Classical Hollywood, American Modernism: A Literary History of the Studio System by Jordan Brower

© 2025 Johns Hopkins University Press

The first notable aspect of Jordan Brower’s intensely researched book is that it mentions Theodore Adorno only twice, in passing, and Max Horkheimer not at all (poor Max). We get it by now: the culture industry qua oligarchy of the Hollywood studio system qua corporate personhood was propaganda, and scholars need to get on with more detailed work. As I write, the emergent rallying cry of “Stop the Oligarchy” analogizes more to the Gilded Age than to Classical Hollywood. Yet today’s anti-oligarchy sentiment is often directed at Silicon Valley tycoons, who have consumed much of Hollywood itself through streaming services, wrought a new kind of culture industry by commodifying our very attention beyond ideological propaganda, and are now trying to deaccession government itself. Brower’s account of the studio system provides an important analysis of how such oligarchical sausage once got made at the nexus of entertainment, art, and anti-trust law by charting how literary authors, the publishing industry, and classical studios adapted to each other, in every sense, for better or worse.

 Classical Hollywood, American Modernism is structured by three Supreme Court cases: the 1912 Townsend Amendment to the Copyright Act of 1909, which converted movies into intellectual property (IP) and subsequently sent studios pouncing on rights to copyrighted literature; 1948’s The United States v. Paramount Pictures, which disaggregated the vertical integration of production studios and theaters; and Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson (1952), which protected movies as First Amendment speech. Within this legal framework charting the rise and fall of “the studio system,” Brower excavates internal corporate decisions and small but astute acts by literary authors within and outside Hollywood studios while reading movies, novels, and the studio system itself as “deep texts.” These analyses develop within four overlapping vectors: transmedial possibility, corporate authorship, industrial reflexivity, and vernacular modernism. The first of these is the most dominant and original in Brower’s analysis, as well as the most relevant to “our era of intellectual property-driven cinematic universes”; indeed, one might read the volume as a version of a villain’s “origin story” that Marvel has recently made so much of by recycling its own IP (13).

This peripatetic yet fascinating critical narrative tries to retrieve a humane sense of agency, for viewers and content providers alike, from the maw of Jerome Christensen’s foundational ideation of the “studio” as the apotheosis of corporate personhood and modern authorship in America’s Corporate Art (2012). Brower argues that Paramount’s accumulation of “story” in the silent era is as crucial to the molding and modeling of the studio system as MGM’s vaunted gathering of stars and honing of “classical Hollywood style.” The studio era at first sees literature reduced to IP as “pre-sold” material. Soon after, the publishing industry anticipates copyright acquisition and morphs its products toward instantly adaptable stories: “Popularity versus prestige and transmedial possibility versus medium specificity are thus the coordinates of the movie-minded literary field” (32). Many literary authors, of course, would support their print work with a screenwriter’s check, inevitably leading to the “Hollywood novel,” written by “industry scribes with an axe to grind” and finding its apotheosis in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (144). The imbrication of screenwriting and fiction writing produces a subtle call-and-response that will affect both industries and their genres.

The human authors featured in this volume weave through four overlapping categories: 1) those trying to write screenplays; 2) those trying to write or to resist writing adaptable print works; 3) those trying to write the Hollywood novel; and 4) most amorphously, those trying to incorporate a lifeworld newly globalized by movies into the legacy of high literary Modernism. If there were to be one author to traverse this quadrant fully, it would be F. Scott Fitzgerald. His incomplete last novel, originally titled The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western (1941), attempted to gain for print literature “the whole equation of pictures,” a vision his narrator attributes to Monroe Stahr, a stand-in for the wunderkind producer Irving Thalberg, who, like Fitzgerald, died young after being expelled from MGM. What Brower’s book indicates, perhaps in unintended alliance with Fitzgerald and Thalberg, is that the “whole equation of pictures” may not be possible at all.

