Posts Tagged ‘film’
“It is even more urgent that we learn to look passionately and technically at stories, if only to protect ourselves from the false and manipulative ones being circulated among us.”*…
Sydney Sweeney is an actress who gained early recognition for her roles in Everything Sucks!, The Handmaid’s Tale, Sharp Objects, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Reality, Anyone but You, and Madame Web. She received wider acclaim for her performances in the drama series Euphoria (2019–present) and the first season of the anthology series The White Lotus (2021), both of which earned her nominations for Primetime Emmy Awards.
But in a way that’s quite apart from her art, Sydney Sweeney has also emerged as an avatar of, a heroine of sorts to, right-wing culture warriors.
B. D. McClay has a thoughful essay in The Lamp on this divergence…
… The life of Marilyn Monroe yields a few lessons for those who would follow in her footsteps. One, don’t marry a playwright. Two, get paid. No current-day actress has taken this second lesson to heart like Sydney Sweeney, whose tousled good looks are practically designed to make people underestimate her. Sweeney understands that being an object of sexual fantasy involves a hefty dose of contempt—and says, If that’s the game, I’m going to make some money off of me, too. She’s under no illusions that if her career is left to others, she’ll be cast in parts she finds interesting. So if she sees a script she likes, she funds it herself. To get money, she sells stuff: bath soap that supposedly contains her bathwater, jeans, ice cream.
And if these products are advertised in ways that are a little tasteless, or a little offensive, that means that people will talk about the ads, and that talk means sales, and those sales mean, in the end, more checks for Sweeney. Asking whether or not Sweeney knew that a jeans ad campaign with the tagline “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” would activate the very weird and very horny portion of the Internet that has made her into a symbol of anti-wokeness misses the point. She would have done it either way. That is, I imagine that Sweeney regards her crew of weird, horny right-wing fans the same way she probably regards any group of fans: as wallets.
As for me, personally? I like Sydney Sweeney, in a vague way that doesn’t mean I have any interest in her movies. I just have a lot of respect for actors who don’t ever say no to a check (see, Orson Welles). The other side of libidinal contempt is feel-good pity, but there’s nothing pitiable about Sweeney either. Some girls are born connected, some girls are born pretty, and some girls are born smart. Two out of three isn’t so bad. But her cultists are another story. Aside from the obvious—adopting Sydney Sweeney as a cause allows them to post pictures of her in underwear with plausible deniability—what’s going on there?
The “Ballad of Sydney Sweeney” goes like this: “They” wanted to exterminate beautiful busty blondes. “They” put ugly people in ads (sometimes). Now, however, here comes Sydney Sweeney, ending wokeness once and for all. The implication is that at some point in the past ten years, it’s been disadvantageous to be a curvaceous babe. The only sense in which that is true has not changed: Sweeney keeps showing up in ads in bras that don’t fit. But never mind that; thanks to Sweeney, it is now legal to be hot. The hot people have come out from the places where they’d been driven into hiding by the uggo police. Now they frolic freely in the sun. Very touching.
Meanwhile, the anti-Sweeney in this drama is Taylor Swift. Swift and Sweeney have been pitted against each other by spectators, including Donald Trump: Swift, who represents woke, is no longer hot; Sweeney, anti-woke, is hot. (Out with the old blonde, in with the new.) Like so many statements about both Taylor Swift and Sydney Sweeney, or, for that matter, by Trump, this one has no tether to reality, but it’s how a certain type of person wants things to be. There’s a level of personal betrayal at play here. Swift, who stays out of trouble, avoids politics, doesn’t do drugs, rarely seems out of control, and sings about love, was the crypto-conservative icon of an earlier era. Eventually, it turned out that she was not one of them. Their Brünnhilde was within another ring of fire. Now all their hopes are pinned on Sweeney.
Does something about this scenario feel a little off to you? Not to sound like I’ve woken up from a coma, in which I have languished since 1992 after hearing Dan Quayle rail against Murphy Brown, but when exactly did making cleavage great again become a conservative cause? Somebody with the combined memory powers of (let’s say) three goldfish can easily imagine an alternate present in which Sweeney and her cleavage were an object of outraged conservative disdain. In this other world, Sweeney is attracting rage-filled press over her horror movie [Immaculate] in which (I’m told) she plays a nun who bashes a baby to death. But in this world, these people don’t even get to do that. All rage provides is free marketing.
