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Abstract:
This article examines the 1930s and 1940s Hollywood studio reception of the works of African American novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. It argues that Hurston's 1948 novel Seraph on the Suwanee was conceived by the author to both conform to and contest the racial politics of Hollywood narrative film.
This is a study of a film that was not made by Warner Bros. Studios in the 1940s, of a bizarre novel that was recommended to legendary Casablanca producer Jerry WaId, and of the groundbreaking African American writer, Zora Neale Hurston, whose artistic production was shaped by the Hollywood industry that considered, but ultimately rejected, her work (Figure 1).
While it is a commonplace that Hollywood narrative production in the studio era was conservative, particularly in regard to race, Hollywood narrative consumption was strikingly ecumenical. This consumption has not been adequately interrogated because scholars examining literature-to-film adaptations generally approach archival material from the film backwards - that is, from the produced adaptation back through screenplay versions, production notes, and early readings of the source text. Such an approach utilizes only a tiny fraction of extant archival material because studio archives retain a tremendous number of documents related to the reception of rejected stories, including plot synopses, critiques, and memoranda that circulated between readers, editors, and producers. Traditional adaptation studies collectively form a kind of studio narrative history written solely about the victors: about the stories that managed to be made into produced films. James Snead pointed out that while "omission and exclusion are perhaps the most widespread tactics of racial stereotyping," these tactics are "also the most difficult to prove because their manifestation is precisely absence itself."1 Fully understanding die forces that create representational absences in film requires looking beyond film, at those stories that were rejected by studios and never adapted.
Box office booms of the late 1920s, mid- 1930s, and early 1940s, together with the advent of double features during the box office slump of the Depression, necessitated intense studio story searches. Tino Balio estimates tihat by 1934, some 700 features were needed per year to "feed the maw of exhibition."2 There was, naturally, a corresponding "maw of production," and indeed the narrative appetite of Hollywood story departments during the studio...