A bold reevaluation of the screen-writing years of a quartet
of iconic writers often at odds with the film industry
F Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, Dorothy Parker, and Budd Schulberg exercised as much of an impact
on Hollywood as it had on them during their respective
screen-writing careers, Tom Cerasulo argues in Authors
Out Here. Cerasulo explores the often tense relationship
between these accomplished writers and the film industry
in which they were immersed and finds that this marriage
of talent and power was mutually beneficial if not always
happy. Combining film studies with literary analysis, this
alternative view of the creative negotiations between
representative writers and the studio system advances our
understanding of the meaning of authorship in the first
half of the twentieth century.
Cerasulo's quartet of subjects wrote for and about the
burgeoning film industry during the halcyon days of the
studio era. Popular accounts of this period characterize
the Hollywood careers of these writers as motivated by
revenge, mocking the studios and their hold over literary
creativity. Cerasulo argues that, rather than ruining talent,
time spent in the film industry benefited artists such as
Fitzgerald, West, Parker, and Schulberg by providing the
financial, creative, and social resources each needed during
a complex moment in American cultural life. In texts from
West's The Day of the Locust and Schulberg's What Makes
Sammy Run? to Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon and Pat Hobby
stories, Cerasulo finds these writers capable of interrogating
the film industry while simultaneously offering
some of the earliest examples of American film theory by
carefully examining studio culture and the writer's place
within it.
Screenwriters and the producers and directors to whom
they reported not only battled over creative control of
individual texts but over larger notions of authorship and
authority. As paid employees crafting screenplays for a collaborative
mass medium in which words were not primary
and writers resided near the bottom of the hierarchy,
many authors were forced to question their callings. But
recognition that they were collaborators in a culture
industry was never artistically devastating, and it was never
a vocation killer. Cerasulo illustrates how this realization
that writers were creative workers in a larger endeavor also
served to inspire some of this group's best creative work
and invigorated their post-Hollywood careers.
 Tom Cerasulo is an assistant professor of English and the Shaughness Family Chair for
the Study of the Humanities at Elms College
in Chicopee, Massachusetts. Cerasulo holds a
Ph.D. in English and a certificate in film studies
from the Graduate Center of the City University
of New York. His research has been published
in American Writers, the Arizona Quarterly, the
Encyclopedia of the Jazz Age, Studies in American
Culture, and other publications.
"Few authors perpetuated the myth that Hollywood is inimical to the man of letters as thoroughly as F. Scott Fitzgerald. Few critical studies have in turn demonstrated as convincingly as Tom Cerasulo's Authors Out Here exactly how writers profited from that nest-of-vipers plot. Hardly literary naifs, the fiction writers examined here arrived in La-La Land more than willing to leverage their artistic credentials against the cold cash that the screen machine dangled in front of them. As Cerasulo shows, the ones that succeeded saw the opportunity to address an audience without condescension. The ones that failed, by contrast, were perhaps a little too tied to their romantic notions of originality and genius. The discussions of Fitzgerald and West here are concise object lessons in why authors shouldn't sweat the spectacle, while the chapter on Parker gives due credit to the underappreciated skills of professionalism and collaboration. Perhaps most exciting is the discussion of Budd Schulberg, whose reputation this study goes a long way toward reestablishing. Cerasulo gives us a great opportunity to rewind some of literary culture's most cherished myths of Hollywood as hack factory, inviting us to view what that interpretation has long left out of frame."—Kirk Curnutt, author of The Cambridge Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dixie Noir, and others |
