Life Among the Rats: The Cinéaste- Writer in British Film Studios, 1926–36
2008; Edinburgh University Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.3366/e1743452108000356
ISSN1755-1714
Autores Tópico(s)Evelyn Waugh and Hans Urs von Balthasar Studies
ResumoAmong the many vivid images in Prater Violet, Christopher Isherwood’s semi-autobiographical novel (1945) set against the background of British film-making, it is hard to shake off the sour depiction of the reading department of British Imperial Bulldog. At this fictitious inner London studio sloping down to the river, Isherwood the narrator finds employment as a scriptwriter in the threatening year of 1933. He describes an area with the atmosphere of a Dickensian lawyer’s office: cobwebbed shelves reaching to the roof, lower rows crammed with scripts – rows through which rats over time have gnawed long tunnels. ‘They ought to be dumped in the Thames’, Isherwood’s studio guide declares, ‘but the river police would prosecute us for poisoning the water.’ The guide then mocks the department’s clutter of books – novels and plays awaiting cinema’s transforming kiss, Bradshaw’s Railway Timetable of 1911, twenty-seven copies of Half Hours with a Microscope, ‘one of them stolen from the Woking Public Library’ (Isherwood 1949: 54). This is hardly a healthy advertisement for those industry staff of the 1930s hired to finesse the material supposed to supply the foundation of all commercial film production: the scenario. But Isherwood’s bilious tone, if not the detail, is typical of the period’s novels about film-making – novels ranging in Britain from Oswell Blakeston’s Extra Passenger (1929), issued by POOL, publishers of Close Up magazine, to Jeffrey Dell’s popular success Nobody Ordered Wolves (1939). With Isherwood, a writer who repeatedly fed off his own life, there is a particular temptation to look beyond fictional conventions to a fleshand-blood forerunner of Bulldog’s squalor. In architectural terms, the culprit is unlikely to be the Shepherd’s Bush headquarters of GaumontBritish, a site recently modernised when Isherwood joined the payroll in the autumn of 1933 to work on the script of Little Friend with the
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