The people who are slavering over Sweeney will cheerfully confess to motivations that are gross enough. They like her because she’s white, busty, blonde, thin, and blue-eyed, but it seems like the white part might be the most important trait. To them, Sweeney represents things being right with the world; she’s the hot cheerleader to their collective star quarterback. (Among her many crimes, Taylor Swift’s engagement to a woke-for-football fellow, whose name I can’t recall, surely ranks pretty high on the list.) She’s the human embodiment of A.I.-generated pictures of beautiful white families, on a farm, reading the Bible, captioned, This is what they took from you!
Intriguingly little of this fandom has anything to do with Sydney Sweeney, the actual person, her professional life, or her public statements. When Doreen St. Félix, a writer for the New Yorker, had the temerity to call the American Eagle ad (and Sweeney, by implication) “banal,” the immediate reaction was to try to get her fired by digging up tweets she had written more than ten years ago and accusing her of racism against white people. One wonders whether what really set them off was St. Félix’s pointing out that Sweeney dyes her hair blonde: “Her blondness, like a lot of adult blondness, is a chemical thing masquerading as natural only to those most gullible in the population, straight men, who don’t know, and don’t care to understand, how much of so-called natural female beauty is constructed.” As both St. Félix’s piece and the subsequent backlash illustrated, the idea that Sydney Sweeney might be marketing herself undoes the illusion of the naturally beautiful girl who attracts attention and fame for doing nothing. Her fans miss all the things Sweeney herself clearly is—a smart businesswoman and an ambitious artist—because in her advertisements they see only a sleepy-looking fantasy object. Do any of these people even know that Sweeney makes movies? It’s an open question.
There is, however, some subtext here, too: These particular people, who are, I regret to say, not all men, need Sweeney to be elevated so that they can go back to cultivating a particular kind of lustful derision. They are owed women whom they can view as stupid bimbos. To the extent that they have been deprived, it’s not because hot people were made illegal. It’s because their moral disapproval, no matter how disingenuous, doesn’t matter anymore. If the vogue in women’s clothing was, for several years, loose and unsexy garments, strictures promoting modesty have little to do with it.
So these people are deprived not only of the chance to ogle but of control. Neither their approval nor their disapproval can move the needle. The only thing that can is conjuring up the idea of a phantom lib, outraged and disapproving, and hoping some real people will come along to play the part. This type of resentment politics is the only card they really have: Look at how they despise you; make them mad, drink their tears! There’s always a professor somewhere who has said something inflammatory and stupid to back up this assertion.
But who cares? Really. Who cares? At last, to own the libs, we can admit McDonald’s tastes good, have fun at the movies, and post pictures of beautiful women in advertisements. But we already could do all of those things. It’s just that McDonald’s is junk, the movies are junk, and those advertisements exist to sell us junk.
There is a familiar type of maneuver that one can expect in response to articles like this, which says little about Sydney Sweeney but a lot about horny racists who are too online. It is to pretend otherwise: “How can you say that about Sydney Sweeney?” St. Félix commented, correctly, that these people wish “to recruit [Sweeney] as a kind of Aryan princess,” which was presented by others as a case of her trashing Sweeney herself as an Aryan princess. After pretending that this article is attacking Sweeney, the field is open to sift through the writer’s old work, old tweets, relationships, and so on. If the writer is female, one can also expect looks and hypothetical fertility calculations to enter into the mix.
It might sound paradoxical to say that Sweeney’s worst fans adore her because they hate women, but it’s true. (Also, they don’t adore her.) There is always a young blonde to attach yourself to, and an older blonde to throw away. As long as Sweeney does nothing to alienate them, they will continue to hype her up; if one day she endorses a politician they don’t like, then it will be time to start talking about how she’s washed (or whatever slang has replaced “washed” by then). What they really want, besides the Fourth Reich, is a world in which women are either objects or invisible, disposable or essentially private.
