Hollywood Outsiders: The Adaptation of the Film Industry, 1913-1934 (review)

In Hollywood Outsiders, Anne Morey uses four carefully researched case studies to examine the ways that people who did not work in Hollywood tried to influence Hollywood's films. Her topics include series fiction about young filmmakers aimed at a juvenile readership; the Palmer Photoplay Corporation, a school for aspiring screenwriters; Catholic and Protestant groups concerned about Hollywood's influence (such as the Legion of Decency and the National Board of Review); and high school courses in film appreciation and character education. The first two cases concern individuals attempting to find work within Hollywood; the latter two cases concern larger institutions attempting to influence Hollywood at the point of reception.

In lesser hands, this book might have been an ad hoc collection of case studies, but Morey consistently and convincingly links her examples to larger themes, such as the ambiguous nature of authorship in Hollywood and the ways that box-office success was seen as having implications for American democracy. The result is a splendid work of scholarship, mixing fine-grained analysis with provocative insights about American culture.

Throughout the book, Morey shows a keen eye for paradox, as each chapter uncovers layer upon layer of contradiction within a particular case. In the chapter on juvenile fiction, she reveals that these stories about young aspiring filmmakers frequently display ambivalent attitudes to the role of affect, both in fiction and in fact. This is particularly true of stories about girls, who typically achieve success by acting (whereas the boys in these stories typically achieve success by operating a theater or running a camera). As actors, the girls are competent at fabricating emotion, but they often achieve their greatest "performances" when a camera records them experiencing genuine emotion. These recordings of genuine emotion allow the girls to achieve success—that is, to manipulate affect in the audience. In short, Morey argues that the stories express a deeper ambivalence about the Hollywood film's capacity to reveal and elicit emotion. She returns to this theme in the remaining chapters, revealing that ambivalence toward Hollywood's manipulation of affect was an attitude shared by many different Hollywood outsiders.

The chapter on the Palmer Photoplay Corporation is a particularly rich study in contradictions. The company offered training for aspiring screenwriters, but its greatest popularity came after the market for freelance screenplays had dried up. In order to attract customers at a time when its ability to facilitate entry into Hollywood was rapidly declining, the Palmer Corporation had to develop a carefully nuanced definition of success. Success was said to be available to all who were willing to work hard, but it was also seen as the reward for a talented elite. Success was supposed to be the production of a saleable script, but the activity of screenwriting could provide an experience of self-fashioning that was inherently valuable, whether the writer sold the script or not. With this complex definition of success, the Palmer Corporation always had something to offer, even when the aspiring screenwriter remained on the outside.

The most intriguing point of tension in the Palmer chapter is the one between self-expression and standardization. Morey writes:

A number of approaches potentially worked toward a kind of Taylorization of self-expression: student work was to be presented to potential buyers in a uniform format; the school's stock in trade was instruction in "technique"; and students were advised as a group to avoid certain topics (costume plays, war and Bible pictures) and stylistic fillips (excessive reliance on melodrama and coincidence, for example). At the same time, however, the school preached the gos-pel of individual success through self-fashioning, the importance of originality, the parlaying of personal experience into audience affect, and the evils of the Eastern publishing establishment and of industry reliance on adaptation.

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Morey explains this paradox of the "Taylorization of self-expression" by highlighting the ambiguities surrounding the notion...