Picture by Lillian Ross

The sun had gone down and the light coming into the suite, high in the Tower, was beginning to dull. Huston looked as though he might be waiting--having set up a Huston scene--for the cameras to roll. But, as I gradually grew to realize, life was not imitating art, Huston was not imitating himself, when he set up such a scene; on the contrary, the style of Huston pictures, Huston being one of the few Hollywood directors who manage to leave their personal mark on the films they make, was the style of the man. In appearance, in gestures, in manner of speech, in the selection of the people and objects he surrounded himself with, and in the way he composed them into individual 'shots' (the abrupt close-up of the thumbnail scraping the head of a kitchen match) and then arranged his shots into dramatic sequence, he was simply the raw material of his own art; that is, the man whose personality left its imprint, unmistakably, on what had come to be known as a Huston picture.

In 1950, director John Huston set out to make a film adaptation of Stephen Crane's novel The Red Badge of Courage. He was followed in his attempt by Lillian Ross, a veteran journalist from The New Yorker who wanted to see the process of making a picture from start to finish. If she had only waited a little bit (and had an expense account that would take her to Africa) she might have seen Huston filming the critical and commercial hit The African Queen, but The Red Badge of Courage turned out to be a flop, just as MGM chief L. B. Mayer expected it to be. But it wasn't a disaster, either--although it failed to make back its budget, it received good notices in the press, among a few detractors. It wasn't some big Fitzcarraldo-style fiasco, where the cast and crew were tortured by the grand delusions of an auteur. Though that might have made a salacious and readable novel, what Ross captures here is something much more subtle and enduring: the steady grind of the studio system, and the way that vision sometimes fails when transferred to celluloid.

The star of Ross' novel is Huston, the legendary director. Her Huston is determined and imaginative, but also practical and collaborative; he believes firmly in the movie he's making, even as he takes in the critiques of his entourage, including producer Gottfried Reinhardt and studio liaison Dore Schary. Huston is an artist, but he can speak in dollars and centers. Studio head Mayer is Huston's foil, a inveterate bottom-liner who extols the virtues of sentimental entertainment like Mickey Rooney movies. You want to hate Mayer, because he's so anti-art, but it's hard to come away from Picture unimpressed by his discernment; he knows that Red Badge will struggle with viewers in a way that Huston and his entourage can only admit when it's too late. Ross captures the voice of both characters in a way that makes them feel magnetic and real; she manages, too, to cut through the backlot lingo and give us a sense of the deeper motivations animating these men.

It's an open question, perhaps, whether Red Badge would have done better if Mayer and the studio had supported it or promoted it more. Reinhardt makes a number of last minute moves to "save" the picture from its middling early screeners, deleting some of the scenes cherished by Huston and adding a cheesy voiceover narration from Crane's novel. (Huston, swallowed up by The African Queen, has washed his hands of the whole thing.) I think, in the end, that Mayer was right, that the shapelessness of Crane's novel just wouldn't play for audiences of the time, but the last-minute editing process makes a double tragedy of the film, turning it into something that is both not a moneymaker and not the artwork that Huston had imagined. That's the story of Picture: not a failure, not an underappreciated masterpiece--just a hash and a disappointment.

Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion

She began to feel the pressure of Hoover Dam, there on the desert, began to feel the pressure and pull of the water.  When the pressure got great enough she drove out there.  All that day she felt the power surging through her own body.  All day she was faint with vertigo, sunk in a world where great power grids converged, throbbing lines plunged finally into the shallow canyon below the dam's face, elevators like coffins dropped into the bowels of the earth itself.  With a guide and a handful of children Maria walked through the chambers, stared at the turbines in the vast glittering valley, at the deep still water with the hidden intakes sucking all the while, even as she watched; clung to the railings, leaned out, stood finally on a platform over the pipe that carried the river beneath the dam.  The platform quivered.  Her ears roared.  She wanted to stay in the dam, lie on the great pipe itself, but reticence saved her from asking.

Maria (Ma-RYE-a) Wyeth is a starlet, the kind who never really drops the diminutive to become a "star."  (Kind of like Tuesday Weld, who plays Maria in the film version of Play It as It Lays?)  In a brief first-person narrative that opens the book, she gives us her life story: growing up in tiny Silver Wells, Nevada, a town that doesn't exist anymore, moving to New York where she becomes involved with a manipulative abuser named Ivan, coming to Los Angeles and marrying the producer Carter Lang, who puts her in a couple small pictures, having a daughter, Kate, who is confined to a mental institution.  But most of the book occurs in the third person, as a disembodied observer watching Maria tumble slowly into a nervous breakdown.

