Mercury Pictures presents A novel

Anthony Marra

Book - 2022

"When we first meet Maria Lagana, she's rewriting scripts at Mercury Pictures, a failing Hollywood studio known for its schlock. Maria's job is to re-craft dialogue and action to circumvent the censors, a skill she's mysteriously adept at. Born in Italy, as a teenager Maria witnessed Mussolini's censors arrest her father, an event that will destroy her family and burden Maria with questions of guilt and responsibility she will carry with her throughout this wondrous, far-reaching novel. Like many before her, Maria has come to Hollywood to outrun her past. Despite its cheap production values and factory-approach to making movies, Mercury Pictures is a nexus of refugees and emigres, each struggling to reinvent themsel...ves in the land of celluloid. There's Artie, the studio boss, a man of many toupees who barely escaped the pogroms of Eastern Europe; there's Anna, a set designer, who ran afoul of Hitler; and there's Eddie Lu, a struggling actor and Maria's boyfriend, who despite being born in Los Angeles encounters the worst of America's xenophobia. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, everything changes for Maria and her world, forcing her come to terms with her father's fate--and her own"--

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Subjects
Genres
Historical fiction
Novels
Published
London ; New York : Hogarth [2022]
Language
English
Main Author
Anthony Marra (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
416 pages ; 25 cm
ISBN
9780451495204
9780593449165
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

In 1941, Maria Lagana has risen to the rank of associate producer at Mercury Pictures, a fledgling movie studio run by Artie Feldman, the fast-talking, quick-witted impresario of B-movies constantly seeking the imprimatur of the Production Code. Maria's ascent from the typing pool is partially due to her moxie but is largely owing to her lifelong passion for film; she attended the cinema instead of church every Sunday with her father, Giuseppe. Maria fled Italy with her mother years earlier when Giuseppe, once a prominent defense attorney in Rome, was imprisoned for subversive activities against Mussolini's fascist regime. Award-winning and best-selling Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno, 2015) skillfully alternates between Hollywood and Italy, dexterously weaving the two threads together when a young man, Nino Picone, arrives at Mercury Pictures fresh from San Lorenzo with news of Giuseppe. Marra's prose is fluid and sprightly; each sentence is imbued with wit and heart and dances to its own internal rhythm. The dialogue is crisp and filled with ripostes and underline-worthy bon mots. The characters are simultaneously larger than life and all too human, utterly memorable. The historically iconic settings are brought sensuously to life by Marra's cinematic eye. Marra has ascended to the top of the literary ranks.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Marra's meticulously crafted latest (after the collection The Tsar of Love and Techno) follows a host of outsiders as they try to make it through pre-WWII Italy and wartime Los Angeles with some of their morals intact. Teenage Maria Lagana and her mother leave Italy for Los Angeles after Fascists exile her father. By 1941, Maria is B-movie producer Artie Feldman's second-in-command. Artie, a toupee-wearing loudmouth with a heart of gold (he'll hire any down on their luck European exile), is at war with the censors, his twin brother/business partner, and the bankers with a stake in Mercury Pictures. Marra skillfully switches between small-town Sicily and a still-small Los Angeles where, post--Pearl Harbor, Maria must register as an internal enemy and her Chinese American boyfriend, Eddie, has to flee assailants who are convinced he's a Japanese spy. The plot is intricate: Artie tries to release a political movie and fend off creditors, Maria and Eddie plot to make a film, a Berlin-born model-builder recreates her city, a Sicilian photographer flees Italy. While Marra's pleasure in the details and argot of the past occasionally feels like overkill, this tough-minded, funny outing exemplifies what Maria calls the democratic promise of "the miniaturist's gaze," in which "all were worthy." Thanks to Marra, the pleasure is contagious. (July)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Leaving 1920s Italy for Los Angeles after inadvertently causing her father's arrest, movie-besotted Maria eventually becomes an associate producer at Mercury Pictures. As World War II dawns, Maria is struggling with her personal life even as the studio struggles fi nancially, but soon it's flooded with refugee European artists--modernist poets writing racy movie scripts. Then a stranger who knew her father arrives to remind her of his fate. From the award-winning, New York Times best-selling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

