“Hollywood Signs” begins by observing a convergence in the fields of film and media studies and modernist studies that makes possible a novel synthesis that Classical Hollywood, American Modernism exemplifies. At the same time that scholars in cinema studies supplemented the concept of the “studio system” with attention to the industry’s social organization and an embrace of film interpretation, literary scholars undertook an analogous effort, finding in the institutional conditions in which literature is written and read the basis for a hermeneutics. This compatibility serves as the basis for this book’s approach of construing experiments in literary form as responses to conditions within the Hollywood studio system. The introduction concludes by briefly demonstrating the analytical payoff of this new synthesis in a reading of Ralph Barton and Anita Loos’s understudied film Camille; or, the Fate of a Coquette (1926).

In the early 1910s, the extension of copyright protection to moving picture adaptations of literary works resulted in the emergence of film rights, and this phenomenon had a profound effect on film production and the writing of fiction. Paramount Studios, originally the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, became the most powerful studio of the 1910s and 1920s, in part, due to its unparalleled ability to exploit preexisting literary and dramatic properties: to produce “Famous Plays with Famous Players.” At the same time, this new regime altered the constitution of the American literary field. Authors and studios alike reflected on the importance of preparing fiction for eventual adaptation. I call the capacity for authors to imagine the afterlives of their prose works before writing the “transmedial possibility” of fiction. This possibility influenced the work of several writers who published in American modernism's great year 1925, all of whom responded in some way to Paramount: Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy.