Hollywood Fictions: The Dream Factory in American Popular Literature (review)

Book Reviews | Regular Feature ten. The author, at long last, gives John Carpenter his proper due as an innovative, important filmmaker while accomplishing one of the director's self-professed goals. "I try," Carpenter said in 1987, "to do things that I haven't done before." So does Cumbow. By examining the entire Carpenter oeuvre with intelligence, wit, and enthusiasm, he adds a distinctive contribution to contemporary film criticism. Jason Vest Washington University in St. Louis jpvest@artsci.wustl.edu John Parris Springer. Hollywood Fictions: The Dream Factory in American Popular Literature. University of Oklahoma Press, 2000. 319 pages; $18.95. American Dream In Hollywood Fictions, John Parris Springer examines the way Hollywood has been depicted in literary (and pseudo) fiction from its dawn as an entertainment capital, through the late 1940s. The sheer breadth of the works that Springer parades before us is quite impressive, but ultimately Hollywood Fictions is of greatest value for its examination ofattitudes toward (and sometimes from) Hollywood during this period. As Springer aptly demonstrates, the literary productions from the first half of the century serve as an excellent lens through which to view these attitudes. Of course, to claim that fictional constructs are true depictions of the town would be to tread dangerous ground, so Springer takes pains to distinguish between the actual physicality ofHollywood , the concrete area in Los Angeles, and the conjured Hollywood . Despite the setting of many works of fiction within the physical limits of Hollywood, the interest here is in the way it treats Hollywood as "a central component ofour national mythology , a complex, multivalent cultural symbol." This is a Hollywood divested ofits physicabty, divested ofthe actual film industry by which it claimed its fame. This is a Hollywood that is either spiritual in nature, or camal, the id of the American Dream. This ambivalence is the key to Springer's reading of Hollywood fictions. The subtitle ofhis book, The Dream Factory in American Popular Literature, is well chosen, as he shows how Hollywood has been depicted both as a place where the dreams ofwould-be writers and actors (mostly actresses) can come true, and as a place where untenable dreams are created on-screen and in theAmerican mind at the expense ofthe poor souls caught in the gears of the dream weaving machinery. Indeed, Hollywood has often been shown as a factory no less rigorous than that depicted in Modern Times, complete with innocents being sucked haplessly into the movie-making machine. Springer characterizes the depiction ofHollywood in Samuel Merwin's Hattie ofHollywood as a "Fordist nightmare", a term which could well apply to many other works treated in Hollywood Fictions. Springer appropriately begins his book with a quick overview of the origins of Hollywood and of the ambivalence toward it, stirred up considerably by the scandals ofthe early 1920s. From there, he traces how literature has not only responded to these attitudes, but also helped galvanize them, usually taking a didactic position either against or in favor of Hollywood. The chapter titles alone make this push and pull clear: "'The Eden ofthe Movies ' : The Redemptive Myth ofthe Hollywood Romance" or "Illusion and Reality: Hollywood and the Peril of Disillusionment". More than just citing polar opposites, Springer also devotes chapters to such topics as the depiction of writers in Hollywood fictions and the hard-boiled Hollywood crime novels of the thirties and forties. Springer devotes considerable space to several major works, including Nathanael West's The Day ofthe Locust, Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, and Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister. His detailed critiques ofthese works are further illuminated by the context of Hollywood fictions, as well as the socio-historical context, in which he places them, but Springer's book really shines when he treats more obscure works. In fact, the greatest strength oí Hollywood Fictions is Springer's painstaking research into not only major novels, but also into magazine fiction, and the related genre of "true" tell-all tales of the industry, written by alleged (and generally anonymous) insiders . Due to relative dispersion and general difficulty that comes with tracking down fiction printed in the magazines, such short stories and serializations can easily...