The Disenchanted by Budd Schulberg

The Disenchanted by Budd Schulberg

I've actually started reading, like, real books since I came to California. My roommate doesn't have a TV, and I've found it kind of refreshing.

I was browsing the free book cart at the Santa Monica Public Library (a lovely place, but I won't be able to get a library card until I changed my driver's license over). I happened to pick this one up to look over when the cart was whisked away. Turns out it was a serendipitous find.

Schulberg is a fellow alum of Dartmouth and is probably best known as the screenwriter of films like The Harder They Fall and On the Waterfront. My screenwriting professor held up the latter film's script as a paragon of screenplay format and plotting. Being a (fairly) recent Dartmouth grad and having made my way out to L.A. to work in entertainment myself, I take this find as a promising omen.

Famously (among Dartmouth folks, anyways), the (mostly true) story of the book goes like this: Schulberg was a junior writer just starting his career after graduation, and had written a treatment for a sweet nothing of a romantic comedy set on campus during the annual winter festival. For obscure reasons the studio brought in no less a luminary than his literary hero, F. Scott Fitzgerald, to punch it up and give it some respectability.

The resulting film: Winter Carnival (1939)

However, Fitzgerald was a recovering alcoholic, and when the strain of traveling to New Hampshire to see the Carnival first-hand proved too much for him, he fell off the wagon in a big way. In an ethanol-fueled haze of a trip from Hollywood to New York City to New Hampshire and back, Fitzgerald and Schulberg try to massage the flimsy story into something more substantial.

It's by far the best book I've read in a long time, and it's positively criminal that it's been out of print since 1989. Schulberg's prose demonstrates a torrid love affair with the English language, and his humor and pathos as he goes from idol-worship to, well, disenchantment for his hero is engaging nearly from cover to cover. And he succeeds most of all in making real the feel of Old Hollywood in the 1930's. This atmosphere and many elements of the story itself were an obvious inspiration for the Coen brothers' bizarro version Barton Fink, which substituted Faulkner for Fitzgerald as the dipsomaniacal writer in decline before veering off into a glorious existential hell.

...

By the way I'm not going to be adding any more books to my Amazon store's inventory. It was great fun back when I was doing the fulfillment myself, but when I moved that was no longer an option, so I shipped all my books out and set up Fulfillment by Amazon. Since then, it's just been a sucker's game of constantly checking my prices and lowering them by a penny every couple of days. Maybe it's worth it if you have lots and lots of inventory to sell, but the profit margin gets cut more than one would expect, and if you set the price point below $3.50, you lose money on the transaction. I went from pocketing to 74% down to 55% of my sales. So now I'm just running out the clock, trying to break even. And I haven't had a sale in over a week? Blah.