The passing of Budd Schulberg at the age of 95 is the end of a cinema era. The son of BP Schulberg, who became head of Paramount in the 1930s, he was raised at the heart of the studio system. Yet in his novels What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) and The Disenchanted (1950), he wrote two of the most scathing denunciations of Hollywoodland.
They remain among the finest entries in a literary subgenre that was launched in 1919 by Harry Leon Wilson's Merton of the Movies. As with PG Wodehouse's Laughing Gas (1936), this was a fond satire that traded in the caricatures and cliches peddled by the fanzines, who were fed sanitised stories about movie moguls and their glamorous stars in the hope of dissuading them from printing the more salacious gossip (which was, of course, what everybody really wanted to read).
But siblings Carroll and Garrett Graham decided to explore the sleazier side of Tinseltown in their novel Queer People (1930), which would later be reissued under the racier title Fleshpots of Malibu. With its hard-nosed anti-hero, Theodore "Whitey" White, anticipating Schulberg's newshounds-for-hire, Al Mannheim and Sammy Glick, this disconcerting roman à clef exposed the chasm between fantasy and reality, and suggested that icons and wannabes alike were incapable of distinguishing between performance and life.
Among the golden-age novels to pursue similar themes were Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1935) and I Should Have Stayed Home (1938), as well as Aldous Huxley's After Many Summers Dies the Swan and Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (both 1939). Like F Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, which remained unfinished on his death in 1940, several of these titles have since been adapted for the screen. But contemporary Hollywood was much too protective of its image to risk anything stronger than self-generated exposés, such as George Cukor's What Price Hollywood? (1932) and William Wellman's A Star Is Born (1937).
There was no chance that either of Schulberg's novels would be optioned, especially after he split the film community with his screenplay for Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954), which was a thinly disguised allegory on testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee. With reality pounding on Hollywood's door in the form of a communist witch-hunt and a television-induced box office slump, Vincente Minnelli and George Cukor respectively confessed that all was not well at the Dream Factory in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and A Star Is Born (1954). But the Hays production code still prevented the fuller disclosures made in novels such as Peter Viertel's White Hunter, Black Heart (1953) and Norman Mailer's The Deer Park (1955). It was only after Henry Farrell's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1960) and Harold Robbins's The Carpetbaggers (1961) were filmed, within a couple of years of their publication, that Hollywood's defences were finally breached.
As the studio system disintegrated, the literary vultures swooped; they deposited among the carnage a mix of potboiling trash and neglected gems that included Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls (1966), Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge (1968), Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays (1970), Larry McMurtry's All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (1972), William Goldman's Tinsel (1979), Jackie Collins's Hollywood Wives (1983) and Rudolph Wurlitzer's Slow Fade (1984). Subsequently, cynicism and sentiment have been the watchword of authors such as Bruce Wagner (Force Majeure, 1991; I'm Losing You, 1996; Still Holding, 2003), Leslie Epstein (Pandemonium, 1997; San Remo Drive, 2003) and Steve Erickson (Zeroville, 2007), as well as such hard-boiled specialists as James Ellroy (The Black Dahlia, 1987; LA Confidential, 1990) and Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty, 1990).
However, a new nostalgia has informed some recent fiction – such as The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters (2004), an epistolary novel about a Hollywood insider by Elisabeth Robinson, a producer who worked on Braveheart. Then there is Martha Sherrill's My Last Movie Star (2004), a satire on celebrity culture; the simian "autobiography" Me Cheeta (2008, just longlisted for the Booker); and Glen David Gold's Sunnyside (2009), which takes us back to Charlie Chaplin in his heyday. Schulberg might not have recognised the Hollywood they describe, but, then, few had the benefit of his privileged perspective.
Top five Hollywood novels
1 What Makes Sammy Run?
The irresistible rise of a New York copy-boy to major Hollywood producer.
2 The Day of the Locust
A backlot insight into studio politics that culminates with a riot at a premiere.
3 San Remo Drive
A bittersweet memoir of 1950s Tinseltown by the son and nephew of the twins who scripted Casablanca.
4 Force Majeure
A washed-up scriptwriter does what it takes to stay in the game.
5 Laughing Gas
A British toff accidentally switches bodies with a brattish Hollywood child star.
