Fiction in the Creation:  The Reality of Los Angeles in the 1930s           

What is Los Angeles?  Is Los Angeles a real place or just a set for a movie?  Where is Los Angeles?  Is it located on land or in the mind?  Is Los Angeles a dream or a nightmare?  Is it a utopia or dystopia?  Did LA create itself; or was it created by artists, writers, outsiders, immigrants, etc.?  This study is going to be a brief foray into the birth of Los Angeles in the American mind of the 1930s.  The purpose of this paper is to begin to discover how and why people viewed LA/Hollywood as they did.  In doing so I will look into the questions posed above and try to discern how and why LA became what it did by the end of the 1930s.  In essence, this excursion is meant to investigate some of the views and perceptions that were created and believed about LA in the 1930s and to perhaps see how this shaped the city itself.

            I will be limiting this reading to one genre.  The field that will create this picture will be literature.  I will be examining two books by two writers in particular.  The two writers and works I will use in this investigation are Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Love of the Last Tycoon.  Therefore the focal point of this paper will be on these works’ illustrations of how and why LA/Hollywood was created by people’s dreams and nightmares, feelings and impressions, observations and perceptions.

            Los Angeles had no native boosters or detractors in the 1930s.  This was why they had to import them.  During the 1930s, Los Angeles was a land of artists, refugees, immigrants and transplants to name a very few.  The main people that best represented what LA/Hollywood wanted to be and was afraid of being were its creative artists.  These artists and their work are the meat of this paper.  The artist, on whom I will focus, is the writer. 

            In the 1930s, the writers were one of the most wanted, detested and neglected personages in the LA area.  The studios wanted them badly to churn out movies.  How could they make more and more movies without scripts?  And how could they make more scripts without more writers?  Even though writers were wanted and wined and dined to come out to LA they were treated like pariahs once they resided here.  The metaphor given in The Love of the Last Tycoon is that the writers were “the farmers in the business [movie industry].  They grow the grain but they’re not at the feast.” [i] They were a crucial element; but they were treated like the drunken uncle no one wanted to claim.  However, due to their role as wordsmiths, they would get the last word.  They would become the artificers of many popular conceptions both good and bad of Los Angeles/Hollywood.  This paper will center on their novels (not their screenplays) and their lives here in La La Land which accomplished these ends. 

Nathanael West and F. Scott Fitzgerald will be my two prime examples.  I will demonstrate how and why their lives shaped their novels and in turn their novels shaped life.  During this process it will be made known how these tomes shaped the views and perceptions of Los Angeles/Hollywood.  First, brief biographies of their time in LA/Hollywood will be needed to put things into context.  Finally, an investigation of their main works on the LA area (The Day of the Locust and The Love of the Last Tycoon) will be taken into account.

  The Actual Stories- the men and their novels

Nathanael West

In 1933, West signed on with Columbia Pictures as a scriptwriter and moved to Hollywood.  It is in the role of script writer/novelist that he would finish out his life.  He spent most of his time in the 1930s in financial difficulty, like most of America during these hardtimes.  He only collaborated on screenplays sporadically. Most of the films he worked on were of the B-movie variety.  It was not until 1936 that script writing became a reliable source of income for West and his wife.  It would continue to be his only dependable source of income until his death in December of 1940. 

            The financially unstable times of the Great Depression shaped all of West’s works.  This is especially true of his ultimate grotesque, The Day of the Locust.  West believed that the American Dream died because of the Great Depression.  The dream died both spiritually and materially. This left a huge vacuum that couldn’t be filled or controlled.  The Great Depression and the death of the American dream are very obvious inspirations for this work.  The most obvious way  in which this is seen is the depressing idea of people trying to go somewhere prettier to die.  This is a pervasive theme throughout this work and is directly caused by the trying times of the 1930s. [ii]    

            The Day of the Locust is considered by many to be one of the best novels on early Hollywood.  Why?  Because this work was not only based thematically on the death of a dream and the Great Depression, ideas that all could relate too; it was also rooted on West’s real life experiences while living in a tangible place, Hollywood.  The settings and many of the secondary characters come directly from people and things he saw while living in a hotel on Hollywood Boulevard.  This lends the novel an authenticity that few others have, and allows the reader a dystopic view into La La Land.[iii]

F. Scott Fitzgerald

             Not to long after the arrival of Nathanael West another American novelist would come to the City of Angels.  F. Scott Fitzgerald would sign on with MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) as a script writer.  During this sojourn in Southern California he worked on short stories (for magazines – the most famous “The Pat Hobby stories”), scripts and his final novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon.  He would stay in Hollywood from the second half of the 1930s until his death in December of 1940.