That world does not exist, nor has it never existed. The A.I.-generated family has to be generated by A.I. because there are no photographs of this sort of idyllic life, with an angelic and eternally youthful wife untouched by reality or work. That is just the product of half-remembered Norman Rockwell paintings and Abercrombie & Fitch ads. Indeed, most of the imagination here is really an endless series of ads, slowly distilled into one giant advertisement, one Sydney Sweeney is not even in. It’s a tape that simply says RETURN over photos of cheerleaders and imagined past prosperity. Like most advertisements, this one is selling poisonous trash people don’t need that can only be produced at a human cost that is too high. I suggest not buying…
The selling of Sydney Sweeney: “The Uggo Police“
* George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone
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As we ponder personae, we might send commercially-viable birthday greetings to another “beautiful blonde” actress, Gwyneth Paltrow; she was born on this date in 1972. Born into the business (the daughter of filmmaker Bruce Paltrow and actress Blythe Danner), she had a long and successful career as a film star. But in 2017, she “stepped back” from acting (though she still ocassionaly appears) in order to focus on her health-wellness-lifestyle-fashion business Goop (out of which, she has recently spun a new fashion line, GWYN). Goop has grown into a formidible company selling a wide range of products, and hosting “wellness summits” and conventions. It has also faced broad criticism that faced broad criticism for marketing products and treatments that are harmful, described as “snake oil,” based on pseudoscience, and lacking in efficacy.
“To the vector belong the spoils”*
Long-time readers will know of your correspondent’s love for animator extraorinaire Chuck Jones (e.g., here). “Ellsworth Toohey” in Boing Boing reminds us that the master’s range was broad…
In 1965 animator Chuck Jones adapted a short picture book called The Dot and The Line: a romance in lower mathematics as a 9-minute cartoon. It follows a rigid blue line who adores a carefree red dot; she, however, swoons for a swaggering squiggle.
Rejected, the line enrolls in self-improvement boot camp, bending, flexing and inventing dazzling angles until he can sketch cathedrals with a single stroke. When the squiggle tries to match the precision, his chaotic scribbles collapse, and the dot chooses discipline over disorder.
Narrated with champagne-dry wit by Robert Morley, the film unfolds on spare backgrounds that feel lifted from a Mondrian canvas, while the squiggle’s jittery form was drawn on rice paper so the ink could literally misbehave. Norton Juster, author of the 1963 book, adapted his own text, seasoning math jokes with romantic wisdom: “To the vector belong the spoils.”
The short captured the 1965 Oscar for Best Animated Short, one of MGM’s final cartoons and proof that Jones could do more than torment coyotes. Decades later, its crisp pop-art minimalism still inspires…
“Chuck Jones’ 1965 Oscar-winning cartoon about a lovesick like and a dallying dot,” from @boingboing.net.
* Norman Juster
###
As we learn from the best, we might recall that it was on this date in 1967 that Chuck Jones gave AFI Report an edited and slightly abridged copy of the speech he had just given at the the World Animation Retrospective, held in Montreal in 1967. (That year was Canada’s 100th birthday and the country celebrated by hosting Expo ’67 in Montreal. The animation retrospective, curated by Louise Beaudet for the Cinémathèque Québecoise was part of the celebration.) The quarterly publication of the American Film Institute subsequently published it, under the title “Animation is a Gift Word,” in a 1974 issue devoted to animation.
Animation festivals were a relatively new idea at the time. Annecy had started in 1960, but festivals in Zagreb and Hiroshima were still in the future. The Montreal event may have been the first international animation gathering on North American soil. Close to 200 animation professionals attended from North America, Europe and Asia.
