Beginning in the immediate postwar and coincident with the Paramount antitrust decree, writers of both fiction and screenplays began to insist on the ownership of the works they produced. While flesh-and-blood authors conceived of themselves as corporate bundles of properties, the studios began to behave more like artists, investigating the possibilities of movies geared to specialized audiences. The literariness of these new pictures should be understood as the expression of a new conception of authorship pervading the industry. Many movies now considered noir, including In a Lonely Place (1950) and Sunset Boulevard (1950), manifest the industry’s shifting attitudes toward source material, original screenplays, and, ultimately, the idea of the Hollywood movie as a kind of literary expression. This chapter concludes with an analysis of All About Eve (1950). In its narrative of accommodation and uneasy coherence in the face of a common threat, Eve, unlike In a Lonely Place and Sunset Boulevard, strikes a balance between the conflicting intentions of its director (the self-consciously literary Joseph Mankiewicz) and its studio (Twentieth Century-Fox), giving legible shape to both.

Surveying Shakespeare adaptations in Classical Hollywood from the failure of Sam Taylors Taming of the Shrew in 1929 to the final triumph of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar in 1953, this chapter looks at how Hollywood film endeavoured to become the ‘new Shakespeare’ while Shakespeare film adaptation gained the reputation for being, as Louis B. Mayer famously declared, ‘box office poison’. Focusing on the marketing of Hollywood Shakespeare adaptations, the chapter reveals how in their eagerness to please everyone, promoters of these films reveal some of the underpinning strategies for adapting Shakespeare in Classical Hollywood. ‘Exploitation’ and ‘showmanship’ (terms used in film marketing in Classical Hollywood) offer an approach to film adaptation that focuses on the consumer rather than the author, the adaptation not as interpretation but as product, not as something to be revered, but as something to be sold.