Chapter Five charts Rogers’ move into silent pictures, a dynamic new entertainment form taking the country by storm in the late 1910s. He headed to Hollywood in 1919 to work for producer Samuel Goldwyn, for whom he would star in a dozen films over the next two years. His films combined humor with depictions of ordinary people struggling to surmount some kind of travail or imposition. In 1923, Rogers moved on and signed a contract with another pioneering producer, Hal Roach. Over a two-year period the Oklahoman would complete thirteen more films, while subsequently appearing in a few independent productions and starring in a series of European travelogue films. Involvement with silent films placed Rogers squarely within the new world of leisure entertainment, and further enhanced his status as a celebrity.

Chapter Thirteen examines Rogers’ emergence in the 1930s as one of Hollywood’s most popular movie stars. The development of "talkie" films provided an opportunity for showcasing perhaps the most popular person in America in every facet of his talent: folksy appearance, verbal dexterity, homespun wit, unpretentious but shrewd sensibility. Fox Films signed him to a contract, and from 1929 to 1935 he starred in a series of popular films that combined his trademark humor with common-man characters struggling with, and overcoming, pressing trials and challenges. These populist films often touted the virtues of rural and small-town life, hard work, plain-spoken morality, and community loyalty. Rogers made a trio of such films with famed director John Ford. The humorist became such a popular movie star and celebrity that he was judged to be Hollywood’s top box office attraction in 1934. Rogers’ success as a "talkie" movie star provided the capstone of his career and cemented his status as an American folk hero.

On December 9, 1949, Huddie Ledbetter died in a New York hospital at the age of sixty. This chapter briefly looks at the life that he and Martha remade after their permanent return to New York in early 1936. It also looks at damage caused to Ledbetter’s career by the November 1936 publication of Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly, as well as all of the Lomax-driven publicity over the previous two years. In 1939, an altercation at a party hosted by the Ledbetters leads an unsympathetic prosecutor and judge, citing false narratives about Lead Belly, to incarcerate him yet again, this time at Rikers. Released later in 1939, he and Martha continue to build a new life. Over time, Huddie Ledbetter builds a celebrated (but not remunerative) career with significant impact on the folk and labor movements as well as the ongoing evolution of American musical forms, including rock and roll.

The four chapters in Part V reconstruct Ilf and Petrov’s California adventures. By the time the writers arrived in San Francisco in early December, they were exhausted and homesick. However, because they had work to do, Ilf and Petrov remained in California for nearly a month. In the Golden State, the writers became active participants in American life as both Soviet cultural emissaries and minor Hollywood players. Part V examine how and to what degree their direct engagement with Americans transformed or reinforced everyone’s presuppositions.

Popular accounts of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s contact with the film industry often spin a tale of professional decline. But rather than ruining his talent, time spent in Hollywood benefited Fitzgerald by providing the financial and creative resources he needed during a complex moment in American cultural life. Furthermore, rather than being revenge tracts, Fitzgerald’s Hollywood fiction and his unfinished novel offer some of the early examples of American film theory by carefully examining studio culture and the writer's place within it. While it is true that Fitzgerald had his share of troubles as a screenwriter, many of these difficulties were of his own devising. Fitzgerald was heavily invested in the notion of the artist as a solitary man of genius. His collaborators often resented his claims to superior taste and judgment, especially since his scripts often weren’t filmic enough. But from the beginning of his career he was a hard-working professional writer who was savvy about making money – especially from the film industry – on the commodities he produced. Hollywood wasn't the setting for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s failed second act; it was part of the same successful performance.

The work and lives of modernist writers were extensively chronicled by the mass media, enabling Americans to develop an active interest in even the most radical literary developments in the first half of the twentieth century. This chapter examines the careers of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway and the cultural developments that enabled their success in specific decades. All were American celebrities. The lives of each were profiled in periodicals, their style was parodied, their faces graced the covers of popular magazines, and all had relationships with Hollywood and filmmaking. Other modernists were subject to this public interest as well, including Faulkner, Eliot, Woolf, and Joyce. None were immune to the broad changes in the marketing and promotion of books and authors that facilitated a lively, robust mainstream knowledge of writers as popular as Hemingway or as difficult as Gertrude Stein, blurring distinctions between low-, middle-, and highbrow writers.

