Five Neglected Hollywood Novels: An Interview with Kari Sund

Kari Sund is a PhD student at Glasgow University working on a thesis about the Hollywood novel. She’s following in noteworthy footsteps: the late novelist and memoirist Carolyn See published her own dissertation, The Hollywood Novels: An Historical and Critical Study way back in 1963. I contacted Kari recently to ask if she’d share some recommendations from her wide reading in this genre, and she generously agreed.

What got you interested in novels set in Hollywood? Were you a film buff who got interested in literature or a literature buff who got interested in film?

Definitely the latter. I first became interested in the Hollywood novel when I was doing my Postgrad in American Literature, though the course didn’t focus on the genre. One of the texts on the core course was John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, and when I had finished reading this my Kindle recommended that I read Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, which I had never heard of, but absolutely loved. As both the works were published in 1939 and both were set in California during the depression era, I wanted to write about their differing depictions of the Western Dream in American Literature, drawing from Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893).

Around about the same time, I was writing my dissertation on the portrayal of alcohol, waste and occupation in the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and this led to me reading his unfinished Hollywood novel The Last Tycoon (1941). That set the ball rolling: the more Hollywood novels I read, the more I wanted to read. What most surprised me was the fact that until reading Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, I hadn’t come across discussion of the Hollywood novel as a genre. I had taken undergraduate modules on twentieth-century American literature, and a postgrad in American literature, but the genre hadn’t been covered and it wasn’t even mentioned in any of the American lit anthologies on my shelves. That added a layer of intrigue to the topic for me, which I find always helps when you are going down a rabbit-hole.

1. Merton of the Movies (1922) by Harry Leon Wilson.

This is perhaps the first Hollywood novel to become a best-seller. It’s interesting to compare what contemporary reviewers said to how the book’s remembered now. The New Republic’s reviewer, for example, said “for the thousands who will laugh with Mr. Wilson there are millions who might read his story and see nothing in it to laugh at at all.” Harry Leon Wilson has a reputation as a comic novelist (e.g., Ruggles of Red Gap): is this a comic novel or a tragi-comic novel?

For me Merton of the Movies is a tragi-comic novel, and it really surprises me how many scholars, critics and reviewers refer to Wilson’s work as simply comic. There is no doubt that it is laugh-out-loud funny at times. Merton is a small-town shop assistant who wants more from life and dreams of finding success as a serious actor. He moves to Hollywood, struggles at first, but eventually finds fame in slapstick Keystone Kops-style comedy westerns due to his remarkable likeness to an existing Western star.

The only problem is that Merton has a deep disdain for these comedies, seeing them as the lowest form of acting. But when a director recognises the humorous scenarios created by Merton’s tendency to take himself far too seriously, he exploits this, putting Merton in a comedy role without telling him. Merton thinks he has finally got the serious Western role of his dreams. This is hilarious, of course, but because all Merton’s colleagues and bosses on set are part of the ruse it’s also humiliating to witness. Merton finally reaches the level of fame and success he has long dreamed of, but by a means which he has always scorned – slapstick comedy – and so there’s a bittersweet element to this.

It’s definitely difficult to feel sympathy for Merton at times because he is pompous and judgemental, but Wilson’s novel speaks about the culture of the Hollywood film-factory utilising human beings for its own means, a culture which countless Hollywood novels would continue to explore into the 20s, 30s, and still do today. Merton can bring you tears of laughter and of pity, definitely a tragi-comic novel, and a wonderful read.

Some years ago in The New York Times, Nora Johnson called Merton of the Movies“>Merton of the Movies one of the Hollywood novels that had become “dated as old valentines in their innocence and their view of the movie capitol as exciting, amusing, certainly loony, but harmless on the whole.” Is this a fair accusation?

I don’t think this is entirely fair, no, mainly because I don’t feel that the novel depicts Hollywood as harmless. Wilson captures the excitement, or rather obsession, that people felt about potential fame and success in the field of acting, and that’s a dream that I don’t think has ever fully left Western culture. But with this obsession comes a resulting difficulty in distinguishing between reality and fantasy – another theme which Hollywood novels have continuously explored – and this is one of the main concerns of Merton of the Movies. Merton experiences delusions in his humdrum life back home, like getting into fights with mannequins at work as he envisions himself in a Western saloon scene, and becoming the laughing stock of the town when he tries to steal a local horse as his trusty steed.

After he has made the pilgrimage to Hollywood he ends up so destitute that he finds himself secretly living on film sets and nearly starving, and it is because his hold on reality is so loose that he is able to normalise this situation. He constantly filters the events of his own life as they might be depicted through a Hollywood memoir, or fan-magazine interview, with a famous star. Wilson’s narrative depicts these scenes in a comedic style, but Wilson himself was not a fan of Hollywood and there is an undeniably serious message in this novel about how harmful an extreme obsession with Hollywood, film, and the cult of celebrity can be.

