Explore the vast range of titles available.

The story of what happens when a serious writer goes to Hollywood has become a cliché: the writer is paid well but underappreciated, treated like a factory worker, and forced to write bad, formulaic movies. Most fail, become cynical, drink to excess, and at some point write a bitter novel that attacks the film industry in the name of high art. Like many too familiar stories, this one neither holds up to the facts nor helps us understand Hollywood novels. Instead, Chip Rhodes argues, these novels tell us a great deal about the ways that Hollywood has shaped both the American political landscape and American definitions of romance and desire.Rhodes considers how novels about the film industry changed between the studio era of the 1930s and 1940s and the era of deregulated film making that has existed since the 1960s. He asserts that Americans are now driven by cultural, rather than class, differences and that our mainstream notion of love has gone from repressed desire to \"abnormal desire\" to, finally, strictly business.Politics, Desire, and the Hollywood Novelpays close attention to six authors-Nathanael West, Raymond Chandler, Budd Schulberg, Joan Didion, Bruce Wagner, and Elmore Leonard-who have toiled in the film industry and written to tell about it. More specifically, Rhodes considers both screenplays and novels with an eye toward the different formulations of sexuality, art, and ultimately political action that exist in these two kinds of storytelling.

Play It As It Laysremains one of the most astute—and troubling—literary investigations of the causes and consequences of the Hollywood-led culture industry. The novel is unique within the subgenre of the Hollywood novel since it is one of the very few that focuses exclusively on the effects of the culture industry on women. Nathanael West'sDay of the Locust, Norman Mailer'sDeer Park, and Raymond Chandler'sThe Little Sisterare just three of many Hollywood novels that exemplify the subgenre's over-reliance on the equation of artistic integrity and masculinity. Hollywood novelists, like modernists, encode mass culture as a “feminine” discourse that functions as a convenient other for the sanctified, but beleaguered aesthetic discourse—a discourse, moreover, that is based on patriarchal, subject-object epistemology.Play It As It Layseschews all such embedded ideologies as it tells the story of a disaffected actress without recourse to any culturally available counternarratives. In its overt revision of Hemingway's existential modernism,Play It As It Layssuggests how little this pair (patriarchy and modernism) no longer speaks to the current historical conjuncture. The novel thus belongs to what has recently been called the postpatriarchal, postoedipal universe theorized by the “New Lacanians” within which the “lack in the other” is in fact a constitutive lack in the subject herself. Herein lies the novel's distinctiveness within the canon of the Hollywood novel: unlike earlier, male-written Hollywood novels whose tragedy is a consummately modernist tragedy,Play It As It laysis best read as a “postmodern tragedy” according to which the narcissistic, empty subject is infatuated with death in actual or symbolic forms.

Rhodes discusses Budd Schulberg's novel \"What Makes Sammy Run?\" The novel has a transparent political agenda because it follows so closely Schulberg's own participation in the founding of the Screen Writer's Guild in Hollywood and has provided labor historians with as much raw material as literary historians.

Rhodes presents an illustration and explanation of the individualism and populism that drive Raymond Chandler's \"The Little Sister.\" These apparently antipathetic ideologies can be seen as mutually sustaining if thought of through Freud's theory of fantasy--and the contrasting pleasure and reality principles more specifically.

This chapter contains sections titled: References and Further Reading

Two novels written in the 1920s, Theodore Dreiser's \"An American Tragedy\" and Harry Leon Wilson's \"Merton of the Movies\" find very different ways of negotiating the formation of the modern subject within mass culture.

On the eve of the publication of his first novel, The Fire in the Flint, Walter White received a letter from T. S. Stribling, whose novel Birthright had inspired White to write Fire in the first place. Both novels tell the story of a Northern-educated black's return to his Southern hometown with the intention of uplifting the black community and improving race relations. In his letter, however, Stribling makes it clear that the similarities between the two novels end there. Fire's main character, says Stribling, is so “poky in love making… I rather suspect a big healthy passion wouldn't have hurt.” He proceeds to criticize Fire's ending in which the main character is lynched following much violence against his family: “The repeated murder and the repeated burning is what I object to. That may be quite natural, and I admit that lynchings are monotonous, but art is the escape of life from monotony. ” At this point, it appears that Stribling is offering the standard critique of much politically-charged literature. He seems to be accusing White of being factually accurate, but aesthetically uninteresting. However, in a follow-up letter responding to White's defense of the novel's ending, Stribling criticizes White for being inaccurate: Here you are, a young Negro writer with a very fine promise. I insist that you write in the big style, in the unhurried style that shows human beings as they are… Now White, detach yourself, my boy. Cut away, be a camera, not a gatling gun.

Near the end of Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles (1974), a fight breaks out in a saloon. As the brawl escalates, a wall of the saloon is knocked down to reveal another movie being made, a high society musical in the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers vein. Soon hyper-masculine cowboys fight effeminate dancers in a clash of classic film genres. This scene reveals the basic theme of Hollywood-on-Hollywood movies: movies are not true-to-life; instead they conform to strict genre formulas to create their own “reality.” Movies about Hollywood are well known and popular. Films like Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen, 1952) and Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) share Blazing Saddles's delight in making viewers feel like insiders in the know about moviemaking. Even when there is an apparent critique of the film industry, it isn't genuine. At a silent film premiere, Gene Kelly's character is interviewed and delivers a stereotypical high-art story of his rise to fame that is undercut by the visual images of a child of the urban ghetto dancing in saloons and pool halls and then working as a stuntman before chancing into a starring role. The silent era, the film strongly implies, was a fake and elitist era but the new Hollywood of the sound era allows for genuine stories about real people. Similarly, Sunset Boulevard is brutally critical of the narcissism that characterizes the silent studio's star system. Norma Desmond now lives in a delusional world because she was ultimately nothing but the creation of the studios. While the silent era was unwittingly comical in Singin' in the Rain, here it is grotesque, but for the same reason. More recent films about Hollywood like the Coen brothers' Barton Fink (1991) and Robert Altman's The Player (1992) are certainly more genuinely critical of the film industry, only celebrating Hollywood's influence on culture in ironic and black comedic ways.

Joan Didion's \"Play It As It Lays\" remains one of the most astute--and troubling--literary investigations of the causes and consequences of the Hollywood-led culture industry. The novel is unique within the subgenre of the Hollywood novel since it is one of the very few that focuses exclusively on the effects of the culture industry on women. Rhodes discusses the issues of gender and feminine discourse in the novel.