As the studio system fluctuates over time between privileging pre-sold and original material, the meta-sophistication of Anita Loos’s navigation of film, fiction, and theater in her Gentlemen Prefer Blondes franchise contrasts to John Dos Passos’s refusal of transmedial potential in Manhattan Transfer (1925) through an ironic mix of “emphasiz[ing] its literariness by mimicking film techniques and limiting its appeal to story departments,” replete with belatedly adding a despicable movie PR man to his raft of characters. Brower sees a theory of proto postmodernism in the “anti-method” of the likes of Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano (1940) and Parker Tyler’s poem The Granite Butterfly (1945), each of which seemingly reflects both how the leviathan days of the studio system eroded from within and how these authors “conceived Hollywood as something akin to the Grail legend for Eliot or Homer’s epics for Joyce” (118). Mounting ambiguity on the eve of the Paramount case meant that a “Hollywood movie could mean whatever a paying viewer wanted so long as it invariably meant ‘Hollywood,’ that is, harmless entertainment.” For Brower, “this interpretative openness bears a striking resemblance to later theories of textuality that would characterize the postmodern aesthetic of late capitalism” (118). This claim builds from an earlier thesis about “MGM Modernism,” supported by the likes of a rather occult allegory that links Absalom, Absalom’s architectural meaning with what Faulkner gained from passing through the gates of Paramount Studios.

This book excels when engaging its original research on the movie industry. While the 1930 Production “Hays” Code produced its own code for reading sexual innuendo for (especially queer) audiences, so did this studio era produce a “writing in code” about itself, with most of the famous adaptations of “noir” films catching and killing their literary sources’ critiques of the studio system. By the end of the 1930s, a self-reflexive tone emerges, as the studio system began historicizing itself as art, replete with MoMA collaborating with the industry, film historians gaining recognition, and self-protecting yet forwarding-looking “historical backstudio” films like A Star is Born (1937). The strongest of Brower’s interventions inhere in his readings of movies at the end of the studio era. Sunset Boulevard (1950) directly analogizes the dissolution of Paramount Pictures Inc. to Norma Desmond’s mental unraveling and was made by director Billy Wilder somehow hiding the film’s intentions from the studio. By contrast, the same year’s All About Eve at once forwards Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s proto-auteur-theory defense of the writer-director as true creator and allegorizes the artistic integrity of Broadway to the survival of movies in the face of television. All About Eve nonetheless compromises by acknowledging the “centripetal dispersion of power and authority in the industry” through a “brilliant balancing of the competing intentions of studio, director, and star” (176). These swan songs reiterate that all publicity is good publicity, as the studios brace to regroup in the aftermath of their “system.”

By Brower’s account, the studio system legally ends with the Paramount case of 1948, but multiple factors usher out classical Hollywood not with a bang but a whimper, as less centralized control paralleled a huge contraction of production. The dissolving of Hollywood’s global hegemony and domestic theatrical control would admit more independent and art-house screen space for foreign films and its auteurs while also centering the authorship of the “filmmaker,” or writer-director. Screenwriters get rights to their own materials in 1953, but by this time many literary authors would go to university MFA programs instead of studio lots, corresponding with Mark McGurl’s notion of the American “program era.” In one of the book’s slim mentions of Hollywood labor actions, Brower notes that “a notion of a filmmaker’s authorship was emerging out of the [Writers] Guild’s emphasis on original materials, and with that, a notion of the Hollywood film as a kind of literature would follow” (153). Brower does not account for why film should be considered literature as opposed to the “medium specific” form he isolates earlier.

For media scholars, a wealth of information lies in these pages. Literary scholars, however, may leave less convinced about what kind of literary history resides here and why we should be anything but concerned about how the studio era reflects our own media and political landscape. Brower exits his introduction with “this literary history of the studio system is ambivalent about Hollywood’s effects but absolutely clear on its power” (20). I leave Classical Hollywood, American Modernism asking how we can afford to be ambivalent about the past and present power of oligarchies and their governmental collaborators, if not also about our own academic system in times potentially even darker than McCarthyism, much of which descended upon Hollywood and, remember it or not, universities. I cannot be the only person who routinely finds themselves at a hotel bar after a long day of cultural studies panels to hear the murmured query, “Was Adorno right? What makes the culture industry evil?” I never ask.