Review | Classical Hollywood, American Modernism: A Literary History of the Studio System
Reviewed by Katherine Fusco, University of Nevada, Reno
Classical Hollywood, American Modernism is one of those rare books that contributes to two fields, rather than using insights from one to make arguments on behalf of the other. While Jordan Brower’s subtitle is A Literary History of the Studio System, it could as easily, if not as catchily, be "A Studio History of the Literary System," for the book argues that the major studios leveraged literature as they jockeyed for position, and that authors’ experiences in a self-consciously literary studio system produced formal responses, such that “developments in literary style and form constitute events in the history of Hollywood” (7).
To make these arguments, Brower follows the model of Jerome Christensen and J.D. Connor and approaches “literature and film” as a question of industrial history. This approach allows Brower to identify both the way studios used literature and modernist authors to construct a model of corporate authorship—for example, MGM’s creation of a distinctive “authorial” voice for its products, discussed in Chapter 2—and the way authors reacted to the experience of having their individual creativity subsumed into such a project. Some penned novels of revenge (F. Scott Fitzgerald and Aldous Huxley), others wrote toward what Brower names “transmedial possibility” (Anita Loos), and still others found inspiration in the disembodied organizational power of the studio, translating it into some of their most characteristic work (William Faulkner). As Brower puts it, such modernist innovation occurred “under the sign of Hollywood” (7).
I draw attention to Brower’s formulation “literature and film” in part because Brower himself does so, including a wonderful chart that catalogues the various models New Modernist scholars have proposed for the relationship between the two media forms. Brower finds extant scholarship has insufficiently engaged with Miriam Hansen’s articulation of vernacular modernism as taking place in “an institutionally specific mode” (qtd. in Brower 12). Brower’s book thus belongs alongside a crop of recent works that offer rigorously historical views of the significant interactions between literature and film, including Jonathan Foltz’s The Novel After Film: Modernism and the Decline of Autonomy (2018) and Sarah Gleeson-White’s Silent Film and the Formations of U.S. Literary Culture: Literature in Motion (2024).
In tracing his literary history of the studio system, Brower focuses primarily on the Majors (Paramount, MGM, Warner Bros., and Twentieth Century Fox are lead characters in the story he tells), and their engagement with the literary between the years 1912 and 1952. The study is bookended by the Townsend Amendment to the Copyright Act of 1909, which allowed studios exclusive rights to literary works they contracted, and two significant court cases, United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (1948, which began unwinding the power of the studios) and Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson (1952, the so-called Miracle decision, which effectively ended censorship). Brower persuasively lays out the legal and economic conditions that intertwined the fates of the studio system and literary modernism, including, but not limited to, the founding of the Author’s League of America and film rights departments in publishing houses; the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America’s “Formula,” soon to be followed by the Motion Picture Production Code; Thalberg’s screenwriting system at MGM, which involved multiple authors working, unbeknownst to each other, on the same script, in subordination to the studio’s “voice”; the “Motion Pictures’ Greatest Year” campaign (1939); the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigations; and the competition of a new medium, television.
Brower makes clear that these historical markers are simultaneously filmic and literary, or perhaps, more accurately, that film used the literary strategically to navigate challenges to the industry. For example, in the chapter most explicitly concerned with the Production Code, Brower discusses the ways the industry leveraged the literary value of “ambiguity” to assign the interpretation of sophisticated content to viewers. He links this interpretive openness with Hollywood’s “lay[ing] claim to the vast space and cultures of the earth” (133) as part of the process by which Hollywood democratized modernism, making it accessible to global markets through an avoidance of censorship.
In addition to remarkable historical research, the book also offers significant interpretations of both canonical and less-frequently-studied modernist literature, which should prove inspiring both for future scholarship and the teaching of these works. For example, the chapter on Paramount contains an analysis of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s “consciously artistic achievement” (Fitzgerald, qtd. in Brower 41), as a novel enacting the tension between the wholly literary and the adaptable, as evidenced by the Fitzgerald’s association of Gatsby’s fantastical parties with the sets of designer David Belasco on the one hand, and the unfilmable (by Production Code standards) amorality of the Buchanans on the other. Brower offers extended readings of John Dos Passos, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald, and in the process he reconceives the 1930s cycle of bitter Hollywood novels beyond the typical understanding of them as film industry critiques. In a bravura reading of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, Brower argues that West reacts to the already established and easy absorption of East Coast intellectuals by the culture industry. Rather than reading the protagonist Tod as an Ivy League artiste wrecked by contact with venal Hollywood, Brower interprets Tod’s mimicry of the police siren at the novel’s end as a signal that Tod “awakens to his preference for authoritarianism” and “embraces the ideal of order purveyed by the classical Hollywood style and protected by the police” (111).
A final strength of this book is its synthesis of information across registers to develop frameworks other scholars and their students will find useful. In addition to the aforementioned graphic overview of what modernist studies has meant by “literature and film,” Brower coins the term “transmedial possibility” in his discussion of the massive focus on adaptations following the 1912 copyright decision. This term identifies a text’s potential, for which Brower lays out a helpful schema, along axes of popularity and prestige, and adaptability and unadaptability (34). Classical Hollywood, American Modernism is full of such crystalizing moments that will doubtless push the field forward as scholars continue to consider what happened when authors went to the movies and Hollywood hit the bookshelf.