Dorothy Parker in Hollywood Gail Crowther
Parker is generally associated with New York city and the famous American literary figures who met around the Algonquin “hotel” Round Table. She is also famous as a hard partying girl of the Roaring Twenties with her bobbed hair, chic outfits, and her witty bons mots, like “What fresh hell is this?” or “Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses.” A reputation she later knew was going to harm her legacy and serious writing.
What is less known is that she lived on and off in Hollywood for almost 35 years from 1929 on and that she contributed to 18 film scripts. Like her friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, she discovered that writing a script was not easy and became likewise disillusioned with the movie industry, but the money was too good. Crowther has done a tremendous effort of research, as there is no dedicated archive, and with Parker’s nomadic life she left no personal papers and little correspondence. Furthermore, she had an elusive persona and was a mystery even to her friends.
This book reveals her activism, she was politically left-wing, organized the Hollywood Anti-Nazi league and fought for the civil rights movement, later leaving her estate and assets to Martin Luther King, Jr. She was unflinching during the McCarthy era when the FBI scrutinized Hollywood and helped to create the Screen Writers Guild. For anyone wanting to know what it is really like to write for Hollywood, this book is a sobering reminder of the harsh reality behind the supposed glamour.
Last update