An ambitious young Italian woman makes her way among the émigrés of 1930s and '40s Hollywood. Maria Lagana has come to Los Angeles after her father is sentenced to confino--internal exile--for his anti-fascist advocacy in Mussolini's Italy. Living with her mother in the Italian American neighborhood of Lincoln Heights--also home to a trio of no-nonsense great-aunts forever dressed in black--Maria finds work as a typist at Mercury Pictures International, working in the office of studio head Artie Feldman, a fast-talking showman with a collection of toupées for every occasion. In time, the letters from her father stop, and Maria becomes an associate producer, Artie's trusted right hand, as well as the secret lover of Eddie Lu, a Chinese American actor relegated to roles as Japanese villains. When a young Italian immigrant turns up at her door introducing himself as Vincent Cortese, Maria's past--and the mystery of what happened to her father--crashes into her present. Like the author's earlier novels, the award-winning A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2013) and The Tsar of Love and Techno (2015), this one builds a discrete world and shows how its denizens are shaped--often warped--by circumstance. But the Hollywood setting feels overfamiliar and the characters curiously uninvolving. While the prose frequently sings, there are also ripely overwritten passages: At a party, the "thunking heels of lindy-hopping couples dimpled the boozy air"; fireworks are described as a "molten asterisk in the heavens to which the body on the ground is a footnote." The World War II Hollywood setting is colorful, but it's just a B picture. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Sunny Siberia 1 When you entered the executive offices of Mercury Pictures International, you would first see a scale model of the studio itself. Artie Feldman, co-founder and head of production, installed it in the lobby to distract skittish investors from second thoughts. Complete with back lot, sound stages, and facilities buildings, the miniature was a faithful replica of the ten-acre studio in which it sat. Maria Lagana, as rendered by the miniaturist, was a tiny, featureless figure looking out Artie's office window. And this was where the real Maria stood late one morning in 1941, hands holstered on her hips, watching a pigeon autograph the windshield of her boss's new convertible. She'd like to buy that bird a drink. "It's a beautiful day out, Art," Maria said. "You should really come have a look." "I have," Artie said. "It made me want to jump." Artie wasn't known for his joie de vivre, but he usually didn't fantasize about ending it all this close to lunch. Maria wondered if the Senate Investigation into Motion Picture War Propaganda was giving him agita, but no--the crisis at hand was on his head. His bald spot had finally grown too large for his toupee to conceal. Six other black toupees were shellacked atop wooden mannequin heads on the shelf behind his desk, where a more successful producer might display his Oscars. They were conversation starters. As in, Artie began conversations with new employees by telling them the toupees were the scalps of their predecessors. As far as Maria could tell, the six hairpieces were the same indistinguishable model and style, but Artie had become convinced that each one crackled with the karmic energy of the hair's original head, unrealized and awaiting release, like a static charge smuggled in a fingertip. Thus, he'd named his toupees after their personalities: The Heavyweight, The Casanova, The Optimist, The Edison, The Odysseus, and The Mephistopheles. Artie had never felt more at home in his adoptive country than when he learned the Founding Fathers had all worn toupees, even that showboat John Hancock. The only one who hadn't was Benjamin Franklin. And look how he turned out: a syphilitic Francophile who got his jollies flying kites in the rain. "Maybe the toupee shrunk," he said, still hoping for a miracle. "I think you'll need one with more coverage, Art." "That's the second time this year. Christ, when will it end?" "Life's nasty and brutish but at least it's short." "Yeah? I'm not so optimistic." Artie didn't believe in aging gracefully. He didn't believe in aging at all. At fifty-three, he maintained the same exercise regime that had made him a promising semi-professional boxer before a shattered wrist forced him into the only other business to reward his brand of controlled aggression. (He still kept a speedbag mounted to his office wall and liked to pummel it while in meetings with unaccommodating agents.) Sure, maybe he lost a step; maybe his knees sounded like a pair of maracas when he climbed stairs; maybe the boys in the mailroom let him win when he challenged them to arm-wrestling matches--but he wasn't getting old. Or so Maria imagined Artie telling himself. In truth, she'd begun to worry about him. In four days, he would sit at a witness table on Capitol Hill, where he would testify alongside the heads of Warner Bros, MGM, Twentieth Century-Fox, and Paramount. It was shaping into a pivotal confrontation between campaigners for free speech and crusaders for government censorship. But as far as Maria could