Customer Reviews

Some Time in the Sun: The Hollywood Years of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Nathanael West, Aldous Huxley and James Agee

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Tom Dardis' "Some Time In The Sun" surprisingly takes on some myths about the fate of some great writers who wound up in hollywood. Dardis makes it clear that he is a proponent of film as an art, and suggests that the movies influenced in some ways the writers who are considered. The myth is one of a lurid money obsessed hollywood being the bottom of the barrel, and its contribution to the destruction of the literary artists who got entangled with it. Dardis demonstrates that the writers in question were motivated by money, that is important, given that most of the time covered was during the Great Depression. The book considers realistically the writers' need to make a living and the movie industry which could pay them for writing. Filled with fascinating detail, Fitzgerald's attempt to produce a great screenplay (he never did), Faulkner's relation to Howard Hawkes, and West's toiling in the skuzzy part of Hollywood, saving his best for "Day of The Locust." The value of this book, I think, is to overturn the literary mythology that condemns the Hollywood film and the film industry, not uncritically or unrealistically, quite the contrary, but to throw light on the relation of these literary artists to that industry.