'Fade Out' stars melodramatic noir of '40s Hollywood
A lifetime of watching old movies has come in handy in writer Ed Brubaker's comic-book career, and especially now with the noir-within-a-noir tale of The Fade Out.
The latest work with artist Sean Phillips, The Fade Out (debuting Wednesday) is influenced by Brubaker's long fascination with 1940s post-war Hollywood. It starts out following screenwriter Charlie Parish having to endlessly rewrite his latest movie after the film's up-and-coming starlet Valeria Sommers is found dead.
But the murder mystery is just a catalyst to a much more expansive story that explores the effects of the Hollywood blacklist and post-traumatic stress disorder in young men at the time, plus pulls from real-life Tinseltown stories and Brubaker's own personal connection to the era.
The whodunit aspect is "the crux of what starts the story and everything going wrong in these people's lives — not that a lot of it wasn't wrong to begin with because they're drunk and debaucherous weirdos in Hollywood in the '40s," says Brubaker.
The Fade Out marks the first series in Brubaker and Phillips' new five-year deal at Image Comics "where we can do whatever we want," the writer says. For Phillips, though, the best part about it is it's new.
"No matter how much I enjoy drawing comics," the artist adds, "the excitement of starting a new one is always so invigorating. "
While Criminal was their most "pure noir" series to date and they've used old-school themes with supervillains (Incognito) and horror (Fatale, which ended last week), Brubaker sees The Fade Out more as a melodrama.
"It's got a lot of sex and violence," he says, "but it's spiritually closer to something like Deadwood or Mad Men."
The Fade Out is also less plot-heavy than Brubaker's other projects — he envisions the 1948-set series as a sprawling noir epic with intertwining stories set at a time when the government is looking to break up the bigger movie studios. Meanwhile, they're desperate to keep their system the way that it is, trying to make as many films as possible before it all comes crashing down around them.
Charlie's drunken ex-writer friend Gil Mason, who gets in a fistfight with none other than Bob Hope, is one of the main characters as is the sassy publicity girl Dotty Quin and the replacement actress who joins The Fade Out in issue 3 to reshoot all of the late Valeria's scenes.
Phillips hopes to draw plenty of those characters over the course of the series, "although I've no idea because I don't know what's going to happen in the story," he says. "I've asked Ed to never tell me so I can enjoy it like the reader, one page at a time."
While a lot of their collaborations have had a noir-y, old-fashioned feel, Phillips has had a help in getting the look of '40s Hollywood right from hundreds of period photos and reference material gathered by Amy Condit, who manages the Los Angeles Police Museum and was hired by Brubaker as a research assistant.
"Because we have no budget, we can create the L.A. of the '40s as accurately as humanly possible," says Brubaker, who puts a premium on authenticity in The Fade Out.
Brubaker wants to incorporate stranger-than-fiction Hollywood tales into the narrative, such as Bob Hope crawling through a North African sewer to escape Nazis and Hitler wanting Clark Gable's bomber plane shot down and him taken alive because he was the German leader's favorite actor.
Plus, each issue will feature essays and articles from the likes of author and librarian Jess Nevins and Devin Faraci of BadassDigest.com, who pens an article in the first issue about the tragic 1932 death of actress Peg Entwhistle.
Hollywood is "a factory town and the factory makes dreams. But the factory is really there to make money," Brubaker says. "Everybody wanted to come to Hollywood and be rich and famous, and very few people are going to get rich and famous. There's going to be a lot of people dashing themselves against the rocks."
One of the reasons why Brubaker became a writer, and why he's so interested in that time in movie history, is due to his uncle, John Paxton, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Murder, My Sweet, Crossfire and other films of the '40s and '50s.
As a young boy, Brubaker would often peruse Paxton's leatherbound books collecting original scripts, and Paxton regaled Brubaker with stories from the time and how friends of his in the Hollywood Ten such as Dalton Trumbo and Adrian Scott had their lives ruined by the blacklist.
Paxton's history inspired aspects of The Fade Out as did his wife Sarah Jane, who worked as a PR girl on the 20th Century Fox lot in the '30 and '40s. "While he was being a screenwriter at RKO and various studios," Brubaker says, "she was writing fake bios for movie stars and stuff."
While the amount of blatant racism, sexism and anti-Semitism of the time has always surprised Brubaker, what really blows his mind was the way everybody in Hollywood puts on masks, and still do to a certain degree.
"It's almost the way you hear about the way people going to Alaska to become a new person and get away from whatever trouble they've been in, people came to Hollywood to become whatever they imagined the ideal them would be," Brubaker explains. "That always really fascinated me to see how that would affect people all the way down to the writers and stuff, because they all want to be part of that world and be within that orbit."
However, he adds, there is still an allure, even for him. "I live in L.A. most of the time and I still am excited when I see a movie star walking through the supermarket near my house. I'm like, 'Oooh, that's so-and-so!' "
Brubaker is still working hard on getting a movie made of Coward, his first volume of Criminal issues — Image will start re-releasing collections of the comic beginning in January.
Even with his comic-book success, he admits that Hollywood is just as frustrating as it is iconic.
"I can imagine what it would be like to only have that," Brubaker says. "But I can totally picture (Raymond) Chandler or somebody having to work within that system the way it was back then and just hating every minute of it, even while he's working on like Double Indemnity."