When Hollywood Was a Writers’ Town: A Conversation with Philippe Garnier

Yes, you’re absolutely right about this. I must admit I was a bit in the wrong about it in the original version and I guess I kept it here; at least one could get this impression that women fell by the wayside with the advent of the talkies. But what of [producer] Virginia Van Upp at Columbia? Or ex-plainclothes-policewoman Virginia Kellogg giving all those stories, from T-Men to Caged to White Heat? The queen of the undercover cop yarn! Joan Harrison, Ida Lupino. But even scriptwriters, there were many. I met one at the Huntington Library, Catherine Turney, who told me lots of anecdotes about Warner Bros. writers, and the famous wartime carpool—to Musso’s for liquid lunches—driven by Bezzerides.

Marguerite Roberts, I was impressed by the way she made her way up from a very poor upbringing in hardscrabble Nebraska. She made her way a bit like Crawford or Stanwyck in those pre-Code films, through men, but she also backed it up with talent as soon as she could prove her mettle.

Richards, she was tragic. She may have had good reasons to give her ex-husband Bob Richards’s name to the [House Un-American Activities] Committee (she told me he beat her up a lot), but it destroyed her. She was in analysis ever after. She and Buzz made a fine pair, scratching their guilt—real or invented—any way they could think of. Some of Buzz’s guilt was over his first wife, Yvonne, who’d supported and believed in him when he still hesitated between writing and engineering. It was not just leaving her for Silvia, but the fact he had never included her in his Hollywood life. When I knew them, Buzz and Silvia were addicted to newscasts and would discuss the news endlessly, almost reveling in the bad stuff. But they had their good sides too. Just like there was not a car or a piece of furniture Buzz couldn’t “fix,” with Silvia there was not a stray dog or cat or a human that could not be sheltered or given a chance. They took in a couple of young junkies who left their kids with them while they were doing time up north. Buzz even drove the getaway car for their inane two-bit bank robberies. He claimed he never tumbled to what they were up to.

I wrote the book to go against all the idées reçues and clichés on the subject, so I went out of my way to make the point that Hollywood was largely beneficial to writers, their survival, and even, sometimes, their development. Not only would Nathanael West not have written The Day of the Locust had he not gone to Hollywood, he would not have written it this way either; his Republic and RKO days had liberated him from the intellectualism that characterizes his earlier books. But of course, I probably overstated it. Nevertheless, writers were “badly treated” only compared to studio executives and producers, who made all the money. Reading memos from Hal Wallis or Jack Warner, you find that they had even lower esteem for directors—see what they thought of Raoul Walsh, at the top of his game! Writers were the coal, the iron, the oil of this industry town. They were for the moguls a necessary evil. But they did not treat them any worse than the whole production ladder. Niven Busch was invited to Mrs. Goldwyn’s famously snobbish and highbrow dinner parties. Capra could cajole a writer if he saw any benefit. Harry Cohn would have a writer in his office, if he thought he could get something out of him.

Also for Cinéma, cinémas, we interviewed Meta Carpenter, who was an important script supervisor then, but had been Howard Hawks’s secretary and Faulkner’s main squeeze when he was in town. She’d written a memoir and was very moving when commenting on the Brownie snapshots she took of the great man in his BVDs in his room at the Knickerbocker, or in his swimsuit at the beach. He looked so happy. A lucky dog, and maybe the whole book was written just to counter all the guff that has been written about ruined writers and humiliated writers. Faulkner had been very well treated by Hollywood. Apart from the WWII period at Warner, he always was well-paid, mostly because Hawks saw to it. And he was a fast and capable film writer as well, when he was sober. And, when you read his early stories, you see that they were exactly the kind of pablum Hollywood needed: airmen stories, romantic WWI stories with Brits speaking through their teeth. Whereas his Mississippi stuff never made the grade as film, not even the respected ones like Clarence Brown’s Intruder in the Dust (1949). I love the comment made by Ben Maddow, who was given the job to adapt the novel: “This is the worst goddamn structured story I ever read. Badly written too.” I guess it’s a plus for an adapter, when you don’t think much of the original.

I just wanted to point out in this book that almost everybody writing in the thirties tried Hollywood at one point, even if many tanked out pronto. It’s an East Coast and a San Francisco notion that writers did not want to go there. They all did, give or take a few like Nelson Algren or Hemingway—and both did go once, to raise money for causes or themselves, even if they did not work there per se. Even a very marginalized author like Edward Anderson had his chance to make good. Many were not cut out for the work, because it was a specific work and you had to learn it. Veterans told the newcomers willing to listen to have a few of the studio’s big successes projected for themselves, and try to see what made them work. Many wouldn’t, trusting their novelistic chops. As basic as this sounds, many thought they were above that. And did not last.

I am not a theoretician, barely an intellectual. In a way I am like those bozos; I like to tell stories. If they can illuminate a few things on the subject, fine, but they are just that, stories, hopefully good enough to interest and amuse people and lead them to their own conclusions, or further exploration. All my life I liked to light fires and get the hell out of there.

I got my bad writing habits early (no training), and it took me a lifetime to shed a few of them. But I never lost the curiosity, or the taste for backrooms, corners, the places where the work got done. This is why I like to write about people who view their trade as craft and talk about it accordingly, without grand views and opinions. [The musician] J. J. Cale liked to talk of nothing but electrical plugs, building sound studios, tricking out an instrument. He’d talk you under the table with that. Burnett and some others would talk about this or that character that they tried and tried to put in stories or novels, but never managed. Like plumbers.

The romance: I love finding that for just about any writer there is the guy who turned him on and gave him pointers. Like for Rowland Brown, there was the guy who wrote penny westerns, lived above a garage, and drank himself to death. And if I can have his name, it makes me happier, even if no other living soul gives a shit. But I wonder about that. Maybe twelve people will care, and that is surely enough.

All photos courtesy of Black Pool Productions. Special thanks to Eddie Muller.