The list of attendees can only be described as impressive. The U.S. was represented by people from both coasts: Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, Ward Kimball, Ub Iwerks, Abe Levitow, Pete Burness, June Foray, Paul Frees, Bill Hurtz, Steven Busustow, Les Goldman, Dave Hilberman, Jimmy Murakami, Milt Gray, Michael Lah, Fred Wolf, Walter Lantz, Bill Littlejohn, Art Babbitt, Bill Tytla, J.R. Bray, Otto Messmer, Pepe Ruiz, Edith Vernick, Shamus Culhane, John Culhane, I. Klein, Ruth Gench, Arnold Gillespie, Grim Natwick, Tissa David, Barrie Nelson, Dave Fleischer, Paul Terry, Mordi Gerstein, Ed Smith, Robert Breer, Richard Rauh, Phil Klein, Al Stahl, and Ruth Kneitel.
Canadian attendees included Norman McLaren, Grant Munro, Gerry Potterton, Mike Miller, and Ron Tunis.
Europeans included Len Lye, Peter Foldes, Fedor Khitruk, Jean Image, Bretislaw Pojar, John Halas, Bruno Bozzetto, Dusan Vukotic, Zelimir Matko, Ivan Ivanov-Vano, and S. Mancian.
A historian present on the site could have written a history of animation just by talking to the attendees…
– source
For photos of that remarkable crowd, see the link just above and here.
And for the text of the speech, see here.
“Present at the creation”*…
The estimable Alan Jacobs on what we can learn from our elders…
There are a lot of stories about the intense conflicts between old Hollywood and new Hollywood. An oft-told one says that at a party Dennis Hopper went up to George Cukor, pointed a finger in his face, and said, “We’re gonna bury you.” This sense that the new Hollywood was at war with the old one — that the new could only live if the old died — was a commonplace idea at the time. But it was not a view held by one of the hot new directors of the Sixties, Peter Bogdanovich…
… When he came to Hollywood, Bogdanovich made a point of getting to know the people who had made so many of the movies he loved. He compiled a book of interviews with old-time directors — he also did one with old-time actors, but the one with directors is particularly noteworthy.
Of all those interviews, the most fascinating is the very first one, with Allan Dwan, because Dwan was present at the creation. He had played football at Notre Dame, got an engineering degree there, worked on designing lights for early filmmakers in Chicago — no one had thought of going to Los Angeles yet — and gradually drifted into making movies himself. He sold some stories, then became a scenario manager (that is, someone who sought and recommended stories for turning into screenplays) and ultimately a director, making dozens and dozens of films — none of them especially famous. His attitude towards movie-making was workmanlike, and he just accepted the tasks set before him.
(He told Bogdanovich that when directors started taking seventeen weeks to make a picture that he would have made in seventeen days, that brought in the producers to manage everything. After that, no director was safe from studio interference. This reminds me of something Christopher Nolan said in his Desert Island Discs interview a few years ago: that right from the beginning of his career he made a particular point of bringing his movies in ahead of schedule and under budget because that was the only way to keep the studio execs away from his sets.)
Dwan’s stories are wonderful because they show what it was like for Hollywood to be invented. Nobody knew what they were doing. He tells about his days as a writer and scenario manager: he showed up at a shoot in Arizona only to discover that the director had disappeared and the actors were just sitting around. He called his bosses in Chicago to report what had happened, and they told him, “Well, you’re the director now.” He had no idea what a director did — but, with the help of the actors, he directed the movie. This happened in 1911. Dwan kept directing movies until 1961.
He tells another story about getting his car repaired and talking to the mechanic, who turned out to be interested in photography. Dwan hired him as a cameraman because he desperately needed one and in those days they weren’t easy to find. That mechanic-turned-cameraman eventually became a director — his name was Victor Fleming, and one of his pictures was Gone with the Wind. Dwan remembered a prop man who liked to wear fake teeth and prosthetic noses. Dwan asked him, “Why are you doing this? Do you want to be on the other side of the camera?” The guy said, “Well, kind of.” That was Lon Chaney.
He also tells of watching a pickup baseball game near the Paramount lot and seeing a girl — maybe 11 or 12 — who was the best player out there and made sure everybody knew it. She was whacking the ball all over the field and taunting the boys mercilessly. Dwan talked to her; he thought she’d make a great impression in the pictures. Her name was Jane Peters, but eventually a studio changed it to Carole Lombard. (Lombard, by the way, was quite an athlete: Clark Gable fell in love with her after she thrashed him in a tennis match.)
