Mr. Faulkner Goes To Hollywood

William Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for brilliant novels like The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), but when he needed money, he turned to Hollywood. John Meroney retraces the writer’s steps:

It all started in 1932, when, riding on the success of his novel Sanctuary, Faulkner got word that Leland Hayward, a prominent Hollywood talent agent, had secured for him a $500-a-week contract (the equivalent of $8,500 today) to write scripts at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Faulkner was a modernist, and film was still a new, exciting form of storytelling. But that wasn’t the reason Faulkner accepted. It was the money.

At the same time Faulkner received the offer from Metro, he got news that his publisher, Cape & Smith, was bankrupt. Faulkner had been planning on $4,000 ($68,000 in today’s money) from the company for Sanctuary but was informed he wouldn’t see any of it. Suddenly, he was broke. Word apparently got around Oxford. When he tried writing a check for three dollars at a sporting goods store, the owner told him, I’d rather have cash. All at once, Hollywood became attractive. Faulkner didn’t even have the money to send a wire to answer yes. Eventually MGM advanced him some cash and paid for his train ticket, and days later he arrived in Culver City.

Amidst tales of an affair and lots of bourbon, Meroney includes tantalizing details of scripts Faulkner wrote that never made it onto the screen. How his Hollywood adventures came to a close:

I discovered that Faulkner’s upward trajectory peaked with an offer to work exclusively with [director Howard] Hawks in their own independent filmmaking unit. “He and I had a talk at the fishing camp…. I am to be his writer,” Faulkner wrote to [his wife] Estelle in 1943. “He says he and I together as a team will always be worth two million dollars at least.” It was an outstanding plan, one that would appeal to filmmakers even today. Faulkner wrote, “We can count on getting at least two million from any studio with which to make any picture we cook up, we to make the picture with the two million dollars and divide the profits from it. When I come home, I intend to have Hawks completely satisfied with this job, as well as the studio. If I can do that, I won’t have to worry again about going broke temporarily…. This is my chance.”

The dream of a lifetime. One that would have launched Faulkner and Hawks into the Hollywood stratosphere. But it was never to be. Hawks had a reputation for going over budget on his pictures, which meant that the $4 million required to produce [the proposed WWII epic] Battle Cry ($53.8 million in today’s money) would surely mean more…and more…and more. The studio said no. Faulkner’s romantic dream of filmmaking had come to an end. He would continue to do work for Hawks, including writing screenplays for Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not and Chandler’s The Big Sleep, both of which became films starring Bogart and Bacall. To an outsider, those classics might seem like the pinnacle of a career. For Faulkner, they were little more than paychecks, not the imaginative, unique film projects he and Hawks had once dreamed of making on those summer nights up at June Lake.

Previous Dish on Faulkner here, here, here, and here.