The exploration of this theme has endured not only in fiction, but also in films about Hollywood and the West. Sunset Boulevard (1950), Mulholland Drive (2001), and more recently Ingrid Goes West (2017), all explore the distortion of reality through their character’s proximity to, or obsession with, Hollywood and celebrity. Ingrid Goes West links this to the use of social media in modern culture, exploring how we distort our own portrayals of reality via platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, and how these portrayals in turn impact our perceptions of our own lives. So, I don’t feel that Merton of the Movies“>Merton depicts Hollywood as harmless, nor do I think that the work is dated given that one of its main themes is still so relevant today. Johnson’s words do resonate in respect of one aspect of the novel though, and that is the fact that Merton still finds success in Hollywood, even if it isn’t his preferred role.

Scholars like John Parris Springer have observed that Wilson gives in to the fairy-tale perception that dreams really do come true, and I have to admit that I also find it disappointing that he somewhat endorses the idea that anyone could make it in Hollywood.¹ This truly was a harmful message, one that was bringing thousands of starry-eyed young people to the film-capital in search of fame, only to be met with disappointment and sometimes destitution. Yet without this ending—Merton’s success—it would have been a completely different novel.

 

2. Minnie Flynn (1925) by Frances Marion

Frances Marion was the highest-paid screenwriter (of either sex) in the 1920s. What does Minnie Flynn tell us about Marion’s view of the industry she was so successful in?

This picks up where I’ve just left off with Merton of the Movies. In Cari Beauchamp’s compelling work Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood (1997), she writes that Marion wanted the novel to be “a warning to the thousands of women she saw pouring into Hollywood full of optimism and without the slightest idea of what lay ahead”.² So Marion was open that this was a cautionary tale for young girls coming to Hollywood to try and make it as actresses.

At the time when Minnie Flynn was published, people were travelling to Hollywood in the thousands to find fame and success only to find that even extra roles were impossible to get because there was such a vast pool of hopefuls to select from. Hollywood had more budding actors than it needed. Marion’s message was that even for those young girls who did find work, it would not necessarily be the experience that they envisioned.

The novel follows a young girl, Minnie, who starts out as an extra in the East coast film industry. She is given an introduction by a minor actor she meets at a ball and who is interested in her romantically. Minnie doesn’t find massive stardom, but she does find moderate success and moves to Hollywood to continue her career.

Marion really emphasises the serious pitfalls, and one of the main ones is the loss of trust in friends and family members. Most of Minnie’s loved ones use her for what they can get when she is at the peak of her fame, and are nowhere to be found when she is down-and-out, it’s quite tragic. Then there is the added fact that, for most, fame rarely lasts.

Marion also makes it explicitly clear that women trying to make it as actresses were objectified sexually, often from a young age, as part-and-parcel of the casting process. This is one of the most significant aspects of the novel for me, as it reflects that a culture which still exists today – as we have seen in the last couple of years with the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the Me Too movement – has been deeply ingrained from the early years of silent film.

Marion confessed later that she spent four months writing the first four chapters and then finished the rest of the book in just six weeks. The “tough guy” novelist Jim Tully said she “was guilty of the artistic murder of a beautiful character.” Did you notice any significant shifts in style or quality in the course of the book?

I wasn’t aware of this when I was originally reading it, and I think it would lead to a different reading experience, so it makes me want to read the novel again! There are some aspects of the work which instantly come to mind. For example, Minnie moves from the East coast film industry to the West coast film industry, and her time in Hollywood is short in the grand scheme of the novel. I was surprised by just how much of the novel is set in the East and how little is set in the West, though this was also an aspect I enjoyed as I felt it highlighted the relevance of the East coast film industry to Hollywood, another topic which my thesis gives focus to.

As for Tully’s accusation, I guess the answer depends on how we consider Minnie as beautiful. From the start she’s described as physically beautiful but Marion also emphasises the many flaws of Minnie’s character: she is selfish, fickle, shallow, and pretty mean! If Tully means that the character was beautifully crafted, then I would agree, but I also felt the ending was effective, not rushed. Minnie ends up being used by partners, lovers, family members, and so-called friends. By the close of the book she is destitute, having lost her fame and her looks, and she’s punishing herself for her fate.

Note: Kari got this beautiful copy of Minnie Flynn a few years ago from Ben Smith, who ran a Kickstarter to get the work back into publication (and who may have a spare copy or two for sale): Frances Marion’s Lost Novel Minnie Flynn – A New Edition

 

3. Twinkle, Little Movie Star (1927) by Lorraine Maynard.

This is a children’s book — what might be considered YA (Young Adult) fiction today. What interests you about this book in the context of your research?

