Tuesday, November 29, 2016
In Day of the Locust, Nathaniel West portrayed Faye, who was the focus of Tod's attention and therefore one of the key figures of the book, as a living representation of Los Angeles. Budd Schulberg writes Sammy Glick as the epitome of the entrepreneurial American self-promoter in the wake of the Gilded Age. However, he specifically ends up as a screenwriter in Hollywood. How does Sammy's character reflect Schulberg's assessment of Los Angeles?Sammy's essential characteristics, such as rapid change, brash confidence, and recycling of existing content, could be interpreted as alluding to the "character" of Hollywood. However, within the narrative Sammy is sidestepping the usual track of a screenwriter, which undermines the possibility of him being representative of the average screenwriter or citizen, as Faye was representative of the aspiring actors. Furthermore, how do the elements of Hollywood that align with Sammy's character integrate with Schulberg's literal characterization of Los Angeles? What Makes Sammy Run contains critique of Los Angeles, but is Sammy a part of that?
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I don't think Sammy is intended to represent the average screenwriter/producer in Los Angeles, but instead a surprisingly large number of successful Hollywood people who are uncreative in their ideas but clever in their ability to "make it." Instead of being knowledgable at his craft, Sammy is simply a great survivor, who is always on the move trying to find new shortcuts to compensate for his creativity deficiency. On page 73, Sammy is described as a "ferret poking its snout into rabbit [holes]." This comparison to a ferret, an animal with few physical advantages but a clever mind for scavenging and surviving fits Sammy perfectly. Similarly, the idea of a ferret searching in rabbit holes for potential prey is representative of Sammy always running and searching for a leg up, even though the odds are stacked against him. Overall, in the ecosystem of Budd Schulberg's Hollywood, there are many ferrets who have not been given the talent that ensures survival in such a competitive landscape, but instead have earned their keep through impressive instincts and perseverance. Overall, I think that this is a criticism of Hollywood, for one of the great entertainment hubs in the world has been infiltrated by a wave of brash and uncreative, but stubbornly insistent outsiders.
ReplyDeleteSimilar to what Matt said, Sammy may not be the "average" screenwriter, however I do think that Schulberg is making a commentary on the crafty and brash nature of a successful Hollywood screenwriter. In the sea of Hollywood screenwriters, Sammy may be special but he is not alone. Kit on page 77 says that "They are different" referring to "all the Sammy Glicks", but Al is sure that Sammy is totally unique. Then Kit corrects him and says, "I hate to disillusion you...but he has plenty of soul mates running in the same race". We only have seen one Sammy so far because we are following the perspective of Al, but Kit has seen many other runners in the race. Schulberg may only be focusing on Sammy, but I think that Sammy's type is part of the critique of Los Angeles. I agree with Matt, the critique is of the "brash and uncreative, but stubbornly insistent outsiders" of which Sammy is only one of many.
ReplyDeleteGwen, you pointed out that Sammy is the epitome of the American Dream, or at least he seems to be from an outsider's perspective. I completely agree. He is the classic rags to riches story, however he did not get there purely through hard work. Sammy skipped, cheated, and is probably still hopping his way up to the top, and that Hollywood is where all this can and frequently does happen is his critique of it.
ReplyDeleteI am not sure what you mean when you ask whether Sammy is a part of Schulberg's critique of Los Angeles, but to me, Sammy essential to it. Sammy acts as Schulberg's X-ray lens or an amplifier, uncovering everything negative in Los Angeles. Sammy is the perfect character for this job because he is an incredibly smart and creative individual, daunted by nothing because he is driven by the basic, animalistic need to survive. I agree with Matt - Sammy is simply a great survivor; his need for survival is so primal (Sammy's behavior is compared to that of an animal in so many scenes in the novel) that it surpasses any moral obstacles to reach this end goal. When Al was resistant to Sammy's idea to get rid of Pancake by going behind his back, Sammy himself said, "don't be a sap. You've heard of survival of the fittest" (85). However, Sammy's definition of survival is acquiring money with no end goal, and like an animal is never content for surviving just through one day, Sammy is never content with whatever money he has on one day. Because of this, he can trample his way through Hollywood, facilitated by the characteristics of Hollywood himself.
Sammy consumes Hollywood (his food) to survive (money). He even says, "I've got a hunch Hollywood is my meat" on page 36.
DeleteThis is a very very long shot at a successful analogy to answer your question about whether Sammy is part of Budd's critique of Los Angeles, but maybe Sammy is Schulberg's animal that reveals the bad stuff in LA/hollywood by chomping away at the "gilded" layer of gold for his survival.
