Beginning in the late 1920s, MGM usurped Paramount’s position as the most profitable and prestigious studio, largely as a result of the oversight of wunderkind producer Irving Thalberg. Thalberg helped develop the corporate personality of MGM – the MGM “Idea” – comprising a glamorous and slick house style, the prioritization of stars, and a system of scriptwriting that involved assigning multiple writers to work on the same project yet often unbeknownst to each other. It is in response to this last phenomenon that authors of very disparate sensibilities – F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Love of the Last Tycoon [1941]), Aldous Huxley (After Many a Summer Dies the Swan [1939]), and William Faulkner (Absalom, Absalom! [1936]) – crafted narratives in a form I call “MGM Modernism”: an aestheticized and self-conscious naturalism developed in part from contact with and subordination to a corporate author.

This chapter considers the literary ramifications of Hollywood’s global presence during the brief epoch of World War II and its immediate aftermath. For the queer American poet and film critic Parker Tyler and the Anglo-Canadian novelist Malcolm Lowry, Hollywood functioned like the ordering myths employed by the high modernists. Tyler’s The Granite Butterfly (1945) and Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), works of grand self-consciously modernist ambition, took shape as the war radically altered everyday life. When defending the form of Under the Volcano to his publisher Jonathan Cape, Lowry insisted that the “book is written on numerous planes with provision made, it was my fond hope, for almost every kind of reader.” This belief resonates with film theorist Miriam Hansen’s vernacular modernism thesis, which hold that Hollywood films achieved dominance by meaning different things to different people. For Tyler and especially Lowry, the myth of Hollywood functions as a means of exploring an implicit theoretical problem – can a work of literature be both meaningful (i.e., authored) and open to any interpretation? – and it provides scholars one way to observe how modernism found its limits.

This book concludes in 1952, the year that the Miracle decision (Joseph Burstyn Inc. v. Wilson) established motion pictures as protected speech, to suggest one way to mark a common endpoint to the eras of the studio system and American modernism. That year, several books were either completed or published that serve as early instances of genres or attitudes that would come to the fore in postwar American fiction. This conclusion briefly addresses three such works: Lillian Ross’s Picture, James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain, and Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe. These books suggest a transformation of writers’ attitudes toward Hollywood, one that coincides with the identification of artistic strategies – the nonfiction novel; the conception of moviegoing as an experience worthy of artistic rendering; the campus novel – that would become increasingly prevalent in subsequent decades. The conclusion ends by giving Hollywood movies the chance to speak for themselves, attending to two MGM films of 1952: Singin’ in the Rain and, more intently, The Bad and the Beautiful. I read the latter as MGM’s version of a literary history of the studio system.