tell, Artie was more preoccupied with his toupee than his opening statement. On the topic of censorship, he said, "Have you heard back from Joe Breen?" "Earlier this morning." "And? Will he approve the script for Devil's Bargain?" Maria said nothing. "I'm going to pull the rest of my hair out, aren't I?" "I'm afraid so," she admitted. Maria had started working at Mercury a decade earlier, rising from the typing pool to the front office. At the age of twenty-eight, she was an associate producer and Artie's deputy, a job that demanded the talents of a general, diplomat, hostage negotiator, and hairdresser. Among her duties was getting every Mercury picture blessed by the puritans and spoilsports who upheld the moral standards of movies at the Production Code Administration. The grand inquisitor over there was Joseph Breen, a bluenose so distraughtfully Catholic he'd once bowdlerized a Jesus biopic for sticking too close to the source material; apparently, a foreign-born Jew advocating redistribution smacked of Bolshevism to Breen. Committed to making pictures gratuitously inoffensive, Breen withheld Production Code approval from any movie dealing with contentious subjects. Throughout the 1930s, if you only got your news from the local picture house, you'd find the American South untroubled by Jim Crow and Europe untouched by fascism. But by late summer 1941, not even a force of blandness as entrenched as the Production Code could keep the European crisis from the screen. In response to pro-interventionist messages in recent movies, a group of isolationist senators accused Hollywood of plotting with Roosevelt "to make America punch drunk with propaganda to push her into war" against Germany and Italy. Congressional hearings were hastily arranged to investigate these charges and propose legislative remedies. And Artie Feldman, ever reliant on the free publicity of controversy to find an audience, wanted to both undermine the legitimacy of the investigation and capitalize on his newfound notoriety with Mercury's next movie. Maria passed Artie the script she'd received back from the Production Code Administration that morning. Joe Breen had rerouted scenes with the frantic arrows of a besieged field commander. Devil's Bargain was a clever idea--no matter her misgivings, Maria would admit that much. Written by a German émigré, it retold the Faustian legend through the story of a Berlin filmmaker who agrees to direct indoctrination movies in exchange for the funding to finish his long-gestating magnum opus. In a pivotal sequence, a visiting delegation of American congressmen watches one of these propaganda films and leaves the theater persuaded the real enemy to peace is not in Berlin but in Hollywood. Of course, insinuating that US senators were easily duped conspiracists ensured the script would never receive Production Code approval. Maria supposed she should feel disappointed, yet for reasons she would not admit to Artie, she was relieved Joseph Breen had sentenced Devil's Bargain to death by a thousand cuts. "I'm surprised he didn't censor the spaces between the words," Artie said, flipping through the blue-penciled script. Maria's marginalia were heavily seasoned with profanity and exclamation points. "Breen's always had it in for me. I've never understood it." "You did call him a 'great sanctimonious windbag' in the New York Daily News ." "I was misquoted. I never called him 'great.' " Artie tossed the script on his desk and peeled off his hairpiece. His liver-spotted scalp resembled a slab of pimento loaf. Maria always found the sight of it oddly moving, a sign of the trust established over the ten years they had worked together. Artie allowed no one else at Mercury to see him in between toupees. He turned to her and said, "What do you think--any chance we can salvage this?" Artie assumed Maria's background made her a natural fit for supervising the production of Devil's Bargain. Long before she became his second-in-command, Maria and her mother had fled Italy as political exiles after Mussolini had her father, one of Rome's most prominent lawyers, sentenced to internal exile in the Calabrian hinterlands. Over the years their correspondence had imbued Maria with a contempt for censors and a talent for circumventing them. Sometimes she felt life had professionalized her to hide in plain sight. Fascism and Catholicism had educated her in navigating repressive ideologies, and growing up a girl in an Italian family meant you were, existentially, suggested rather than shown. Gesture and insinuation comprised the Italian American vernacular, from mamma to Mafia, and coming from a diaspora where desires and death threats went articulately unspoken, Maria had a knack for smuggling subtext past the border guards of decorum at the Production Code Administration. Nevertheless, in the case of Devil's Bargain, she agreed with the censors' decision. Meddling in politics was for the rich, the powerful, or the self-destructive; she learned this from her father's example and had no wish to become him. "I think this one is well and truly Breened," she said. Excerpted from Mercury Pictures Presents: A Novel by Anthony Marra All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.