The most obvious comparison point for Play It as It Lays is The Bell Jar: both are about young women undergoing protracted mental episodes.  Both Maria and Esther Greenwood cling around the lower rungs of a industry dominated by male figures.  Play It as It Lays is populated with cruel men: the psychopathic Ivan, the dismissive Carter, a womanizing Russian mobster named Larry Kulik.  None of these men understand Maria, nor do they care to; Maria's instability and suffering threaten the kind of freewheeling party atmosphere they laboriously occupy.

But the other comparison point is Nathanael West's L.A. phantasmagoria The Day of the Locust, another book that paints Hollywood as a moral black hole.  Los Angeles may not be to blame for Maria's breakdown, but it is somehow the perfect backdrop for it: shallow, superficial, misogynistic, destructively hedonistic.  Much of the novel is taken up by Maria driving around Greater Los Angeles with no clear destination or purpose, which is most of what I imagine happens on L.A. freeways:

In the aftermath of the wind the air was dry, burning, so clear that she could see the ploughed furrows of firebreaks on distant mountains.  Not even the highest palms moved.  The stillness and clarity of the air seemed to rob everything of its perspective, seemed to alter all perception of depth, and Maria drove as carefully as if she were reconnoitering an atmosphere without gravity.  Taco Bells jumped out at her.  Oil rockers creaked ominously.  For miles before she reached the Thriftimart she could see the big red T, a forty-foot  cutout letter which seemed peculiarly illuminated against the harsh unclouded light of the afternoon sky.

I'm putting that one in my great-sentence scrapbook: "Taco Bells jumped out at her."

The book ends by forcing a moral choice upon Maria (spoiler alert): she does nothing while her friend, BZ, commits suicide by overdose.  This single act redefines the entire novel.  It is the only moment in which Carter and her friends take her mental breakdown seriously, since as we know from the first-person chapter, it's what finally drives her into a mental institution.  But it also repurposes Maria's persistent lack of agency.  BZ asks her to do nothing, and though she is drugged out, her compliance with his wishes transform her lack of agency into a positive moral choice which honors her friend's distress in a way that the other characters in the novel refuse to recognize Maria's.  Is it an act of kindness?  Or, as BZ's wife believes, an act of deep selfishness?

Maria tells us at the novel's beginning that such questions have no value:

What makes Iago evil? some people ask.  I never ask.

Another example, one which springs to mind because Mrs. Burstein saw a pygmy rattler in the artichoke garden this morning and has been intractable since: I never ask about snakes.  Why should Shalimar attract kraits.  Why should a coral snake need two glands of neurotoxic poison to survive while a king snake, so similarly marked, needs none.  Where is the Darwinian logic there.  You might ask that.  I never would not any more.  I recall an incident reported not too long ago in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner: two honeymooners, natives of Detroit, found dead in their scout camper near Boca Raton, a coral snake still coiled in the thermal blanket.  Why?  Unless you are prepared to take the long view, there is no satisfactory "answer" to such questions.

Just so.  I am what I am.  To look for "reasons" is beside the point.

But doesn't this attitude let all the monsters of the novel--Ivan, Carter, Larry Kulik--off the hook?  Is it merely the only way that Maria can cope with the world in which she finds itself, to embrace its cynical amorality in order to keep "playing it as it lays?"  And is it Los Angeles' problem, or all of ours?

The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.

---

"Mr. Greener, the bedraggled Harlequin of our caption, is not bedraggled but clean, neat and sweet when he first comes on. By the time the Lings, four muscular Orientals, finish with him, however, he is plenty bedraggled. He is tattered and bloody, but still sweet… His is the final victory; the applause is for him.”

So, a very quick plot summary before the review proper: The Day of the Locust is set in the early years of film, when Hollywood was expanding, moving from talkies to sound, from melodrama to drama, from cultural barometer to cultural thermostat. The novel follows several characters, each pitiful in their own way: Tod Hackett, an aspiring artist who longs to paint Hollywood as it really is; Faye Greener, an aspiring actress who spreads her love, among other things; Homer Simpson, a socially-awkward recluse, in Hollywood for his health, dragged against his will into love with Faye; and an assortment of Hollywood extra types, including the cowboy, the singing child star, the comedian, the oily agent, etc. The narrative is loose, but not flabby—the book is a slim 120pp—and as the lives of these characters intersect, things happen, mostly awful things.

The Day of the Locust is a harrowing read. Once every 10 or so pages, there’s a passage that hits like a kick to the stomach. If it were possible, it would be tempting to read certain bits with eyes closed, cowering beneath a blanket. The characters are not lovable, not light, and their adventures, such as they are, reveal more despair than joy. Indeed, it’s difficult to think of a single joyous moment in the entire novel. Tod is a would-be rapist, would-be in a way that makes his inability to follow through almost worse than if he did. Faye is a heartless harpie, cruel to the ones who care for her, desperate for attention and unable to quit acting even when her father dies. Homer is a pitiful cipher: we are told that some men can lust after things and control them, but others, like Homer, must not allow such thoughts—they are like a spark in a field of dry hay. Indeed, that turns out to be true.

