Nothing New Under the Sun - Hollywood Writers

In an oft-quoted interview in 1956, Parker gave a memorable description of the Hollywood personality, an ostentatious showboat whose humbler roots keep bursting through the elegant facade. "I can't talk about Hollywood," Parker said. "It was a horror to me when I was there and it's a horror to look back on. I can't imagine how I did it. When I got away from it I couldn't even refer to the place by name. 'Out there,' I called it. You want to know what 'out there' means to me? Once I was coming down a street in Beverly Hills and I saw a Cadillac about a block long, and out of the side window was a wonderfully slinky mink, and an arm, and at the end of the arm a hand in a white suede glove wrinkled around the wrist, and in the hand was a bagel with a bite out of it."

Evelyn Waugh was lured to Hollywood only once, in 1946, when MGM proposed turning Brideshead Revisited into a film. But when the Hays office demanded major changes in the story to make it morally acceptable, Waugh with-drew the book and returned to England. The stay was useful to him, however, in providing the setting for his scathing satire of California burial customs, The Loved One. While he was in Hollywood, Waugh wrote a letter to a friend: "MGM bore me when I see them but I don't see them much. They have been a help in getting me introductions to morticians who are the only people worth knowing."

Upon his return to England, Waugh wrote an essay for the Daily Telegraph called "Why Hollywood Is a Term of Disparagement." "It may seem both presumptuous and unkind to return from six weeks' generous entertainment abroad and at once to sit down and criticize one's hosts," Waugh acknowledged in his introduction, but that did not inhibit him. Like so many other visitors, Waugh was struck by the insularity of people toiling on soundstages. "Even in Southern California," he noted, "the film community are a people apart. They are like monks in a desert oasis, their lives revolving about a few shrines-half a dozen immense studios, two hotels, one restaurant; their sacred texts are their own publicity and the local gossip columns... Artists and public men elsewhere live under a fusillade of detraction and derision; they accept it as a condition of their calling. Not so in Hollywood, where all is a continuous psalm of self-praise."

One of the things that tickled these literary visitors was the unique language of the locals, their tendency to speak in hyperbole. Novelist Leo Rosten wrote a book about Hollywood in 1941 in which he observed, "Hollywood talks and thinks in superlatives...The revealing story is told of two movie producers meeting on the street. 'How's your picture doing?' asked the first. 'Excellent'. 'Only excellent? That's too bad.' "

Or as Gore Vidal wrote in a whimsical reminiscence, "The last time I saw Dorothy Parker, Los Angeles had been on fire for three days. As I took a taxi from the studio I asked the driver, 'How's the fire doing?' 'You mean,' said the Hollywoodian, 'the holocaust.' "

Of course then, as now, those who had grown up in puritanical middle America were struck-and often swept away-by the very different sexual mores of Hollywood. Ben Hecht delighted in reporting the licentiousness of the movie crowd and their blithe oblivion to sexual scandals that would have rocked Des Moines or Cincinnati. "News that a group of stars and caliphs have been engaging in orgies is received casually by the movie dinner parties," Hecht wrote. "Information from a qualified source that a certain great star is perverse in her love-making and will engage in amour only in a bathtub full of warm milk, or that a local Casanova has taken to substituting electrical appliances for phallic attentions makes the smallest of ripples. You will see the lacteal siren and the sexual Edison at dinner the next evening and there will be no nudging or winking."

Long before the age of the auteurs, writers groused about the tendency of directors to think they could compose their own movies. In 1920, on the first of many visits to Hollywood, W. Somerset Maugham remarked, "There are directors who desire to be artistic. It is pathetic to compare the seriousness of their aim with the absurdity of their attainment." Ben Hecht reported that he had enjoyed his collaborations with several directors, but not "the humorless ones to whose heads fame had gone like sewer gas... They scowled at dialogue, shuddered at jokes, and wrestled with a script until they had shaken out of it all its verbal glitter and bright plotting. Thus they were able to bring to the screen evidence only of their own 'genius.' "

These writers were just as perspicacious when skewering the loudmouth producers who hired them. "The producers, generally speaking, read nothing," Evelyn Waugh wrote in 1947. "They employ instead a staff of highly accomplished women who recite aloud, and with dramatic effects, the stories which filter down to them from a staff of readers. The producers sit round like children while the pseudonanny spins a tale, two or three in an afternoon-classical novels, Broadway comedies, the Book of the Month, popular biographies, anything. 'Bags I,' says the producer, when something takes his fancy. 'Daddy buy that.'"

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