Salman Rushdie has a long-standing relationship with cinema and cinematic storytelling. Foundational to many deliberations is the film version of The Wizard of Oz. His novels are deeply invested in an aesthetic that is shaped by European art-house cinema, including auteur filmmakers such as Fellini, Godard, and Buñuel. Increasingly his relationship with Indian popular cinema and Bollywood has been explored, but the cinematic imagination continues to preoccupy Rushdie, not least in his novel The Golden House, where the central narrator is a film scriptwriter who imagines large elements of the plot as a film script. This chapter considers the wider context of cinematic production in relation to Rushdie’s fictional work to uncover the contexts of his cinematic influences and to consider how a cinematic style of storytelling is reformulated throughout his career for an increasingly cine-literate reading public.

August Wilson had one of the most impressive debuts in the history of theater in America, an area whose highest echelons had previously been dominated, overwhelmingly, by white playwrights. The four plays Wilson brought to Broadway between 1984 and 1990, however, not only changed the scope of American drama but also the shape of its audience, drawing Black theatergoers to Broadway in numbers significant enough to impact Broadway’s sense of its audience and of the infinite possibilities of live theater. These 1980s productions thus not only set the parameters of Wilson’s ten-play cycle – one play set in each decade of the twentieth century – as it explores the tension in African American history between community expectation and heroic disappointment, but, within those parameters, also enabled Wilson to create on the American mainstage some portion of the history that might have been visible in a world where American history is always already Black.

Tolstoy’s works have been adapted into film more often than any other Russian writer except for Dostoevsky. This chapter covers Russian and world cinematic adaptations of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Resurrection, and various shorter works of Tolstoy. Tolstoy’s novels, with their vast length, broad canvas, and complex plots, create unique challenges for prospective filmmakers. While some directors attempt to film his texts as closely as possible, others choose to single out particular aspects of his novels as their foci. Adapters of Anna Karenina, for instance, often focus almost exclusively on Anna and Vronsky’s love affair, while minimizing the plotline involving Levin. Cultural factors often come into play, for instance in Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace, which adapts Tolstoy’s text in light of the Brezhnev-era demand for monumentalism, and for conveying the patriotic aspects of the novel. Shorter works such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Kreutzer Sonata have inspired particularly creative approaches, as directors often freely combine Tolstoy’s short narratives with other texts and set them in remarkably different social, historical, and cultural contexts.

In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, Shakespeare plays contradictory roles. On the one hand, he emblematizes the cultural inheritance Britain shares with the United States; on the other, he serves as the vehicle by which to assert British artistic superiority. The tensions between these roles is explored in a scene in which American service men and women, under the direction of a British vicar, rehearse episodes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Through this scene, Powell and Pressburger both mock American movies and betray their anxieties about the British film industry’s postwar future. At the same time, they make the case for the imaginative primacy of British cinema—and, indeed, of their own films—over Hollywood. The chapter concludes by considering links between A Matter of Life and Death and Powell’s unrealized adaptation of The Tempest, in which Prospero stands in for the filmmaker in exile.

Within contemporary Western gay communities, Alexander the Great is often championed as a hero and an inspirational figure – the ultimate high-status homosexual. This chapter explores the various ways in which he has been visualised within the gay community and its wider – more closeted – community. The chapter explores his literary image in the novels of Mary Renault, in stage musicals and pornography and in mainstream Hollywood cinema. The darker, anti-gay, reading of Alexander is also explored in the context of right-wing nationalism and the military.