Dwan had a thousand stories like this. It’s fascinating to see how this industry — this art form — developed when nobody knew how to make movies. Dwan himself was the first to figure out that you could dolly a camera backwards, putting it on rails or a truck and backing up. (This actually disoriented viewers at the time, made them feel woozy). He helped D.W. Griffith figure out how to do a crane shot for Intolerance. All such techniques had to be improvised — and when an improvisation worked it became an invention. You basically had to think like an engineer, and Dwan was an engineer.
And when you put all the improvised and then repreated techniques together, you get the dominant artistic medium — and the dominant form of entertainment — of the 20th century. But nobody could possibly have guessed any of that when Dwan was just getting started. It’s to Bogdanovich’s great credit that he listened to these people…
“Allan Dwan’s stories,” from @ayjay.bsky.social.
* a reference to the belief that Jesus was involved in the creation of the universe, appropriated by Dean Acheson as the title of his memoir.
###
As honor those on whose shoulders we stand, we might recall that it was on thus date in 1985 that Pee-wee’s Big Adventure premiered. Following the success of The Pee-wee Herman Show in 1981, Pee-wee (Paul Reubens) was hired by Warner Bros. to write (ultimately with help from Phil Hartman and Michael Varhol) the script for Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. Impressed with Burton’s work on the short film Frankenweenie (1984), the producers and Reubens hired him to direct. The film was scored by Danny Elfman, marking his first among many collaborations with Burton. It was a success in its initial release and has, of course, become a cult classic.
“The call is coming from inside the house”*…
As the old proverb goes, “we become what we hate.” In this post, two examples of groups adopting practices they had decried in their enemies.
First, from the fetid ocean of political finance: it’s been pretty obvious for some time that the Trump Administration and the Republican party at large have embraced the doctrine of “honest graft” (and here and here and…). What is perhaps less obvious is the extent to which that impulse has affected (infected?) their approach to campaign finance per se (and here).
But, as Stanford professor Adam Bonica demonstrates, greed is an equal opportunity vice…
The digital deluge is a familiar annoyance for anyone on a Democratic fundraising list. It’s a relentless cacophony of bizarre texts and emails, each one more urgent than the last, promising that your immediate $15 donation is the only thing standing between democracy and the abyss.
The main rationale offered for this fundraising frenzy is that it’s a necessary evil—that the tactics, while unpleasant, are brutally effective at raising the money needed to win. But an analysis of the official FEC filings tells a very different story. The fundraising model is not a brutally effective tool for the party; it is a financial vortex that consumes the vast majority of every dollar it raises.
We all have that one obscure skill we’ve inadvertently maxed out. Mine happens to be navigating the labyrinth of campaign finance data. So, after documenting the spam tactics in a previous article, I told myself I’d just take a quick look to see who was behind them and where the money was going.
That “quick look” immediately pulled me in. The illusion of a sprawling grassroots movement, with its dozens of different PAC names, quickly gave way to a much simpler and more alarming reality. It only required pulling on a single thread—tracing who a few of the most aggressive PACs were paying—to watch their entire manufactured world unravel. What emerged was not a diverse network of activists, but a concentrated ecosystem built to serve the firm at its center: Mothership Strategies.
To understand Mothership’s central role, one must understand its origins. The firm was founded in 2014 by senior alumni of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC): its former digital director, Greg Berlin, and deputy digital director, Charles Starnes. During their tenure at the DCCC, they helped pioneer the fundraising model that now dominates Democratic inboxes—a high-volume strategy that relies on emotionally charged, often hyperbolic appeals to compel immediate donations. This model, sometimes called “churn and burn,” prioritizes short-term revenue over long-term donor relationships.
After leaving the DCCC, Berlin and Starnes effectively privatized this playbook, building a business around the party’s most aggressive tactics and turning an internal strategy into a fundraising powerhouse for the Democratic Party—or so it might seem on the surface.
