Scoundrels & Spitballers: Writers and Hollywood in the 1930s (Preview)
by Philippe Garnier; Foreword by Eddie Muller. Alameda, CA: Black Pool Productions, 2020. 370 pp., illus. Paperback: $25.00.

Reviewed by Mary F. Corey

Philippe Garnier is a veteran French journalist, author, and translator, who has made his home in Los Angeles for the last forty years. He has, among his many other achievements, introduced the work of James Salter, Charles Bukowski, and James Crumley to French readers. Scoundrels & Spitballers, originally published in France in 1996 as Honi soit qui Malibu, is a vibrant exploration of writers and Hollywood in the 1930s and ’40s, based on the author’s interviews conducted over many years, and is more fun than a barrel of adventurist, typewriter-wielding monkeys.

Garnier has said that he wanted to express “the vibrancy and free-for-all giddiness of a period when the film industry was young, and its workers even younger.” And so, in an approach that author Woody Haut aptly called “anti-romantic romanticism,” he introduces a dashing cadre of gamblers, drunks, cowboys, jailbirds, and high-end literary types who landed in Hollywood and wrote for the movies.

He jauntily flips the old Barton Fink trope on its gloomy head, reframing the paradigm of the sensitive East Coast literary type, contaminated by Hollywood’s toxins, into something both more interesting and truthful. Using F. Scott Fitzgerald as the Ur example of the myth of the literati ruined by Hollywood, Garnier makes it clear that Hollywood had very little to do with Fitzgerald’s undoing. “The pasty-faced ghost” who came west on his last legs and hooked up with Sheila Graham (whom Garnier refers to as that “gossip hag”) had done a pretty good job of self-destructing all on his own. Sure, Garnier says, “Hollywood broke a few writer’s souls, but it also helped many—and definitely inspired a few.” Author and screenwriter A. I. “Buzz” Bezzerides says, “They always say that Hollywood is the writer’s demise. But the truth is…I would not have written a second novel let alone a third one, had it not been for Hollywood.”

While this book covers a lot of ground, including an oblique history of the rise of the studio system from its wild early days as the silents segued into the Talkies, in the end what Garnier has written is a cluster of delightful biographies of the men and women who populated Hollywood’s writing community in these years. Among them, Nathanael West, Niven Busch, Marguerite Roberts, Rowland Brown, Bezzerides, and Sylvia Richards. 

The book is packed with juicy cinematic observations. Garnier is a master of the bon mot as well as the mauvais mot. He refers to Bezzerides’s hands as “hairy paws” and describes actress Maxine Cooper in Kiss Me Deadly (1955) as “slatternly enough for the part, but not pretty enough, with greasy skin and a runty build.” Nonetheless, at its heart Scoundrels & Spitballers is an affectionate, thoughtful, and fastidiously researched deep dive into a chunk of Hollywood history that has long needed re-examination. 

At the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), there is a famous line: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” While Garnier often “prints the legend,” he never fails to identify it as such. In fact, the first chapter of Scoundrels & Spitballers is titled “A Note on Truth in Hollywood History,” where he explains:

The details [of this book] are all true, verified as much as humanly possible. But…when it comes to truth in Hollywood—who’s to know for sure? Was the picture shot on location or in front of a matte painting? Hollywood anecdotes, especially the good ones, should always be enjoyed with the proverbial grain of salt. 

Reading Scoundrels & Spitballers feels a little like looking through a wonderfully curated series of snapshots that deliver the zeitgeist of this epoch. Garnier isn’t terribly worried about plot, continuity, or even chronology, describing the book as an “elliptical…crazy quilt” designed to let us look “into little seen corners.” 

Garnier is a big fan of the particular, and often highlights the elevating power of an unexpected visual detail or line of dialogue. Take this line he cites from Rowland Brown’s screenplay for Blood Money (1933): “All my life I wanted to meet a dame who likes raw scallions.” Or this uncredited exchange between two Dead End Kids in 1938’s Angels with Dirty Faces: “I bet you don’t even know what glands are for.” “Sure,” replies the other, “little sponges that regulate the personality.”

The author is an energetic detective, following even the wispiest of leads as the reader trots along behind him like a faithful dog, happily uncertain of where it will end up. An interview with Sam Brown, the brother of Rowland Brown (clearly one of Garnier’s Top Five screenwriters because he “thought visually”) leads us circuitously to Tahiti in 1929 where Sam was a prop man for F. W. Murnau, who was there shooting Tabu and shacking up with a local boy…

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Mary F. Corey teaches history at UCLA where she specializes in intellectual history and African American history.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLIX, No. 2