Dream Factory

Dream Factory Gabriel Miller The Golden West: Hollywood Stories Daniel Fuchs Black Sparrow Books http://www.blacksparrowbooks.com 272 pages; cloth, $24.95 In 1937 Daniel Fuchs, a novelist and a permanent substitute teacher at P.S. 225 in Brighton Beach, left Brooklyn for Hollywood. RKO had offered him a thirteen-week contract to write screenplays. Fuchs's first impressions were typical for an eastern writer transplanted to the West Coast. In his second story for the New Yorker, "Hollywood Diary" (1938), reprinted in this collection, he details a bizarre and disorienting encounter with a world that he can barely understand. Paid simply to sit at his desk, he craves assignments, but nothing is forthcoming. When he complains to his agent, he is told that his two-hundred-dollar-per-week salary is "beans," and he shouldn't worry about it. Fuchs received no screen credits during this first stint in Hollywood, after which he went back to New York. But he returned in 1940 when MGM bought the rights to one of his stories, and with the exception of two years' wartime service in the Navy OSS where his commanding officer was John Ford, he remained in Hollywood until his death in 1993. While there, he wrote numerous stories, one novella, and a novel. He was credited with writing or cowriting thirteen films, and a fourteenth is based on one ofhis stories, though he also worked on many others. In 1955 Fuchs won an Oscar for Love Me or Leave Me, which script James Cagney called the best he had ever read. Fuchs also scripted or coscripted two noir classics, Criss Cross (1949) and Panic in the Streets (1950). Some of his best Hollywood writing has now been collected in The Golden West: Hollywood Stories, offering an extraordinary and varied insight into Fuchs's attitudes toward screenwriting and life in Hollywood. Ofall the writers who relocated to Hollywood and stuck it out, Daniel Fuchs was perhaps the most talented. With many other eastern writers, Fuchs came to Hollywood shortly afterthe movies had learnedto talk. He had established his literary reputation with three novels written in quick succession during his summers off from teaching: Summer in Williamsburg (1934), Homage toBlenholt(1936), andLow Company (1937). These novels—which John Updike calls "quite brilliant "—are varied in form. In the naturalistic Summer, the narratorputs the Williamsburg section ofBrooklyn under a microscope, struggling to make sense of the Uves of its people. This is arguably the most realistic and least sentimental depiction we have of immigrant Jewish life in America at the turn of the twentieth century. Homage, on the other hand, is comic in tone, focusing on one of Fuchs's most persistent themes: the disparity between youthful dreams and reality. Low Company abandons the questioning tone of the earlierbooks, providing instead a dramatic portraitofa world on the verge ofcollapse, a nightmare landscape where everything and everyone is drek. This third novel is Fuchs's finest work—one of die literary high points of the thirties and an unappreciated American masterpiece. Despite good reviews, the novels did not sell, so Fuchs, ever a realist (like his youthful protagonists), decided to go to Hollywood, where the pay at least would be steady. Throughout his life, Fuchs remained at best ambivalent about his fiction. In his introduction to the 1961 reprint of the Williamsburg novels, he writes, "the books became odious to me." And at one point in his essay, "Strictly Movie," he remarks, ". . .1 know the books are not first class and privately I wonder at the acclaim." Much of Fuchs's Hollywood fiction is essentially plotless. The two best fictional pieces in the collection—the novella "Triplicate" and the title story—reflect the liveliness and exuberance of a Hollywood party. Stylistically they combine Summer in Williamsburg's panoramic view of (Williamsburg) life with the almost free-form observation that marks much ofFuchs's Hollywood writing. Thus these works achieve his aim of trying to capture a moment, life as it is, dramatized not in a movement toward or around acentral episode but through the aggregate revelations of characters coming and going, engaging in bits of dialogue and fitful activity. The stories are...