They became the operational heart of a sprawling nexus of interconnected political action committees, many of which they helped create and which now serve as their primary clients. These are not a diverse collection of grassroots groups; they are a tightly integrated network that functions primarily to funnel funds to Mothership. Their names are likely familiar from the very texts and emails that flood inboxes: Progressive Turnout Project, Stop Republicans, and End Citizens United to name a few.
The relationship between the firm and this network is cemented by blatant self-dealing. The most glaring example is End Citizens United. In 2015, just one year after founding their consulting firm, Mothership principals Greg Berlin and Charles Starnes also co-founded this PAC. It quickly became one of their largest and most reliable clients, a perfect circle of revenue generation that blurs the line between vendor and client.
The core defense of these aggressive fundraising tactics rests on a single claim: they are brutally effective. The FEC data proves this is a fallacy. An examination of the money flowing through the Mothership network reveals a system designed not for political impact, but for enriching the consultants who operate it.
To understand the scale of this operation, consider the total amount raised. Since 2018, this core network of Mothership-linked PACs has raised approximately $678 million from individual donors. (This number excludes money raised by the firm’s other clients, like candidate campaigns, focusing specifically on the interconnected PACs at the heart of this system.) Of that total fundraising haul, $159 million was paid directly to Mothership Strategies for consulting fees, accounting for the majority of the $282 million Mothership has been paid by all its clients combined…
… After subtracting these massive operational costs—the payments to Mothership, the fees for texting services, the cost of digital ads and list rentals—the final sum delivered to candidates and committees is vanishingly small. My analysis of the network’s FEC disbursements reveals that, at most, $11 million of the $678 million raised from individuals has made its way to candidates, campaigns, or the national party committees.
But here’s the number that should end all debate:
This represents a fundraising efficiency rate of just 1.6 percent.
Here’s what that number means: for every dollar a grandmother in Iowa donates believing she’s saving democracy, 98 cents goes to consultants and operational costs. Just pennies reach actual campaigns…
For all of the details, and an explanation of why the Party looks the other way: “The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine,” from @adambonica.bsky.social.
Second, consider the case of Texas, a state that used to hate lawsuits, the nanny state, and the film industry. As Christopher Hooks reports, it’s learned from the Golden State to embrace all three as a means of cultural influence. After unpacking the state government’s turnabout from tort reform to encouaging rise of private enforcement of laws through fines and lawsuits and it’s shift from it’s prior rejection of government nutritional and health guidelines, Hooks looks at Texas’ new push to become a seat of film and television production…
… Beneath the long-standing contempt for California and its tyranny was, apparently, a fair bit of envy. On no issue was this more obvious than the expensive package of film incentives the Lege passed this year—$300 million to refund movie and TV productions for money spent in the state.
Most lawmakers who supported the package doubtless did so because of a general positive feeling about the arts, or just because Matthew McConaughey came to the Capitol to lobby for it. But implicit in the way some lawmakers talk about the baleful influence of the California-centered movie industry—currently in a state of near collapse because of AI and the streaming revolution—is a belief that it represents a malign channel of cultural control and coercion by liberal Hollywood elites. In writing the incentives, Texas lawmakers seemed to be asking: What if we had that power instead?
Texas is likely to attract many additional TV and film shoots with this new money. Some productions will come specifically to take advantage of the bill’s Texas Heritage Project funding, a pot of money set aside and controlled by the governor’s appointees to fund projects that promote “family values” and portray “Texas and Texans in a positive fashion.” A cynic might blink twice and wonder if the governor just gave himself a propaganda fund.
The subtext of the bill is probably more important. The state has already in the recent past revoked film incentives from a movie, 2010’s Machete, because state officials disapproved of its message. Future films made here will likely aim to avoid the watchful eye of state lawmakers. The Legislature seems to be embodying the favorite idea of a profoundly influential Californian, Andrew Breitbart, who reminded conservatives at every possible opportunity that “politics is downstream from culture.” It’s perhaps true, but it’s also the kind of thing you think up when you’ve lived in Santa Monica for too long.
