Hollywood reverential

A contented screenwriter: Now there’s an oxymoron for you. Yet such a figure once lived, and in his modest way prospered, in Los Angeles. His name was Daniel Fuchs, and “The Golden West,” which posthumously collects some of his short fiction and articles about the movies, tells us a great deal about how he attained his blissful state. Indirectly, it also tells us why that state is nowadays not duplicable.

Fuchs’ story begins in poverty in 1909. He was one of those kids who went to the City College of New York at the beginning of the Depression and somehow took it into his head -- mainly it would seem from reading stories by Chekhov and Isaac Babel -- to be a writer. In those hard times, however, he for a while made his living as a “permanent substitute” teacher in Brooklyn. He earned $6 a day, and he and his wife slept on a Murphy bed. In his spare time, he wrote realistic novels about struggling Jews that, he says, neither sold nor received good reviews (many years later they were reprinted and gained a cult reputation). He also began writing short stories for the “slicks” (the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, even occasionally the New Yorker). These unfailingly sold, and he was able to quit teaching. One of his stories was bought by MGM and the studio offered him a 13-week contract to convert it into a screenplay. So Mr. and Mrs. Fuchs went West -- and discovered paradise.

To put it another way, it was the Anti-Brooklyn. In his fiction, Fuchs always made much of the Southern California flora -- orange blossoms, honeysuckle, jasmine, a field of poinsettias growing just off Sunset Boulevard, if you can imagine such a thing now. In his nonfiction he reveled in watching his children grow up -- clean, healthy, tanned in a fragrant, smog-free Los Angeles that had plenty of empty space and no apparent traffic problems.

Better still, he enjoyed work in the studios. Whatever frenzy was occurring in the producers’ offices, the pace in the writers’ building was leisurely. The paycheck arrived regularly, no matter how many (or how few) pages you turned in, or whether your script was destined for production or (more likely) the shelf. There was time to stroll the back lot and take long lunches at the writers’ table in the commissary. In the late afternoons, a colleague might drop by for gossip or a game of cards. Afternoons at the racetrack and evenings at the boxing arena were regular activities.

Fuchs was never, as he says, a top-tier writer. He received some sort of screen credit on little more than a dozen films and one Oscar (for 1955’s “Love Me or Leave Me”). He didn’t like to talk about money, especially with friends from his past life, “because it’s seldom as much as they think it is, and they will be disappointed. Because it is too much, lavish beyond anything they earn in two years or three, and they will only be sick again.”

But money was not the point of his life; contentment was: “You get absorbed in the picture-making itself. It’s a large-scale, generous art or occupation, and you’re grateful to be a part of it.” He writes thus of the craftsmen -- the art directors, set decorators, directors of photography -- toiling on the studio’s ephemera: “They worked with the assiduity and worry of artists, putting in the effort to secure the effect needed by the story, to go further than that and enhance the story, and not mar it.”

Of the great moguls he encountered, he says: “I genuinely liked these men and admired them as doers,” which, in turn, encouraged their liking for him. Their affection was logical; they sensed in him something they felt in themselves -- the spirit of the lucky refugee, someone who had somehow arrived at a pretty place, where there was time to smell those flowers, to have other kinds of fun in the sun. In what seems to me this book’s crucial passage, Fuchs writes: “That’s why the pictures had their worldwide success. They were made without strain by happy, unneurotic people who were having a good time and who worked naturally out of their instinct, and audiences everywhere were intelligent enough to perceive this and treasure it. It’s the climate, the desert. It comes with the locality.”

Now that the locality has lost its prelapsarian charm, now that the movie business is all business -- anxious frenzies over the first weekend’s grosses, desperate pitch meetings by unsalaried writers who really want to direct, the media avidly reporting not just the sexual dysfunctions of the stars but the business secrets of their employers -- it is impossible to imagine a career as placid and workmanlike as Fuchs’. But in these pages, one feels, he’s speaking for the silent apolitical majority of Hollywood’s golden age, people who saw themselves more as conscientious workers than as thwarted artists and were glad to be rewarded by pay and pleasure in excess of their gifts. In any event, you will not find here anything like the crabbed and crabby recollections of the more famous writers who dropped in on Hollywood, took the money and then ran back to the East Coast retailing tales of abuse, exploitation and vulgarity. Instead, Fuchs offers a nice story about Samuel Goldwyn urging his writers to celebrate George Bernard Shaw’s birthday by taking the afternoon off to read his plays.

Intermittently, Fuchs, who died in 1993, found time to write the short fiction that forms the core of this book. The stories betray, I think, a minor ambition that, to a degree, belies his grateful pose. They are written in long, almost Jamesian paragraphs densely packed with behavioral details but with artful descents into vernacular cliches, reminding us that his settings are Beverly Hills terraces, not some English country house, his subjects not to any definable manner born. The longest of them, “West of the Rockies,” is about an aging movie star who suddenly deserts the set of a picture in production -- the greatest Hollywood sin -- to take refuge in a Palm Springs hotel run by one of her former lovers’ wives. Various agents and studio functionaries unsuccessfully attempt to lure her back, and she ends up with a lounge lizard who hopes to make a living by managing what’s left of her fading career. Her story carries Fuchs’ major theme: She has lost the joy of her Hollywood beginnings, which fed her natural instinct for the camera, to celebrity distractions. But he correctly judged the piece a failure: It is too fussy and lacks narrative pulse. Most of all, it lacks that leavening, animating note of malice that these louche characters deserve.

“Triplicate” is more successful. It brings together at the same party a clearly autobiographical screenwriter, a John Huston-like director and, best of all, a down-on-his-luck Broadway producer modeled on the legendarily lunatic Broadway producer-director Jed Harris, who once made so many show-biz lives miserable. Nothing much happens in the story. But the sympathetic portraiture is wonderful -- Fuchs at his patient, nonjudgmental best.

Still, the great strength of “The Golden West” lies elsewhere -- in Fuchs’ simple and direct meditations, unforced by the pressure to fictionalize, on his good luck at finding good work and good friends in a good climate. Reading this sweet-souled book, something Ingmar Bergman said about movie work more than once recurred to me. If anyone is entitled to auteur status, it is surely the gloomy Swede. But he said that the better way for a movie worker to think of himself is as one of those stoneworkers chipping away at a cathedral in the Middle Ages, pleased to be contributing to a vast edifice whose full design was unclear to him but whose larger purpose -- the consolation of an unhappy populace -- seemed, on the whole, well worth serving.