Stanley Kubrick’s choice to appropriate the opening gesture of Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra (1896) in his science fiction masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) provided this music with a degree of pop-culture notoriety rarely attained by "serious" works. Afforded the mass exposure of a Hollywood blockbuster, the tone poem’s visceral power manifested itself in settings the composer never could have imagined: athletic stadiums, discotheques, Elvis Presley concerts, and cell phones, saturating the popular consciousness to an extent perhaps unparalleled. Beneath this spectacular feat of publicity, however, the film offers a rich and sophisticated reading of Strauss’s music, by duplicating visually the music’s dazzling aural effects, by engaging with the same Nietzschean dilemmas that occupied Strauss (particularly humanity’s evolving struggle to conceptualize the fate of the individual), and by seeking to integrate the worlds of self-consciously significant artistic expression and commercial entertainment.

This chapter brings Strauss’s music into constructive dialogue with Hollywood film, via the persona of Erich Korngold. It examines Korngold’s historical connection with Strauss through the former composer’s operas and concert works, before exploring the ways in which Strauss can be heard in the film scores by Korngold and his contemporaries in the 1930s and 40s. The use of one particular Straussian harmonic trait – third-related triadic sequences (of both octatonic and hexatonic variety) – is highlighted in Korngold’s scores and traced in more recent film, including in the output of John Williams. Williams’s use of what Frank Lehman calls "chromatically modulating cadential resolutions" can also be found in Strauss and Korngold. The chapter concludes by suggesting that hearing Strauss in Korngold and Williams is just one way of constructing a Straussian Text, one that reveals the power of seeking to encounter Strauss’s music in varied and surprising contexts.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between Decadence and cinema through a study of the novels of Carl Van Vechten. As neo-Decadence emerged in America in the 1920s writers responded to a range of new technologies largely unknown to earlier writers such as Wilde. Van Vechten embraced the new media of cinema, writing novels about and treatments for Hollywood and the cinema industry. He saw Hollywood through the eyes of a Decadent and Decadence through the lens of a movie camera. From Van Vechten’s second novel, The Blind Bow-Boy (1923), through Spider Boy: A Scenario for a Moving Picture (1928), to his final novel Parties: Scenes from Contemporary New York Life (1930) his Decadent style depicted the excesses of Hollywood while being formally shaped by the visual and narrative modes of cinema.

From its emergence in the mid-nineteenth century, decadence has been, fundamentally, a socio-cultural response to urban modernity. Indeed, decadence is all but unthinkable outside the borders of the modern metropolis. Hence this chapter treats literature less as a literary critic would and more as an urbanist thinker might. An urbanist reading of a decadent text must perforce pay attention not only to urban geography, including the plan of the city in which the work is set, its dominant architectural styles, socio-economic differences in neighborhoods, and so on, but also to the cultural, social, and psychological meanings that the urban setting produces in a particular decadent text. In this essay, the urbanist approach is brought to bear on three novels whose urban geography is especially significant to their respective narratives: Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il Piacere [Pleasure] (1889), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig [Death in Venice] (1912). These three works illustrate, respectively, the special relationship of the urban scene to cultural, social, and psychological issues germane to the decadent narrative of each novel.

Decadent works, decadent themes, and decadent personalities figure prominently in the history of film, not only because of screen adaptations of novels and plays (there are at least three versions of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and many more adaptations of Wilde’s plays), but also because of the proliferation of decadent themes and types, especially in the silent era. Examples include Theda Bara’s vamp persona and the frequent use of decadent settings for the silent mise-en-scène, such as pre-WWI Vienna in Erich von Stroheim’s The Wedding March (1928). Two key periods of decadence ? the Roman Empire and libertine France ? form the bases of the two modern films most identified with decadence: Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (1969) and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or 120 Days of Sodom (1975). Some critics refer to Salò as the ‘last art film’ in cinema history, an assessment that reflects a sense that cinema itself has since entered a period of decadence. But time and again, some filmic form of ‘decadence’ has actually helped to enliven cinema and ensure its continuing artistic value.