreds of small, economical homes were built south of Sunset Boulevard, which was still mostly bordered by bean fields. Hollywood and Vine was the home of a used car lot and a cigar store; within the next few years, the Pantages Theatre would be built there. The year before, a few blocks west, Grauman's Chinese Theatre had been built, and across the street from it, the luxurious Roosevelt Hotel had opened its doors.

Movie studios, the basis of all this development, no longer operated out of shacks and barns on empty lots. Now they had huge plants with dozens of buildings housing offices, production facilities, and dressing rooms. In the next few years, dozens of sound stages would be built, for 1928 was the year when sound established itself firmly as part of the movie-making process. The year before, The Jazz Singer had been released. Al Jolson talked; Al Jolson sang; audiences loved it; Warner Studios made m illions (although Sam Warner, who had backed the film despite tremendous opposition from his brothers, died the night before its premiere, and never knew what a sensation it had created). After some initial resistance, the other studios saw that sound was the path to even greater profits. "Silents" were on the way out; "talkies" were in.

But now that the movies talked, they had to have something to say. It was no longer good enough to have movement on the screen, with a few titles thrown in here and there. Although there were a few competent scenario writers who were able to make the transition to sound, it was quickly discovered that new talent was going to be needed to write the kind of coherent and sustained dialogue demanded by this new kind of movie.

And so the search was on. Anyone with a shred of a pretension to writing ability was invited to give screenwriting a try. Journalists, free-lancers, novelists, poets, playwrights, would-bes, and people's hard-up relatives swarmed to the studios. Herman Mankiewicz sent his friend Ben Hecht a telegram from Hollywood: "Will you accept three hundred per week to work for Paramount Pictures. All expenses paid. The three hundred is peanuts. Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around." Those who came to Hollywood found all the glamour they expected: sunshine, movie stars, endless parties, chauffeured limousines, champagne and caviar for breakfast, swimming pools, mansions, beach houses at Malibu, butlers and maids and wine cellars and evening gowns and tuxedos and flashbulbs popping at premieres. As Ben Hecht said, "And whatever the weather elsewhere in the world, it rained only gold in Hollywood."

But the glamour was only one side of the picture. The other side- the very large cloud behind the silver lining-was the work. Many writers came to share John Fante's opinion: "Hollywood is a bad place. It kills writers. They die young and violently there." Hundreds of writers passed through the studios in the next few years; only a few dozen stayed to make a name and a living--only the toughest. By the early Thirties, the studio system was firmly in place, and the writer was just another employee.

Writers were hired by, and answered to, producers. Producers were almost uniformly hated by writers. "[The producers] owned you; you were a commodity; they were paying you so much a week and you belonged to them. And there was never any kidding about that." Writers were, like any other employee, required to clock in at their offices at the studios no later than nine or ten in the morning, and leave no earlier than five or six at night. They worked a half a day on Saturdays. They took no more than an hour for lunch. A writer was expected to put out ten to twenty pages of material a week--up to four scripts a year--and sometimes more. Rush jobs and emergencies, of course, required overtime--as much as it took to get the job done on time.

What hurt most was having to write to order. "No other writers--from cub reporters to successful Broadway playwrights--were so highly paid, and no others were required to betray the autonomy and creativity which characterize their profession." Ben Hecht's experience in writing for the studios was typical:

As a writer in Hollywood, I spent more time arguing than writing...My chief memory of movie land is one of asking in the producer's office why I must change the script, eviscerate it, cripple and hamstring it? Why must I strip the hero of his few semi-intelligent remarks and why must I tack on a corny ending that makes the stomach shudder? Half of all the movie writers argue in this fashion. The other half writhe in silence, and the psychoanalyst's couch or the liquor bottle claim them both.

The producers seemed to hate the writers just as much, although they seldom wrote or spoke about it as articulately as the writers did. Their main reason seems to have been fear. Irving Thalberg, at MGM, said once to Anita Loos, "Damn it. I can keep tabs on everyone else in the studio and see whether or not they're doing their jobs. But I can never tell what's going on in those so-called brains of yours." And many producers felt intimidated by writers, because they seemed to come from a different world where there were different and disorderly rules.

Acting, producing and directing required technique and skill, of course, but you could acquire these things on the job or, in a pinch, 'by the seat of your pants'...But by and large screenwriting demanded a degree of training, talent, and intelligence which excluded from its practice anyone 'passing through' on the way to something higher...one could not acquire the fundamentals of literacy and imagination while standing on the set. Writing for the screen could not be faked or picked up or imbibed...Intelligent, educated, and literate in ways that most actors, directors, and producers were not, the movie writers' importance and personal uniqueness discomfited co-workers. There could be no denying that in spite of his low status, ill-treatment, and impotence, a writer's influence was decisive.