There is no glamour in West’s depiction of Hollywood. The stars exist on a different plane from our struggling “heroes”—Gary Cooper is spotted late in the novel, near but completely uninvolved in a major riot—and there are no happy endings. Every single character does despicable things, when they do anything at all. In an amazingly disturbing description of a cockfight late in the novel, West summarizes his character’s motivations in the cruelest way possible.

I know I haven’t said much about the specifics, but they’re devastating. The Day of the Locust is depressing, eerie and affecting in its depiction of humanity without grace, mercy, or hope. It’s beautiful the same way as a mushroom cloud.

Chris's Review

The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

Ah, I have been so bad about this blog. I was so close to catching Carlton, but, what with my recent job hunt and all, reading books has been the second farthest thing from my mind, the farthest being posting on the blog. The closest thing to my mind is Michael Phelps. He's as good at swimming as I am lovemaking.

But now it's time to put all jokes aside, because The Day of the Locust is a not a very happy book (though it is very good). I'm not sure if I've read anywhere that it is the quintessential Hollywood book, but you're reading it here now. West's 1930's Los Angeles is populated not by movie stars and celebrities but by has-beens and hangers-on, the fringes of Hollywood culture, who operate, sometimes literally, behind the scenes.

Consider the cast: At the center of it all is Tod Hackett, a set painter who spends half of his spare time painting a masterwork called The Burning of Los Angeles that depicts the final destruction of the city at the hands of its own, like some form of self-cannibalism. He spends the other half of his spare time ogling Fay Greener, a teenage would-be starlet who, shall we say, spreads her affection very thin. But it isn't a story of unrequited love; it's a story of consuming and unfulfilled lust. As the narrator tells us point blank, for Tod, "Nothing short of violent rape would do." Fay's father is an aging Vaudevillian who has been phased out of modern pictures. She also has another suitor in Homer Simpson (I know, I know), a simple man whose doctor has recommended he spend some time in Southern California for his health. West lets the irony of this speak for itself, as it is Simpson's uncomplicated feelings for Fay that eventually cause him to break down and set into motion a massive riot that brings Hackett's painting to life.

The cast actually does very little, and yet it seems like the terrifying final chapters hinge on the tiniest human movements. How sad it is to see Harry Greener stumble drunkenly through his clown act, and how disheartening to watch Tod and Fay and the others loiter and drink and do nothing, as if it were an expression of the totality of their existence. For West, human ugliness arises out of little more than boredom, the symptom of a desire for objects unclear, to be anything else, to do anything else. Hackett's job is to paint worlds, to create the illusion of places, but he cannot satisfactorily define his own world or his own existence. He hates Los Angeles because it is nowhere and offers nothing, and The Burning of Los Angeles is the way that he channels the destructive--and self-destructive--impulse. Others in the book seek more proactive recourse, but like Hackett, they are all intensely miserable.

The Day of the Locust is like Hobbes' famous epithet on human life: Brutish, nasty, and short. What it lacks in length (it and West's novella "Miss Lonelyhearts" add up to a scant 183 pp.) it makes up for in power. If you ever find yourself on a flight to LAX, you may want to pick it up for the ride--just to prepare yourself.

Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales and Andrew Miller

So, does this book win the title for having the longest title?

If you enjoy Saturday Night Live, reading about television shows from the 70's, or just insider perspectives of the entertainment world, this is a good book. Following the progression (or regression) of SNL from it's start in the 70's clear through the early 2000's, it's unlikely that such a comprehensive book has ever been written about the show.

The book is split up into major sections, mostly by decade, and, aside from some brief historical information provided by the authors, the entirety Live From New York is made up of snippets from interviews with the cast members, crew, and hosts over the past 30 years. It's pretty impressive in its scope. Virtually every SNL alum is represented, with the notable exception of Eddie Murphy who was evidently too busy filming Pluto Nash 2 to spend 10 minutes talking about the show that made him famous.

The book as a whole is pretty good guilty pleasure reading, and the best bits are when the cast talks about the best and worst hosts. Best include people like John Goodman, Steve Martin, and Alec Baldwin, and the worst include Ben Stiller (who refused to host if he couldn't host the first non-Guliani post-9/11 episode, and Steven Seagal, who spent most of his time sexually harassing the crew and thought a skit about a psychologist who drugs and rapes his patients would be hilarious.