JOHN DOS& PASSOS Cinema L I S A N A N N E Y JOHN DOS& PASSOS Cinema L I S A N A N N E Y © 2019 Clemson University All rights reserved First Edition, 2019 ISBN: 978-1-942954-87-3 (print) eISBN: 978-1-942954-88-0 (e-book) Published by Clemson University Press in association with Liverpool University Press For information about Clemson University Press, please visit our website at www.clemson.edu/press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Nanney, Lisa, author. Title: John Dos Passos and cinema / Lisa Nanney. Description: First edition. | [Clemson, South Carolina] : Clemson University Press in association with Liverpool University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019004202 (print) | LCCN 2019011303 (ebook) | ISBN 9781942954880 (e-book) | ISBN 9781942954873 | ISBN 9781942954873 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781942954880 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Dos Passos, John, 1896-1970--Motion picture plays. | Dos Passos, John, 1896-1970--Political and social views. Classification: LCC PS3507.O743 (ebook) | LCC PS3507.O743 Z773 2019 (print) | DDC 812/.52--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004202 Typeset in Minion Pro by Carnegie Book Production. Contents John Dos Passos and Cinema Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Part I (1917–1928) From the Stage to the Screen: “Goin’ to the Movies…” in the Great War and the 1920s 1 Experimental Drama and Soviet Constructivist Theater 11 2 The Birth of an Industry: Setting the Stage for the Screen 25 3 “Propaganda for peace”: Film and Narrative in One Man’s Initiation: 1917 (1920), Three Soldiers (1921), and D.W. Griffith’s Hearts of the World (1918) 37 4 Soviet Film: Montage, the Camera Eye, and Ideology 63 Part II (1934–1937) From Paramount Studios to the Spanish Front: Writing Hollywood, Filming History 5 “The world’s greatest center of … propaganda”: Hollywood, The Devil Is a Woman, and The Big Money 77 6 Film Writing: “Dreamfactory,” Metafilm, and the Politics of Form 101 7 Filming History and The Spanish Earth: “what a man and a comrade has to do in … wartimes” 127 Part III (1937–1970) From Page to Stage to Screens: Adapting U.S.A. and “the truth as I see it” 8 Filmic Narrative into Narrative Film: “politics and the silver screen” 159 Conclusion 183 Appendix 195 Notes 217 Index 243 Acknowledgments Many thanks go to the individuals and institutions who assisted in this work. Lucy Dos Passos Coggin and John Dos Passos Coggin have been most generous in providing me with insights and encouragement as well as permissions to publish and quote from materials that form the foundation of this study. In particular I appreciate their willingness to respond to questions about Dos Passos’s involvement in film and to search their own collection of photographs for images and grant permission to use them. The book would not have been possible without their generosity. I appreciate also the help of the librarians and photographic techni- cians in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, where the John Dos Passos Collec- tion is located. All manuscripts and letters in this book are quoted and appear with permission from the Dos Passos family and the University of Virginia Special Collections library. For access to images and permissions to publish them I thank the European Foundation Joris Ivens, administrator for the Joris Ivens archive, and the Nederlands Fotomuseum, which handles the archive of photographer John Fernhout. In particular I appreciate the assistance and insights of André Stufkens of the European Foundation Joris Ivens, who provided new information about Ivens and The Spanish Earth, and vii viii John Dos Passos and Cinema Carolien Provaas of the Nederlands Fotomuseum, who graciously took the time to answer questions about the Fernhout archive. The insights and images afforded by two recent documentaries and their makers were instrumental for the information they provided about the complexities surrounding the making of The Spanish Earth and the circumstances of the fate of José Robles. Sonia Tercero Ramiro, creator and director of Robles, duelo al sol (2015), patiently helped locate infor- mation about images and answered questions related to Dos Passos’s involvement in The Spanish Earth and his own search into the circum- stances surrounding the death of Robles. Robles, duelo al sol and the research that informs it provide a thorough and engrossing investigation into this episode and its impact on the lives of those affected by it. Peter Davis, creator and director of Digging The Spanish Earth (2017), took time to answers questions, generously provided access to his film incorporating unpublished interviews with Joris Ivens, Helen van Dongen, Martha Gell- horn, and others, and facilitated contacts with the Ivens Foundation. Revisiting locations where The Spanish Earth was filmed and commenting on the process of Ivens’s work, Digging The Spanish Earth insightfully traces the ongoing impact of the Spanish Civil War on the Spanish people and land. Thanks go also to Prof. Alex Vernon, who contributed to the making of Davis’s documentary and who wrote Hemingway’s Second War (2011), not only for that book’s invaluable research into the political and military history of the Spanish Civil War and the particular circumstances that involved Hemingway, Ivens, and Dos Passos during the conflict but also for correspondence about research and for facilitating contacts with the Ivens Foundation. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to John Morgenstern, Director of Clemson University Press, for making this project possible, and to Alison Mero, Managing Editor of the Press, for her patience and assistance throughout the production of this book. Introduction In the April 2015 premiere episode of the final half season of the hit HBO series Mad Men, successful Manhattan advertising executives Don Draper and Roger Sterling, slumming in a diner, have their order taken by a dignified but downtrodden waitress into whose apron pocket is wedged a battered copy of The 42nd Parallel (1930), the first novel of Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, which chronicles the American nation as it emerged as a superpower in the early twentieth century. Flirtatiously teasing her, Roger asks, “Do you have anything by John Dos Passos?” By calling atten- tion to the incongruity of the appearance of this novel of the 1930s in the possession of a working woman of 1970, when the episode takes place, screenwriter Matthew Weiner tacitly underscores the economic and class dynamics that underlie the critique of capitalism the series shares with U.S.A. Likewise recalling the novel’s representation of the stark economic inequities that ensue when corporate greed precipitates a boom and bust cycle, in his 2016 Academy Award-winning screenplay adaptation of Michael Lewis’s 2010 novel The Big Short Adam McKay drew not only substance but style from U.S.A., using joltingly juxtaposed fragments of popular culture to propel his revelatory film. In the Daniel Espinosa film Child 44 (2015), adapted from the 2008 Man Booker prize contender by Tom Rob Smith, a single shot of The Big Money (1936), the trilogy’s third novel, serves as a signifier for a character’s dangerous and covert oppo- sition to the suppression of speech and thought in the work’s Stalinist 1 2 John Dos Passos and Cinema Russian 1950s setting. Acclaimed documentarist Adam Curtis, whose work in films such as HyperNormalisation (2012) and The Century of the Self (2002) explores the intersections of global forces such as consum- erism and social media, credits Dos Passos as the primary aesthetic and ideological influence on his own work. Curtis insightfully asserts that in U.S.A. Dos Passos “prefigures everything” by creating, through his frag- mented compositional technique, “the great dialectic of our time, which is between individual experiences and how those fragments get turned into stories, both by individuals themselves, and then, by those in power above them.”1 Here Curtis acknowledges the revolutionary nature and impact of the trilogy’s four interactive narrative devices—the Newsreels of current events of its day; the biographies of history makers; the stories of fictional characters whose lives are molded by social and historical forces; and the stream-of-consciousness Camera Eye segments from the point of view of an anonymous observer in the novels’ times. By means of the dynamic juxtapositions and parallels among them, the devices create a simultaneous portrait of the United States in the first three decades of the twentieth century, from war to boom to crash. Little wonder that the potential of such Cubist, cinematic narrative structure, functioning as it does like montage, should be recognized by filmmakers in a hyper-visual age nearly a century later. Such examples in current cinema of the resonant influence and visual use of Dos Passos’s modernist American chronicle suggest its persistence into the twenty-first century as an icon of proletarian democratic political and economic ideals, despite the relative infrequency of its invocation even during years spanning the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, a decade when youthful protest over social and economic injustice might usefully have appropriated the novels’ messages into their rhetoric. Yet for all its early and perhaps returning status as a work that grasped in its vast expanse the complex character of American identity, and articulated it in the multiple genres it incorporated and the revolutionary structure it devised, most U.S. high school and college students today will graduate never having been introduced to this trilogy or its writer, both of which seem to have been lost to the canon between the era of its publication and the present. Both call for renewed attention in an era of hyper-visual culture, when