Gore vidal's early Hollywood: history, fiction and film Gore vidal's early Hollywood: history, fiction and film

• Main Author: Thomas LaBorie Burns
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina 2008-04-01
• Series: Ilha do Desterro
• Subjects: English Language; English
• Online Access: http://www.periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/desterro/article/view/9204

Although Gore Vidal has both worked as a Hollywood screenwriter and written criticism on Film—in this regard, he is perhaps best known for a sustained attack on the auteur theory of the magisterial director—I am concerned in this paper mainly with his fiction account of the early days of film-making in his novel Hollywood (1990) and the relation of film to national political life depicted therein. This novel is the sixth in a series that gives a more or less continuous historical picture of the social and political history of the US from colonial times to the present. “Political” for Vidal, however, means primarily the acts of statesmen, diplomats, and high-ranking military personnel, and the social history he presents is that of the upper-class which supplies their ranks, so that what Vidal is in fact offering in these six novels is what
 one might call the history of the American “movers-and-shakers”. Although Gore Vidal has both worked as a Hollywood screenwriter and written criticism on Film—in this regard, he is perhaps best known for a sustained attack on the auteur theory of the magisterial director—I am concerned in this paper mainly with his fiction account of the early days of film-making in his novel Hollywood (1990) and the relation of film to national political life depicted therein. This novel is the sixth in a series that gives a more or less continuous historical picture of the social and political history of the US from colonial times to the present. “Political” for Vidal, however, means primarily the acts of statesmen, diplomats, and high-ranking military personnel, and the social history he presents is that of the upper-class which supplies their ranks, so that what Vidal is in fact offering in these six novels is what
 one might call the history of the American “movers-and-shakers”.