Hollywood-related fiction for children plays a huge role in my research. The first film-related novels to be published about Hollywood were in the form of series-works for children, so they really hold a formative position in the genre, yet these and all works for children are consistently dismissed from scholarship. Because of this, I assumed that they would be irrelevant to the larger genre, yet when I started reading these works I was struck by the similarities in the themes they explore, but also by the fresh perspectives that they bring to the genre, and so I felt they warranted more attention.

The most interesting aspect of Twinkle for me is the depiction of a child star – Vivi Corelli – and that stars experience of working in the film-industry of the 1920s. The story is almost wholly set in Hollywood, bar a few visits for location shooting, yet the universe we encounter in the novel really exists in a vacuum of film sets through the eyes of a child. Through this novel, Lorraine Maynard depicts and condemns the working conditions for child actors by detailing the dangers which Vivi is at the mercy of because of those conditions. It also touches on the use of animals in the industry, as Vivi’s co-star is a beloved dog, Scamp.

Would you consider Maynard’s child star, Vivi Corelli, a precursor to Shirley Temple?

Absolutely. Lorraine Maynard herself had worked as an actress for a short period of time when she was a teenager, so she would have had experience on film sets and in studios, and would have been familiar with the phenomenon of child stars in America. Variety also claimed that this work was allegedly based on “Baby Peggy” (Diana Serra Cary) who was one of the first child stars of the silent movie era, a real-life precursor to Shirley Temple.

 

4. Remember Valerie March (1939) by Katherine Albert

Like Frances Marion, Katherine Albert wrote from insider knowledge of working in Hollywood. Yet The New York Times reviewer wrote, “It would be shocking to think that her people represent a cross-section of Hollywood, and this reviewer is left unconvinced by the jacket’s assurance that such is true.” Having read a fair share of Hollywood books by now, how realistic did the book seem to you?

For me, this is a good example of a Hollywood novel being unfairly dismissed based on its authorship and the subcategory to which it belongs. The work is female-penned, focuses almost entirely on the career of an actress and has elements of romance and sensation in it. Having dissected bibliographies on the genre and having now read a fair amount of scholarship on it, works with these characteristics have often been dismissed since—and they were not even given serious attention at the time of publication either. There is nothing in this work which strikes me as more or less realistic than the next Hollywood novel.

Remember Valerie March takes the form of a mock star exposé narrated by Conrad Powers, who’d directed most of March’s films. It focuses on Valerie’s personality, her rise to fame, her acting roles and methods, and the events of her personal life. The writing is sometimes deliberately sensationalised due to it being a mock-exposé, yet the story remains believable. The New York Times review wasn’t the only one to disparage the work: Hollywood novelist and scriptwriter Budd Schulberg dismissed Valerie March, along with Minnie Flynn and a number of other works about women’s experience in Hollywood as “Glamour Books, glorified fan magazine stuff”.³

This was the common view of these works in the 1950s and there hasn’t been much to contradict this stance in Hollywood scholarship since. This is one of the reasons I feel these works warrant further exploration. Given the prevalence within the genre of surrealist novels like The Day of the Locust (1939), satires like Carroll and Garrett Graham’s Queer People (1930), and tongue-in-cheek works like Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One (1948), it does become difficult to distinguish this genre as “realistic”.

One thing that sets Remember Valerie March apart is the fact that Albert related the story through the voice and perspective of a male narrator–Conrad Powers, the director who discovered Valerie March. Why do you think Albert made this choice?

I’m not sure why, but it makes for a complex portrait of a Hollywood actress. In part, it’s a necessary measure to fit with the mock star-exposé form the narrative takes. At the time, the relationship between an actress and their director was something which film fan magazines and Hollywood gossip columns would often focus on as part of their preoccupation with revealing “insider” stories (and something we still read about in gossip magazines today!), so on more obvious level it would encourage an existing readership who were interested in Hollywood to buy the novel.

I don’t know if this was Albert’s conscious intention, but I also felt the narrative perspective highlighted the way in which women in Hollywood were—and often still are—filtered through male perspectives, and this is another reason why I selected this work for focus in my thesis. Conrad Powers has a close relationship with Valerie, and at times quite a strong ability to influence her decisions. I don’t think that Albert intended for the reader to always take Powers’ view of events at face value, but for them to question if there was a different perspective.

 

5. In a Lonely Place (1947) by Dorothy B. Hughes.

You’ve written that “For me, this is neglected in the sense that it’s not traditionally considered to be a Hollywood novel, but I think there’s a really strong argument for it being one!” How would you make that argument?

