Edna Ferber's Hollywood: American Fictions of Gender, Race, and History

Foreword

A mong the literary giants of early twentieth-century America whose works were adapted into Hollywood movies, few, if any, cut a larger figure than Edna Ferber . From her breakthrough success in 1924 with the best-selling Pulitzer Prize–winning novel So Big, which became a major motion picture that same year, to the pinnacle of her career with Giant three decades later, Ferber enjoyed a remarkable run of successful novels—and a few hit Broadway plays, including Dinner at Eight and Stage Door (co-written with George S. Kaufman), which in turn became hit movies. Ferber, in fact, was the top-selling woman writer of the twentieth century, and one clear measure of her impact on Hollywood was that just three of her best-selling novels—So Big, Show Boat, and Cimarron—generated eight movie adaptations from 1925 to 1960. Although Ferber’s stature with the New York literati earned her a seat at the legendary Algonquin Round Table, literary critics and scholars have consistently undervalued or overlooked her work—due, no doubt, to its popular and commercial success, as well as to its obvious appeal to women. And perhaps not surprisingly, that critical neglect has extended into film studies. Despite the impact of her writing on the movie industry, and despite the scholarly interest in film adaptations of the work of such Ferber contemporaries as William Faulkner and John Steinbeck, film scholars, as J. E. Smyth points out, “have persistently ignored Edna Ferber.” Until now, that is. With Edna Ferber’s Hollywood, Smyth eradicates decades of inexplicable indifference toward what she aptly terms the “historic partnerForeword E D N A F E R B E R ’ S H O L L Y W O O D viii ship” between Ferber and Hollywood. Smyth mounts a convincing case that “Ferber’srelationshipwithHollywoodwasarguablytheclosestandmostprofitable experienced by any twentieth-century American writer,” and also that the novelist provided the movie industry with some of the richest, most complex , and most challenging story material that it had ever taken on. Actually, Hollywood could ill afford not to buy the rights to Ferber’s fiction, given her massive popularity with precisely the audience the studios sought to attract. But after spending record sums for the rights to these “presold story properties ,” particularly the historical novels with their unconventional (to say the least) female protagonists and their revisionist, vaguely subversive accounts of America’s past, producers were often at a loss about what to do with them. Smyth deftly combines social history, cultural theory, and industrial and textual analysis in Edna Ferber’s Hollywood, making brilliant use of primary materials culled from multiple Hollywood studio archives as well as Ferber’s own papers. While the book is not a biography, we do glean a strong sense of the personal life of this extraordinary woman—a small-town Midwesterner with enormous professional ambition, an ardent feminist and deeply proud Jew, and a resolute “old maid” (her term) who might easily have been cast as the protagonist in one of her own novels were it not for her ascetic lifestyle. But Smyth’s focus throughout is firmly fixed on Ferber’s professional career and her long, difficult, and endlessly fascinating relationship with the movie industry. Smyth takes us deep inside the Ferber-Hollywood partnership, providing an engaging and insightful account of the complex and inevitably byzantine adaptation process at every stage. This process begins with the writing itself, of course, as Smyth traces the conception, the actual creation, and the reception of Ferber’s novels. Such a discussion is altogether necessary to an explanation and assessment of Hollywood’s transformation of those novels into movies, which is Smyth’s ultimate concern, and her analysis of this process of cultural production is so thorough and detailed that Edna Ferber’s Hollywood stands as an invaluable case study not only of Hollywood film adaptation , but of both literary and motion picture authorship as well. The Edna Ferber that emerges here is an enormously gifted writer and an astute observer of the American experience, but also a canny businesswoman and skilled literary entrepreneur. Ferber realized quite early in her career, for instance, that the serialization of her novels, prior to their publication, in national women’s magazines like the Ladies Home Journal and Cosmopolitan not only provided additional revenues but significantly enhanced the value ix Foreword of subsequent iterations both in print and on screen. Ferber also came to...