Becoming an “Automatic Gesticulator”: Hollywood’s Mechanized Threat in American Modernist Fiction

In 1933, nathanael west left his job as a New York hotel clerk to join a wave of westward migration. Spurred by faltering publishing and theatre industries in the east and lucrative offers from Hollywood studios, West was one of hundreds who packed their bags in the early 1930s and boarded trains for Hollywood. A latecomer within a generation of American modernist writers who sought to create a new literature to capture the tumultuous spirit of a new industrial, mass-mediated century, West’s early novels had failed to find an audience beyond a select group of fellow avant-gardists. Although he had published three critically praised novels, as biographer Joe Woodward recounts, West had at that point made only $780 from his writing (166). When Columbia Pictures offered him a contract to work on a script for a film entitled Beauty Parlor, West saw (if nothing else) an opportunity to subsidize his writing for a little longer, perhaps long enough to garner a sustainable following.

He did not, however, appear to see his screenwriting as artistically connected to his literary efforts. In a letter to Josephine Herbst, he reveals his studio labour to be rigorous and routinized, more akin to hotel work than novel writing:

My hours are from ten in the morning to six at night with a full day on Saturday. They gave me a job to do five minutes after I sat down in my office—a scenario about a beauty parlor—and I’m expected to turn out pages and pages a day. There’s no fooling here. All the writers sit in cells in a row and the minute a typewriter stops someone pokes his head in the door to see if you are thinking. Otherwise, it’s like the hotel business.

(quoted in Woodward 1811)

In this short account, West alludes to two elements of Hollywood labour that would perplex writers throughout the 1930s: first, that creative labour could be set to the steady, measured rhythms of a Taylorized industry, and second, that artists within mass cultural industries must maintain distinctions between art on the one hand and the industrial work of screenwriting on the other. Like many Hollywood writers, West considered himself to be stooping to a cultural industry designed to turn out mass-produced drivel, but he also wanted to capitalize on his work there while maintaining literary legitimacy. This capitalization was more than monetary for Hollywood writers: West, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ben Hecht, and many others looked to the “dream factory” as inspiration for new novels. In doing so, however, they undermined boundaries between artistic and industrial writing that were important in maintaining stable personal and professional identities. At the same time, these writers often found themselves more invested in their screen work than they may have anticipated. Hecht fought ceaselessly for creative autonomy and eventually gained control of his own independent division within Paramount. West, even while churning out scripts for B studios like Republic, found himself infusing the social attitudes of his Popular Front ideals into his stories. Although these experiences often proved to be inspirational, the literature they produced speaks to the conflict and anxiety that the deterioration of art-industry boundaries induced.

In what follows, I ask how these conflicts played out in the literature these writers produced in Hollywood, taking Hecht and West as exemplary figures who, while they experienced disparate degrees of success in their literary and film careers, both worked out the conflicts of artists subjected to industrial creative production in film scripts and novels. Specifically, I am interested in their recurring portrayals of mechanized behaviour in creative workers. Time and again, characters such as West’s Homer Simpson (one of many Hollywood casualties portrayed in The Day of the Locust) lose bodily control in their encounter with Hollywood and assume properties of broken automatons. Mechanical behaviour in these tales proves damaging at best, fatal at worst, and pervasively devastating to those who experience it.

Such portrayals belie earlier characterizations of writers in happy capitulation to the Hollywood machine. Ronnie Regev...