            The Great Depression played a big role in reshaping Fitzgerald’s outlook look on the world as well.  Eventhough, his revised world view was not nearly as jaded as West’s you definitely see how the financially hard times of the 30s converted him from his roaring 20s light heartedness.  In a letter he once wrote, he stated that he had a  “sense that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and that the redeeming things are not ‘happiness and pleasure’ but the deeper satifactions that come out of struggle.”[iv]  You can see this emphasis on how the only thing that matters is commitment to hard work (struggle) in his main character, Monroe Stahr, in the The Love of the Last Tycoon.

            The Love of the Last Tycoon was published posthumously and is to be read in its incomplete form.  Monroe Stahr, the main hero of the novel, was based on Irving Thalberg the boy genius of the movie industry who became one the more important producers of the 1930s.  Thalberg, like Stahr, knew how to struggle and work hard for what he wanted.  Fitzgerald knew Thalberg and respected his sheer command and forceful ways.  So it was Thalberg along with the Great Depression that shaped this amazing but partial novel.  Just like West, Fitzgerald’s actual experience in LA/Hollywood makes this work not only authentic but accepted by the general American population as acurate. [v] 

The Fictional Stories- the Novels and LA

        The Day of the Locust

The Story

This is a story of Hollywood/LA during the Great Depression era.  The focus is on the B players and how they live and what they yearn for in this life.  What I mean by that is that this work centers on the nobodies and every bodies.  It is the tale of the common people (the extras, the audience, the people behind the scenes) not the powerful and famous.   This book’s main characters Tod Hackett and Homer Simpson are perfect examples the Average Joe in this mundane world and how we react to its fallout.

Tod is an artist that creates costumes and story boards for a movie studio.  Homer is a mid-westerner that moved out to Southern California to rest and convalesces.  These two men are and represent the common American.  Both have or had dreams and yearnings and both have continually failed to attain these dreams.

The story wraps up in an apocalyptic rage.  The people (mob) finally cannot stand their mediocrity and the movies’ false promises and lash out burning LA and rioting in the streets at a movies premiere. Tod and Homer are swept up in this commotion.  In the end, Homer is dead and Tod is injured.[vi]

What was learned?  What was gained?  What was the purpose?  What are the why and the how of the story?       

The Message

            This novel tries to show the dangers and evils of the movie industry (LA/Hollywood) as it relates to the common people.  This harmful realtionship between the dream factory and the masses (mob) hinges on how the audience views the world through the movies.  What West tries to show is how the dreams/illusions of glory, fame, beauty and affluence are dangerous when given to weak, sickly slaves of heavy labor that have no imagination or will of their own.  When these brutes see these dreams and can never attain them the only possible conclusion is obsession, fantaicism, hate and then sometimes violence. 

            The reality is that LA/Hollywood exploits a failing that already exists in the viewing public.  So the industry is responsible for feeding the public’s weakness for dreams by giving them impossible illusions of beauty and romance.  In turn, LA/Hollywood creates its own downfall by promising the world in a basket and not deliviering this wonderful utopia. [vii] 

            This idea of the Boulevard of Broken Dreams was and is a popular allegory of Hollywood/LA in the America mind.  The idea that LA/Hollywood teases the people with their hopes and dreams and only gives it to an elite few is one of the causes of America’s love-hate relationship with this area.  Most Americans want these things of beauty and romance but cannot grasp them for they do not have the ability to acquire them.  Thefore, instead of hating themselves the masses focus this anger and sometimes violence on the object of their desires.   

        The Love of the Last Tycoon

The Story           

            This is the story of Monroe Stahr a Hollywood movie producer during the Great Depression.  This tale, unlike West’s, is the story of the rich and powerful.  In this, unfinished work, we see the inner workings of the movie studio and the people that make it the powerful machine that it is during the 1930s.           