Like many employers who feel inferior to their employees, but also have huge egos to satisfy, the producers did their best to make the writers' lives miserable. Constant regimentation and demands for changes and rewrites were common complaints among writers. Another was the "assembly-line" method of writing and rewriting: Leonard Spigelass recalled, "There were six of us writing Shearer, six of us writing Garbo, six of us writing Ruth Chatterton, six of us writing Robert Montgomery, and six of us writing Clark Gable. Which one [of us] would they choose? It was a great lottery." Few films, therefore, were ever credited to a single writer, and in most cases, it is impossible to figure out exactly who wrote what parts of a script.

Some didn't let this bother them: "There was small responsibility," according to Ben Hecht. "Your name as writer was buried in a flock of 'credits.' Your literary pride was never involved. What critics said about the movie you had written never bothered you. They were usually criticizing something you couldn't remember."

Others just tried not to take the work so seriously, and then the mutilations of their writing didn't bother them as much: "Well, I was probably a more flexible writer than most," Marguerite Roberts remembers, "because I didn't have an exalted idea of writing. It was not a sacred chore to me. It was a way to make money, it was a business." Many tried to affect this pose, but few really meant it. Most writers--even those able to distance themselves in this way--took their work very seriously, and it hurt to see it mangled.

One of the most frustrating experiences for a screenwriter was the story conference, where, as Ceplair and Englund say, "the scripter's ideas, treatments and drafts were decimated like Indians in a Western." At story conferences, the writer met with one or more producers, who then gave him "suggestions" about how to improve his work. The writer knew that if he refused to make the suggested changes, someone else would, and there were other penalties for refusal as well: one could be suspended without pay, or simply ignored and given no work for months, or worst, be given only the most hopeless, tenth-rate projects. The writer also knew that the producer ordering the changes had absolute power, and no skill, experience, or sense of plotting beyond the most cliched situations. Producers didn't like originality:

There are different kinds of producers in the studios, ranging from out-and-out illiterates to philosophers and aesthetes. But all of them have the same function. Their task is to guard against the unusual. They are the trusted loyalists of the cliche...In the court of the Movie Owner...none dared speak of art. In the Owner's mind art was a synonym for bankruptcy. An artist was a saboteur to be uprooted from the company's pay roll as quickly as a Communist with a pamphlet...The job of turning good writers into movie hacks is the producer's chief task... I can recall a few bright ones among them, and fifty nitwits. The pain of having to collaborate with such dullards and to submit myself to their approvals was always acute. Years of experience failed to help. I never became reconciled to taking literary orders from them. I often prepared myself for a producer conference by swallowing two sleeping pills in advance.

So if it was so awful, why stay? Most of the writers were not dependent on Hollywood alone for income, and could easily have left. The most obvious reason was money--"tremendous sums of money for work that required no more effort than a game of pinochle," Ben Hecht recalls:

Of the sixty movies I wrote, more than half were written in two weeks or less. I received for each script, whether written in two or (never more than) eight weeks, from fifty thousand to a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. I worked also by the week. My salary ran from five thousand dollars a week up. Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer in 1949 paid me ten thousand a week. David Selznick once paid me thirty-five hundred a day.

Not all writers made this much, but most of them made far more than they could have made at any other kind of writing job.

The lure of making one's mark in a new and exciting medium was another reason many stayed on to write for the studios. The possibilities of the movies seemed endless in the early Thirties, and the fact that they reached an audience of millions could not have failed to cross the mind of even the most unambitious writer.

The company of other writers was also a major consideration for most of those who wrote in Hollywood. You could socialize with your colleagues at the studio during the day, and at night, when there was more time (and, because of your salary, more money) for fun, at Musso and Frank's, Luceys's, the Formosa, the Brown Derby, Stanley Rose's bookstore, and others. John Sanford said, of Musso and Frank's, "It was our preserve; it resembled an eating club; there was no other place to eat dinner. 'Meet you for dinner,' meant Musso's. Between six and nine in the evening everyone you wanted to see was there; you would know at least eighty percent of the people dining in the back room. We liked each other. We read and respected each other's work."

And certainly not least, the writer was not as isolated as he could be writing a novel or play. Most movie writing was a matter of collaboration; Ben Hecht recalls, "Even without collaborators, the loneliness of literary creation was seldom part of movie work. You wrote with the phone ringing like a firehouse bell, with the boss charging in and out of your atelier, with the director grimacing and grunting in an adjoining armchair. Conferences interrupted you, agents with dream jobs flirted with you, and friends with unsolved plots came in hourly." To someone who has sat alone in a room for a year, trying to write a novel, this might well sound like paradise.

