In the late 1930s, the studio system and its ancillary institutions (museums, newspapers, and trade journals) engaged in a concerted effort to narrate the industry’s maturation. This tendency manifested onscreen in the emergence of the historiographical backstudio picture, led by David Selznick’s A Star is Born (1937) and followed by Warners’ Boy Meets Girl (1938) and Fox’s Hollywood Cavalcade (1939). The belief in Hollywood’s coming-of-age gave rise to a countervailing sense that the Hollywood novel had become exhausted. Writers as different as Cedric Belfrage (Promised Land, 1938), Horace McCoy (I Should Have Stayed Home, 1938), and Patsy Ruth Miller (That Flannigan Girl, 1939), among others, used this heightened historical sense to renovate the genre. No renovator was more successful or less understood than Nathanael West. In The Day of the Locust (1939), West contributed to American modernist inscrutability in his occult bildungsroman of painter Tod Hackett. West dared readers to see Tod’s monstrous coming of age alongside the studio system’s own in Tod’s submissions to the order of Hollywood’s aesthetics and the law of the police that rescue him in the novel’s concluding riot.

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.