            Stahr is the driving force behind this narrative and we see the world as it revolves around him and his job, making movies.  The reader gets to see what Stahr and the studios do on a daily basis and how movies are made.  The novel turns the magical illusion of the movies into a process of creation.  You see all the elements that it takes to make a movie; the writing, filming, sets, directing, and editing.  All the while you get a sad love story of one of the more powerful men in the industry (Stahr) to boot.[viii]           

            What was learned?  What was gained?  What was the purpose?  What are the why and the how of the story? 

The Message

            This is the story of the American Dream in the last frontier.  This novel is about the last American pioneers, refugees, and immigrants in the “Wild West.”  The hero of this story is the rough and ready American man willing to get dirty and work hard to achieve his goals and dreams. 

            There are two important elements that make this a good alternative view of LA/Hollywood.  First, this work addresses the love-hate relationship people have with Hollywood/LA like West’s work does.  However, this novel puts forth the idea that La La Land can only be understood in flashes because it is so hard to unravel the illusions from reality and reality from the illusions, and in truth it is impossible to separate the two in this world.  For Fitzgerald, it is this impossibility of understanding that causes the love-hate relationship between the public and the dream factory not just petty yearnings and jealousy.  We fear what we do not understand; and we are terrified of that we can never comprehend.            

            Finally, in Fitzgerald’s Hollywood/LA and America, the Great Depression is not the end all it seems to be according to West.  Even though, the Great Depression causes hardships and many, many other problems it also creates opportunities to test one’s chararcter and mettle.  Instead of this being a destruction of a dream it the the trial by fire of this dream.[ix]   

            Fitzgerald ignores the Boulevard of Broken Dreams idea; while promoting the idea of hard work and fortitude.   To Fitzgerald, work will not necessarilly lead to happiness but to character and potency.  This also promotes hope and optimism in that people still strive for something.  This idea of perseverance was and is another popular vision of LA/Hollywood in America.  This is the image of LA/Hollywood being a field of possiblities and the idea that it is not the  successful aquisiton of dreams that moves people but the struggle and battle for these dreams.  This is a different form of violence that drives people to work and create not to wanton destruction. 

The Conclusion- the LA of Fiction and Reality          

           There is the factual and then there is what people believe to be real.  What people think shapes and creates their reality.  Perception and opinion often matter more than fact.  These two author’s visions were how these writers and many Americans nation wide viewed LA/Hollywood during the Great Depression era of the 1930s.  The pessimistic ones of course felt more at home with West’s idea of a dead American Dream; while the ones that refused to give up felt more at ease with Fitzgerald’s idea of a life of struggle that yeilds it’s own rewards.  And of course you have the people that see aspects of both that they can believe to be comprehendible.

            Both authors’ had distinct views of LA/Hollywood based on the effects of the Great Depression and their time spent here in the LA area. Their drastically different visions show how important one’s turn of mind (perception) is to how people see the things going on in the world around them.  Even though, all Americans shared the consequences of the Great Depression people took different ideas, views and feelings away from this experience. 

            It was easy to “know about” the Great Depression everyone experienced this event.  However, when it came to “knowing about” LA, all that the rest of the country could do was accept what was given to them.  The authors experiences working in the movie industry not only shaped their visions of LA/Hollywood; they painted a picture of the City of Angels for all the American people.  Their retelling of their Hollywood lives fashioned how America in general felt about and viewed LA/Hollywood in general.  It is at this point you must ask; did Hollywood create itself or was it fabricated like its movies?  If it was created; did the writers do it?   

Bibliography

Books

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Love of the Last Tycoon. 1939-1940. 

Martin, Jay  Nathanael West The Art of His Life.  Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  1970.  

West, Nathanel. The Day of the Locust. 1939. 

Articles

Callahan, John F.  “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Evoling American Dream: The ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ in Gatsby, Tender Is the Night and The Last Tycoon.”  Twentieth Century Literature.  42 (fall 1996): pp. 374-395. 

Martin, Robert A.  “Hollywood in Fitzgerald: After Paradise.”  The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: New Appraoches in Criticism. Edited by Jackson R. Bryer.  1982. 

Rapf, Joanna E.,  “Human Need in The Day of the Locust: Problems of Adaptation.”  Literature/Film Quarterly.  Vol.IX, NO.1, January, 1981, pp.22-31. 

Widmer, Kingsley.  “Nathanael West.  Chapter 4: The Hollywood Masquerade:  The Day of the Locust.”  Twaynes’s United States Authors Series Online.             

Web Sources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_Scott_Fitzgerald