The book moves through different genres and, finally, through different historical moments, gradually emerging from the alternate world of movies into the worlds of movie-making and movie-watching, as if finally coming out of the theater after a day at the pictures.”
At Film International, William Blick interviews Geoffrey O’Brien about his new novel, Arabian Nights of 1934, which recreates the Pre-Code Hollywood era from the early 1930s.
O’Brien is a widely published poet, critic, and cultural historian whose books include Hardboiled America (1981), Dream Time (1988), The Phantom Empire (1993), The Times Square Story (1998), The Browser’s Ecstasy (2000), Sonata for Jukeboxes (2004), and Where Did Poetry Come From: Some Early Encounters (2020). He was for many years, editor in chief of The Library of America, and contributes frequently to The New York Review of Books, Artforum, Film Comment, and other periodicals.
How would you classify your style? It moves at a frantic pace. Were you trying to simulate the tumultuous times of those films?
Pre-Code movies are often characterized by speed and brevity. Language was being unleashed in movies for the first time, and there is a sheer pleasure in fast, energetic, slangy talk. The book contains a great deal of language of the period; I wanted it to be among other things a sort of lexicon of catchphrases, many of which lingered in the speech of adults I knew as a child. It’s a collage of what was floating through people’s minds as they sat in the dark absorbing all those thousand and one plot twists. The style aims to be direct and compressed. One scene folds rapidly into the next and the book moves through different genres and, finally, through different historical moments, gradually emerging from the alternate world of movies into the worlds of movie-making and movie-watching, as if finally coming out of the theater after a day at the pictures.
Why is Pre-Code Hollywood vital to film history? What was the effect of the Production Code?
The highly developed styles and techniques of silent cinema were suddenly confronted by the seemingly problem of having characters talk – what would they say, about what, and how would that change the effect of movies? There was an immense downloading of words from elsewhere – plays, novels, magazine stories, vaudeville acts, radio shows – and a lot of experimenting with how to combine speech with existing cinematic modes. As it happened, that moment coincided with economic catastrophe, which certainly contributed to the pursuit of raw-edged and sensational material to bring in customers. The Pre-Code period is best remembered for its enduring icons and stars (King Kong, Frankenstein, the Marx Brothers, Jimmy Cagney in The Public Enemy, Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar, Bette Davis, the Busby Berkeley chorus girls), but a sizeable bulk of its product was swept away both because of the Production Code and because of advances in technology which made the earlier films look primitive to later viewers. The great freedom and liveliness of the period has only become fully apparent in recent years. The Production Code, which replaced the earlier and vaguer Hays Code, came into full effect in 1934 and had an immediately perceptible effect on the content of American movies. The decades that followed were of course rich in great filmmaking, and it has been argued that the existence of the Code was a stimulus to art because it forced filmmakers to find subtler ways to get around its strictures.
Read the interview here.
William Blick is an Assistant Professor/Librarian at Queensborough Community College. He has published articles on film studies in Senses of Cinema, Cineaction, and Cinemaretro and on crime fiction at Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of NoirCon. His fiction has appeared in Out of the Gutter, Pulp Metal Magazine, and Pulp Modern Flash.
Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of NoirCon 