After ten years of a governor who has vowed to keep West Coast ways from our pleasant shores, the state is awash in tech exiles. Big money and a strong executive dominate the Legislature more than ever before. Republicans in the House have turned into granola-eating health food obsessives while trial lawyers are on the ascent. The lieutenant governor spends his days entertaining movie stars. Close your eyes, and you can almost imagine you’re U-Hauling down the 405…
Becoming your enemy: “Right-Wing Lawmakers Are Trying to California Your Texas,” from @hooks.bsky.social in @texasmonthly.bsky.social.
Yet another bizzaro flip: “Welcome to the age of Hard Tech” from @taylorlorenz.bsky.social.
* from When a Stranger Calls
###
As we try to appreciate the ironies, we might recall that it was on this date in 2008, that a tour bus belonging to the Dave Matthews Band dumped an estimated 800 pounds (360 kg) of human waste from the bus’s blackwater tank through (grated surface of) the Kinzie Street Bridge in Chicago onto an open-top passenger sightseeing boat sailing in the Chicago River below. Roughly two-thirds of the 120 passengers aboard the tour boat were soaked.
More here.
“Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.”*…
While William Faulkner spent most of his life in the Oxford, Mississippi area that he made famous, he did a considerable– and fascinating– stetch in Hollywood. John Meroney reports…
… It all started in 1932, when, riding on the success of his novel Sanctuary, Faulkner got word that Leland Hayward, a prominent Hollywood talent agent, had secured for him a $500-a-week contract (the equivalent of $8,500 today) to write scripts at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Faulkner was a modernist, and film was still a new, exciting form of storytelling. But that wasn’t the reason Faulkner accepted. It was the money.
At the same time Faulkner received the offer from Metro, he got news that his publisher, Cape & Smith, was bankrupt. Faulkner had been planning on $4,000 ($68,000 in today’s money) from the company for Sanctuary but was informed he wouldn’t see any of it. Suddenly, he was broke. Word apparently got around Oxford. When he tried writing a check for three dollars at a sporting goods store, the owner told him, I’d rather have cash. All at once, Hollywood became attractive. Faulkner didn’t even have the money to send a wire to answer yes. Eventually MGM advanced him some cash and paid for his train ticket, and days later he arrived in Culver City.
He was so naive about the industry that he entertained hopes he would be writing for the famous movie star Mickey Mouse. But the folks at Metro informed him, No, Mickey lives at another studio out in the Valley—we want you for a Wallace Beery picture. “Who’s he?” Faulkner asked…
… Faulkner completed four story treatments in four weeks. That kind of productivity earned him a meeting with up-and-coming director Howard Hawks [see almanac entry here]. He liked Faulkner’s writing and purchased a Saturday Evening Post short story by him that he wanted Faulkner to adapt into a script for Hawks to direct. Over a “couple of quarts of whiskey,” as Hawks recalled in an interview, they clicked and found common cause. “[Faulkner] got up the next morning and started to work, and in five or six days, he had a script,” Hawks said. “It was one of the finest scripts I’ve ever read.” Hawks showed it to Metro’s head of production, Irving Thalberg, who concurred. “Go out and make it!” he ordered Hawks. The result was Today We Live, a drama starring Gary Cooper and Joan Crawford, released in 1933. William Faulkner now had a hit movie to his credit. And, more important, the beginning of what would become an ongoing professional connection with Hawks…
…Faulkner sometimes hunted with Hawks, and on one dove hunting trip recounted by the director, Hawks invited along Clark Gable, already a star. Faulkner and Hawks began discussing literature and eventually Gable asked, “Mr. Faulkner, what do you think somebody should read if he wants to read the best modern books? Who would you say are the best living writers?” Faulkner replied, “Thomas Mann, Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and myself.” Gable asked, “Oh, do you write, Mr. Faulkner?” Faulkner replied, “Yeah. What do you do, Mr. Gable?”…
And so much (so very much) more: “William Faulkner’s Hollywood Odyssey” from Garden and Gun.
* William Faulkner
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As we fathom fish out of water, we might recall that it was on this date in 1987 that the United States Postal Service issued a 22-cent postage stamp in Faulkner’s honor. Very early in his career, Faulkner had briefly served as Postmaster at the University of Mississippi, and in his letter of resignation in 1923 wrote:
As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.
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