Edna Ferber's Hollywood: American Fictions of Gender, Race, and History

Texas Film and Media Studies

by J.E. Smyth, Thomas Schatz (Foreword)

Edna Ferber's Hollywood reveals one of the most influential artistic relationships of the twentieth century--the four-decade partnership between historical novelist Edna Ferber and the Hollywood studios. Ferber was one of America's most controversial popular historians, a writer whose uniquely feminist, multiracial view of the national past deliberately clashed with traditional narratives of white masculine power. Hollywood paid premium sums to adapt her novels, creating some of the most memorable films of the studio era--among them Show Boat, Cimarron, and Giant. Her historical fiction resonated with Hollywood's interest in prestigious historical filmmaking aimed principally, but not exclusively, at female audiences.

In Edna Ferber's Hollywood, J. E. Smyth explores the research, writing, marketing, reception, and production histories of Hollywood's Ferber franchise. Smyth tracks Ferber's working relationships with Samuel Goldwyn, Leland Hayward, George Stevens, and James Dean; her landmark contract negotiations with Warner Bros.; and the controversies surrounding Giant's critique of Jim-Crow Texas. But Edna Ferber's Hollywood is also the study of the historical vision of an American outsider--a woman, a Jew, a novelist with few literary pretensions, an unashamed middlebrow who challenged the prescribed boundaries among gender, race, history, and fiction. In a masterful film and literary history, Smyth explores how Ferber's work helped shape Hollywood's attitude toward the American past.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, Biography

351 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2009

About the author

J. E. Smyth is a historian, critic, and Professor of History at the University of Warwick.

Smyth has written and edited several books, including a new edition of Jane Allen’s Hollywood novel, I Lost My Girlish Laughter (Random House, 2019) and Nobody’s Girl Friday (Oxford University Press, 2018), a history of the many high-powered women who worked in the golden age of the Hollywood studio system (1924-1954).

She was awarded the Richard Wall Special Jury Prize by the Theatre Library Association, the International Association of Media Historians' Michael Nelson Prize, a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, and the Association of American Publishers Award. She was a Getty Research Institute scholar-in-residence and contributed to the award-winning PBS documentary, Children of Giant (2015).

She was awarded an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences film scholar grant in 2021.

Her latest book, Mary C. McCall Jr.: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood's Most Powerful Screenwriter, was published by Columbia University Press in September 2024 and was profiled in the Observer in July 2024.

Reviews

[Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not a biography of Ferber. I learned nothing about her personal life, which suited me just fine. This is more like a biography of her relationship with Hollywood, following course of its film adaptations, one novel at a time in the order of publication. The book reads almost like a series of biographies on each novel. We start with the novel’s inception, followed by Ferber’s research and what she wanted to achieve with it. Then comes a big payday as she sells the rights to RKO or Warner Bros, and then the first film adaptation, its reception, and the circumstances of its eventual remake, usually by MGM which bought the rights to many properties from other studios, and then produced watered down adaptations.

We start with “So Big” and the author writes about Ferber’s relationship to Hollywood before 1924. We also learn about Ferber’s influences like the muckraking historian Ida Tarbell and Harriet Beecher Stowe, to whom she was frequently compared due to her concern with racial issues, initially as a complement and eventually as a pejorative at the end of her career when critics considered her more of a crusader than a writer. Also important to note, Ferber always wanted to differentiate herself from the kind of women’s historical fiction like Helen Hunt Jackson’s “Ramona” which, although it concerned a mixed-race heroine, espoused a certain kind of nostalgia that was anathema to Ferber but not, ironically, her most devoted fans.

Although Ferber sought to write fiction that looked at America’s ugly past through the prism of contemporary problems, she was often criticized as writing just for bookish women, or worse – Hollywood, which made the most derided of genres, the women’s picture. Ironically again, her novels were often shaped (or at least promoted as) more masculine adventures, particularly those made or remade in the 1950s. Not that adapting her work was always a form of dismantling it. Oscar Hammerstein managed to build on Ferber’s intentions by giving more attention to the African-American characters in his book for the musical “Show Boat”.

Sometimes there were even trades in these adaptations. In “Show Boat” (the musical and 1936 film) there is less of Magnolia’s husband Gaylord Ravenal, which I appreciate because the focus should be on Magnolia’s relationships with women, but on the other hand, they reunite at the end, which is a bummer. In the film of “Giant”, Jett Rink’s ethnic hybridity is deemphasized, but he is instead shown teaching Leslie about the injustice to the Mexicans. Likewise, the Mexican characters are made more passive in the film (Sal Mineo doesn’t speak a single word), yet this somehow manages to make the racial injustice more sad.

I’ve read three of Ferber’s novels (“So Big”, “Show Boat”, “Cimarron”) and have seen all the film adaptations of them, except for the lost silent version of “So Big”. I’ve also loved “Giant”, the movie, my whole life, and kinda sorta liked the film version of “Saratoga Trunk”. This book was right up my alley. I’m not sure how much I would have gotten out of it if I was not as familiar with Ferber. The chapter on “Come and Get It” left me a little cold since I was unfamiliar with the book and the film. On the other hand, I don’t know the novel or film of “Ice Palace”, and I thought that chapter was very interesting. I also feel the need to now read the novel “Saratoga Trunk” due to its description of the heroine’s ability to play with others’ anxieties about gender and race to her benefit.

All in all, this was an excellent book of literary criticism, film criticism, Hollywood history, and oh! her business acumen!

[Gary]

DNF