Given all the obvious attractions, it is not surprising that Hollywood lured and hooked so many writers, among them some of the best of the twentieth century: Maxwell Anderson, Robert Benchley, Stephen Vincent Benet, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Nathanael West, Moss Hart, Ben Hecht, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, S.J. Perelman, George S. Kaufman, Herman Mankiewicz, Charles MacArthur, Marc Connelly, Francis Faragoh, John Dos Passos, Bess Meredyth, Anita Loos, Dorothy Farnum, Lorna Moon, Salka Viertel, Doris Anderson, Gertrude Purcell, Jane Murfin, Sarah Y. Mason, Laura Kerr, Marguerite Roberts, Frances Goodrich, Ayn Rand, Mary McCall, Jr., Gladys Lehman, Phoebe Ephron, Zoe Akins, Dorothy Parker, Vera Caspary, Lillian Hellman, Donald Ogden Stewart, Samuel Ornitz, P.G. Wodehouse--the list numbers in the hundreds.

Nevertheless, almost all of them chafed under the studio system, and were shocked and dismayed to find that they had given up control over their work, and thus, to a great extent, over their lives. The contradictions and ironies in the Hollywood system were not lost on them:

art/profit, innovation/standardization, refinement/ vulgarity, expertise/instinct, specialization/ integration, creativity/predictability...The great historical irony which every screenwriter had...to brave was that the very forces of production which had called him into existence and defined his crucial task denied him the artistic authority and creative satisfaction which directors and stars had once tasted and which his apparent importance would seem to demand. Success in the form of high salaries and steady employment failed to compensate a significant minority of screenwriters for their constant subordination and artistic debasement in a business where their contribution was essential.

Another form of dislocation was geographic. Many of the writers came from New York, which they still regarded as the center of life. They itched to get back there as often and for as long as they could; for many, to settle in Hollywood was a sellout--an admission that you had given up your high standards and sunk into complacence and mediocrity. So they shuttled back and forth, rented, rather than bought, lived in hotels like the Garden of Allah, the Hollywood Plaza, the Chateau Marmont, the Beverly Hills Hotel, out of suitcases for months at a time, until they had made enough money to go "home." But the lure of the money to be made, and the other, more intangible benefits, drew them back time and time again, irresistably.

And of course, trying to do your best writing on something for which you had, at most, only a sneaking, grudging kind of respect, and then having to denigrate your hard work among your fellow writers, produced another sort of frustration. Writing something you felt had value, and then seeing it ruined by a dozen other writers, directors, and producers, produced a special kind of agony. Perhaps the worst frustration came, though, for most screenwriters, from the knowledge that there were good producers, who could recognize quality when they saw it and who gave the writer control over his work; but that they were not working for those producers: "The writer's frustration thus, ironically, resulted from the taste of artistic success and the wish for more, not the failure ever to taste it...writers...escaped from their jailers often enough to feel really frustrated about the time they had to spend behind bars."

John Fante was one of those drawn to Hollywood by the prospect of fame and fortune. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1930 from Colorado, but found himself working at grocery stores, gas stations, hotels, and in the canneries in Long Beach Harbor. He spent his spare time in the library, reading and writing. His first story, "Altar Boy," was published in 1932; he was thrilled, and went out and bought a collection of neckties and a fancy suit with the money. He moved to a 2-dollar room in the Alta Vista Hotel on Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles and worked as a waiter. Whenever he sold a story, he would splurge a bit, maybe on a new fedora, but then he would send the rest of the money to his mother, to help support his family.

It was only natural that a writer would look to the studios for work, and it wasn't long before Fante was employed as a $300-a-week hack writer. It was good money--he bought a car and some good clothes and spent a lot of money on women--but it wasn't his dream, and he kept doing it to buy himself the time to write short stories and novels.

In 1937 he married Joyce Smart, another writer, and he credited her with giving him the impetus to start working harder to write and publish. In 1938, his first novel, Wait Until Spring, Bandini, was published, followed quickly by Ask the Dust in 1939. A collection of short stories, Dago Red, was published in 1940, Full of Life in 1952, and then Dreams of Bunker Hill in 1985.

But his novels never made much money, and Fante, who had a growing family to support--he and Joyce eventually had four children--spent most of his time working for the studios, a job he grew to hate. Among his screen credits are East of the River (1940), Full of Life (1956--from his own novel by the same name), Dinky (1935), The Golden Fleecing (1940) Jeanne Eagels (1957), Walk on the Wild Side (1962), The Reluctant Saint (1962), and My Six Loves (1963).

In 1955, Fante was diagnosed with diabetes, and his health began to decline. By 1978, he was completely blind, but still wrote, dictating stories and his last novel to his wife. He died in 1983.

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The information in this lecture is derived in part from the following sources:
Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century, 1954.
John Fante, letter, 16 June 1934, quoted in Michael Moreau, "My Mentor, Mr. Mencken," Los Angeles Times Magazine, 26 April 1987.
Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood; Politics in the Film Community, 1930-1960, 1979.
Anita Loos, Kiss Hollywood Goodbye, 1974.
Richard Collins, John Fante, A Literary Portrait, 2000.
Stephen Cooper & David Fine, eds. John Fante: A Critical Gathering, 1999.

As one went to Europe to see the living past, so one must visit Southern California to observe the future.
~ Alison Lurie