I am currently working on a book about the many connections between the literary world of New York City and the world of Hollywood during the Pre-Code era (1929-1934). Hollywood before the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code is still notorious for its frank treatment of sex, crime, and other vices. What’s little known, however, is how much Hollywood relied on the New York literary establishment for its material. Between 1929 and 1934, three out of four Hollywood movies were based on novels, magazine stories, or plays published or produced in New York. New York provided not just the material but the subjects: what was news in Manhattan often showed up on cinema screens around the country a few months later.
I want to tell the stories of the writers who fed Hollywood’s hunger: not the screenwriters, who’ve long been studied, but the novelists, storytellers, and playwrights whose words filled the soundtracks of these early talkies. Writers like Grace Perkins and Fulton Oursler, who wrote under four different names and contributed the stories for five different films in 1931 alone. Writers like Katharine Brush and Faith Baldwin, whose stories of working women and their struggles to get past stereotypes like “the office wife” made them some of the highest-paid writers in America and provided roles for the likes of Mary Astor, Joan Blondell, and Loretta Young. Writers like Jack Lait and Donald Henderson Clarke, who parlayed their street knowledge from years as New York reporters into hard-hitting novels about racketeers, corrupt cops, and fallen women. Writers whose fame earned them billing ahead of stars like Edward G. Robinson and Cary Grant.
Hollywood and literary New York have never been as intertwined as they were during these five short years and I want to show the many threads that connected them, including such the Gold Diggers of Broadway novel that Eve Bernstein of Warner Brothers wrote for newspaper serialization, the bookmarks that Brentano’s bookstore gave out as tie-ins to the Constance Bennett movie Bought, and The Trial of Mary Dugan, the play Bayard Veiller wrote based on the Peaches and “Daddy” Browning case that was a hit on Broadway, toured the U.S., made into a film starring Norma Shearer, and then published as a novel by Photoplay magazine.
I’ve written about some of these books on NeglectedBooks.com:
- Bad Girl, by Viña Delmar (1928)
- Basis of the 1931 film Bad Girl starring Sally Eilers and James Dunn
- Big Business Girl, by Patricia Reilly (1930)
- Basis of the 1931 film Big Business Girl starring Loretta Young and Ricardo Cortez
- Ex-Wife, by Dora Macy (Grace Perkins) (1930)
- Basis of the 1931 film My Past starring Bebe Daniels
- Five Star Final, by Louis Weitzenkorn (1931)
- Basis of the 1931 film Five Star Final starring Edward G. Robinson
- The Goldfish Bowl, by Mary C. McCall Jr. (1932)
- Basis of the 1932 film It’s Tough to be Famous starring Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
- Night Nurse, by Dora Macy (Grace Perkins) (1930)
- Basis of the 1931 film Night Nurse starring Barbara Stanwyck
- No More Orchids, by Grace Perkins (1932)
- Basis of the 1932 film No More Orchids starring Carole Lombard and Lyle Talbot
- Red-Headed Woman, by Katharine Brush (1931)
- Basis of the 1932 film Red-Headed Woman starring Jean Harlow
- Windfall, by Robert Andrews (1931)
- Basis of the 1932 film If I Had a Million starring W. C. Fields, Gary Cooper, George Raft, and many others
- The Woman Accused, by Rupert Hughes and eight other writers (1933)
- Basis of the 1933 film The Woman Accused starring Nancy Carroll and Cary Grant
Other projects in development:
- Peter Greave’s Secrets: A selection of the diaries of the British writer and leprosy victim. Before leaving the UK in 2021, I photographed the three dozen notebooks that remain of the diary kept by Peter Greave (born Herbert Carberry) from the late 1930s to late 1960s
- My Father’s Records: a memoir told through the prism of the Space Age Pop and other records in my father’s collection, my first exposures to music
- Failures: The group biography of six neglected writers, the proposal for which was short-listed for the 2020 Tony Lothian Prize