I agree with Matt and Jamal. I think that Sammy may represent a new type of screenwriter (well, new based on the time) who doesn't use conventional methods in order to achieve success. Something that strikes me as interesting is the fact that what we see Sammy doing to get ahead wouldn't exactly work in the modern film industry, at least not according to the screenwriters I've talked to. Stories and tropes are reused, but you can't exactly get by on the same brashness and total lack of content. During Schulberg's time, people like Sammy were on the cutting edge of the film industry; in our time, "Sammies" probably look a little different.
ReplyDeleteBasically what I'm saying here is that Sammy doesn't have to be representative of the entire screenwriting population of the time in order to still function as a critique of the system -- rather, he represents his era's idealized notion of Angeleno/American success (the paradigm that Schulberg questions).
-Matilda Berke
I think something that a lot of the responses seem to be moving towards is the role that capitalism plays in the book, and I think this is essential in answering Gwen's question of whether or not Sammy represents literally Los Angeles or its denizens. I think the animalistic nature of Sammy's perseverance that Matt brought up with the quote about the ferret is more indicative of the nature of national capitalism at the time than of any intrinsic feature of Los Angeles. The book was published in 1941, at the dawn of the red scare that would engulf America for decades; you can see in the tension in chapters 7 and 8 between the elite writers and the writers guild the class struggle building in America as a whole. I think the choice by Schulberg to make such a majority of the characters jewish is part of this, although I don't know exactly why yet. Rather than representing a distinctly angeleno culture, I think Sammy represents the capitalist ferret that found its way into the rabbit hole of Los Angeles, a city filling by the busload with Julians, or rabbits. Maybe the jewishness of the text is meant to show how a traditionally stereotyped and discriminated class of people can fall prey to the animalism of capitalism, even prey upon themselves.
ReplyDelete-Myles "Big Dad" Caldwell
Gwen, your question reminds me of the conversation we had in class today about Sammy being like some sort of archetype, and the center of some unanswered, world-rocking question (like how he compares the answer to what makes him run to the cure for cancer on pg. 135). I do agree that Sammy is a unique type of screenwriter that manages to circumvent the usual toils of the business to get to the top, but I wonder if Schulberg exaggerates his character in this grand way in order to illustrate the dog-eat-dog system that exists in all of Hollywood, therefore actually making him that representative type of character. If it really takes someone much longer than it took Sammy to find any success in the business, then Schulberg wouldn't have as much to write about or have access to the other parts of the business as he followed the path of a simple screenwriter like Julian. However, by reading about Sammy climbing the ranks the reader gets to explore more of Hollywood. The idea that everyone climbs on people to get to the top is again explored on pg. 113 when it is explained that producers hire many writers for one story just to knock them all out and use their ideas. If this relates to Sammy's climb, maybe it is evidence that Sammy is actually representative of the inter workings of Hollywood.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing to think about is on pg. 193 when Kit says, "he is the id of our whole society." I interpret that to mean that Sammy is representative of the deep emotional desires of the society in Hollywood at least in some way. So I do think that at least a little bit, Sammy is being used as a representation.
I believe that Sammy is supposed to represent the depiction of Hollywood as a money machine that consumes talented writers. He does not harness any of his own real raw talent, instead, he merely imitates or steals others work to get ahead. He runs his career under the guise of a façade of literary expertise. Schulberg could be asserting that like the film industry in Los Angeles, Sammy's capability to cater to and trick the elite is "overshadowed by one stupendous talent; his ability to blow his own horn." (pg. 20) Hollywood is great at selling itself by advertising how great, flashy, and essential the business is. Brilliant artists find themselves inhaled by the cash-cow that is the industry, which is alluded to when Glick usurps Julian Blumberg's script and greatly profits from it, allocating barely no money to Blumberg while Sammy gets rich. Sammy is driven by his avarice and thirst to get ahead, whilst backstabbing others along the way, which helps him survive in Los Angeles.
ReplyDeleteI definitely think Sammy is a representation on some level of Hollywood and how it works. The entertainment industry is, in many ways, one of cheating and stepping on other people and heartbreak. On page 79, Al notes, "This must have been the only way he could write, telling his story over and over to people who supplied a line here, an idea there, until the story began to take shape like a snowman forming hastily under many hands." Hollywood is also inherently about collaboration, and although it is easy to hound Sammy for being a manipulative, selfish go-getter, that kind of behavior is not uncommon, nor necessarily morally reprehensible in this specific industry. I would say that Sammy is a part of Schulberg's critique of Los Angeles, but only because I know the book is satirical. People like Sammy are simply a reality of Hollywood, and as infuriating as that is, I'm not sure if it will ever change.
ReplyDelete