This ties in with a larger existing scholarly debate over how much of a link to Hollywood a Hollywood novel should have. Some critics think that a Hollywood novel should have a specific and significant geographical setting in Hollywood, while others feel that Hollywood doesn’t need to be a specific or central setting, but can be more of a “symbol rather than setting”, in the words of Jonas Spatz.⁴ To play devil’s advocate, I don’t really agree or disagree with either, or not yet anyway!

The genre has such an enormous and diverse collection of novels, all of which have varying degrees and forms of involvement with Hollywood as either a place or an industry. Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park (1951) isn’t even set in Hollywood, but with an overarching concern with the film industry and the people in that industry, no one can deny its status as a Hollywood novel. Then you have works like Remember Valerie March (1939), which are very distinctly set in Hollywood, painting a clear picture of living and working in Hollywood even down to what interior design is popular with the stars. Yet, as we have seen with the review you cited, it is still critically dismissed for being unrealistic or inaccurate.

In A Lonely Place (1949) hasn’t been discussed within the genre – to the best of my knowledge – and it isn’t recorded in any bibliographies of the genre, and I believe this is because of the book’s delicate involvement with Hollywood. Hughes goes to great lengths to utilise the geographical area, as the protagonist Dix Steele drives round specific streets at night, haunting hotspots where he *spoiler* looks for murder victims. The geographical element is very much there, but many would argue that there is no actual concern with Hollywood as none of the characters or plots are prominently involved in the film industry.

Much of Dix’s urge to kill, though, comes from a feeling of resentment which is clearly linked to class, money, and lifestyle. He pretends to be a novelist and tries to exude the casual superiority of a man of leisure. But, of course, this only betrays an inferiority. He is financially dependent on an uncle he hates, and the perpetual land of sunshine and beautiful film-people represents, for Dix, a fantasy which he has been shut out from after serving in the war.

His experience is such a truly stark contrast to the leisurely life which was consistently promoted in Hollywood through consumerism. This lifestyle was promoted through the films being produced, by the publicity machines of film studios, by the fan magazines, even in the shop windows you would pass as you walked down the street. The message was that this life of leisure was attainable if you only looked the part.

Dix is trying desperately to look the part but only feels an increasing sense of unbelonging that adds to his resentment. I would argue that there could be no better setting to fuel this type of resentment than Hollywood itself. So, though it might seem almost like an incidental setting – just the backdrop to a serial killer’s hunt – I think Hollywood is the essential setting for In A Lonely Place. I don’t think this novel could be set anywhere else and still have the same associations.

One last question: some people say that Hollywood and the movie business is an artificial environment, so fictions set there are inherently stilted or simplistic. Others say it’s an environment that distills, drawing out and intensifying aspects of the world at large. Where do you side?

From the Hollywood novels which I have read I think the genre tends to draw out and intensify aspects of the world at large. An idea which you come across frequently in scholarship on Hollywood and the Hollywood novel pre-1950s is that Hollywood was being perceived and portrayed in these novels as a “microcosm” of America. This idea doesn’t always resonate with me when I’m reading Hollywood novels, but I think in a great many of these works Hollywood is definitely being used to explore some of the larger social, cultural, and artistic concerns which people were experiencing at this time.

The early works I examine from the 1910s and 1920s reflect the changing perceptions of social class in America, women’s role in the workplace, concerns and excitement over industrialisation, invention, and technological advancements being made. I really haven’t read one Hollywood novel that I’ve found stilted or simplistic. Instead, even the least complex works still provide insight into significant aspects of the film industry and reflect larger concerns over cultural or societal issues, and if we are examining Hollywood and the film industry from a historical perspective these are extremely valuable insights.

Footnotes

¹John Parris Springer. Hollywood Fictions: The Dream Factory in American Popular Literature. Norman. University of Oklahoma, 2000.

²Cari Beauchamp, Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood. California, University of California Press, 1997.

³Budd Schulberg. “The Hollywood Novel.” American Film (Archive:1975-1992), vol. 1, no. 7, May 01, 1976, pp. 28-32.

⁴Jonas Spatz. Hollywood in Fiction: Some Versions of the American Myth. Mouton, The Hague, 1969.

Kari provided the following profile: I’m studying for my PhD in American Studies at Glasgow University, and my thesis is on the Hollywood novel genre pre-1950s. Other research interests include F. Scott Fitzgerald, and particularly the role played in his novels of alcohol, work, and waste. As a part-time student I also spend my time working in financial services, hospitality and teaching. My Twitter handle is @karichsund and my email address is [email protected], would love to hear from anyone with similar research interests, or fellow part-time PhD students as it’s always nice to connect with those who have a shared experience of this!