John Dos Passos and Cinema [Paperback]

The first study of his little-known screen writing, John Dos Passos and Motion Pictures: Writing Film, Film Writing uses unpublished manuscripts and correspondence to explore how he adapted film aesthetics to structure his modernist novels of the 1920s and 1930s, then, beginning in the 1940s, attempted to revise those novels directly into screenplays reflecting the controversial conservative political shift that redefined his later literary career.The book features previously unpublished manuscripts and correspondence illustrating case studies of John Dos Passos' screen writing for Paramount Pictures (1934); his role in writing and filming The Spanish Earth (1937), a Spanish Civil War relief project whose circumstances culminated in his public break from the Left; the 1936 screen treatment he wrote just before The Spanish Earth in consultation with its director, Joris Ivens; and his later-career attempts, beginning in the 1940s, to adapt his radically innovative trilogy U.S.A. directly for the screen and to realign its leftist politics toward the anti-Communist conservatism reflected in his work and activism after the 1930s and the disillusionments of the Spanish Civil War. It thus provides a new context for and reading of his political reorientation in the 1930s that not only ended his long friendship with Ernest Hemingway but also evoked the opprobrium of his former champions on the Left and redefined his literary career.Introduction
Part I (1917-1928) - From the Screen to the Page: Goin' to the movies in the Great War
Chapter 1 Dos Passos and Soviet Filmmakers: Meyerhold, Vertov, Eisenstein, and the Development of Montage
Chapter 2 Dos Passos and U.S. Film: D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation (1915), and Hearts of the World (1918)
Chapter 3 Propaganda for peace : Film and Narrative in One Man's Initiation: 1917 (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921)
Part II (1934-37) - From Paramount Studios to the Spanish Front: Writing Hollywood, Filming History