Volume 52, Number 8 · May 12, 2005
The Blessings of the Sun
By John Updike
When films ceased to be silent, a migration of eastern writers, playwrights, and wits swarmed to the Golden State, to write scripts for the studios. Though it wasn't exactly the Donner Party, its annals are not happy ones. One thinks of Fitzgerald and his quixotic, dashed hopes of bringing his brand of literary refinement and glamour to film; of Faulkner sneaking back to Mississippi as soon as one of his raids on the studio coffers had yielded its loot; of Dorothy Parker complaining that Hollywood money melted like snow and embracing communism, perhaps in protest. Novels from Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (1939) to Bruce Wagner's Force Majeure (1991) and I'm Losing You (1996) portray a nearly apocalyptic community of grotesque losers—schemers and dreamers driven mad by the wealth and fame apparently to be had all around them. The insider's view, as painted by Hollywood offspring Budd Schulberg and Leslie Epstein, is scarcely rosier. Even as benign a visitor as Ludwig Bemelmans struck off a novel, Dirty Eddie (1947), despairing of the screenwriter's lucrative but thankless lot.
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