Down and Out in Hollywood

Justin Gautreau considers Lou Mathews’s new novel “Hollywoodski.”

By Justin GautreauFebruary 20, 2025

• Fiction

LOU MATHEWS’S NEW NOVEL Hollywoodski demonstrates that the Hollywood novel is alive and well in the 21st century, albeit as a kind of zombie genre lacking any real sense of direction—a perfect description of the career trajectory of protagonist Dale Davis. Composed of nonlinear fragments spanning 40 years, the novel offers a refreshing update on the tale of the failed screenwriter—or, as Mathews describes it, the faded screenwriter. “Screenwriters can’t fail,” one of the novel’s epigraphs explains; “the bar is set too low. We only fade.”

The image of the jaded screenwriter has been part of Hollywood lore for the better part of a century, depicted in countless films, from Sunset Boulevard (1950) to Mank (2020). At the height of the studio system, such literary icons as F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Nathanael West came to write for the movies only to find themselves disillusioned by the industry’s interest in profit over talent. Many came to see themselves as cogs in a machine, hired to churn out screenplays as quickly as possible no matter the quality. Not surprisingly, authors soon turned to fiction as an outlet to express their frustrations with Hollywood’s inner workings, a perspective largely invisible to the rest of the world. Beginning with the rise of the studio system in the 1920s and the enforcement of the Production Code of the 1930s, the Hollywood novel aimed to fill in what the screen deliberately left out, offering readers a more critical perspective than was available elsewhere. It was an unspoken prerequisite that authors participating in this emerging genre must have had firsthand experience working in the studios.

During the collapse of the studios and the rise of the ratings system in the 1960s, mainstream filmmakers slowly began showing the darker side of the industry on-screen, which effectively dethroned the Hollywood novel as a cultural force. Books that subverted Hollywood’s promotional image were no longer unfilmable; rather, studios began embracing such dark narratives as part of the industry’s mystique. As the Hollywood novel moved into a post-studio era, the practical question became “what could the Hollywood novel still explore that Hollywood films couldn’t?” Was the genre now totally passé?

As if to revive a moribund tradition, Hollywoodski works to counter the basic concept of a mainstream Hollywood film. With the possible exception of the first chapter, there isn’t much of a plot, even after readers piece together the fragments. Like the people who have come to California to die in West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust, which Hollywoodski references throughout, a sense of boredom and stillness fills these pages. The experience of reading Mathews’s text feels uncinematic in the best way, as if deliberately resistant to a film adaptation. Mathews focuses on a side of Hollywood not typically shown because there simply isn’t much to see. In the shadow of studio lots, Dale Davis inhabits a gaudy landscape filled with thirsty parasites. Take, for example, Petey Powell, who frequents the Denny’s at Sunset and Gower, “a bad child actor thirty years ago” who passes out old headshots of himself “in lieu of tips.”

Hollywoodski begins in 1988 with Davis’s apotheosis as a film director. As he is filming on location in Nicaragua, studio executives abruptly shut down the project when their tax deal with the Nicaraguan government goes bad. Despite Davis being at the “high point of [his] career,” the film project never sees the light of day, nor does Davis receive any credit for his work: “None of us would even have a frame to add to our reels. Nothing we had filmed would exist beyond memory.” The rest of this opening chapter details Davis’s wanderings around Nicaragua, a kind of narrative tangent that becomes the first of many in the novel. In fact, despite its Hollywood backdrop, most of the novel has very little to do with the film industry.

Hollywoodski asks: What happens to screenwriters after their heyday? Where do they go? What do they do? For his part, Davis putters around looking for ways to make ends meet, while never missing an opportunity to seize his second chance at success. For instance, he and his other faded-screenwriter friends meet ritualistically to drink at Bowdler’s, a Hollywood bar (clearly based on Boardner’s) once frequented by such big-name authors as West and Fitzgerald, as well as by “writers you’ve never heard of, the ones [Kenny the Bartender] describes as underappreciated. I am on that list.” Spending their time quoting old movies and bouncing bad ideas off one another, they exist in their own reality, out of the spotlight, away from any sense of excitement. At the bar on the wrong side of the clock (1:00 p.m. instead of 1:00 a.m.), Davis literally sees the space in a different light from those who inhabit the place at night:

The daytime is different. […] [W]hen the back door is opened, the shocking white light blasts in on the shrinking mole people, the dust motes hang in that white light, and you see once again the grubby astroturf and molded white plastic chairs of what Bowdler’s insists is a patio.

This feeling of stasis, of immobility, is precisely what makes Hollywoodski powerful. Readers inhabit Davis’s world in bits and pieces over four decades. The entire novel might be considered a series of out-of-order snapshots that document the process of career decay and the day-to-day struggle to live up to long-lost highs.

Like the best Hollywood novels, much of what Mathews writes about doesn’t read like fiction. Instead, what Davis endures sounds like it’s based on either actual or probable events, including his time as an adjunct professor at “a Christian college in Malibu, a place I haven’t been in over a year since my banishment. Under the terms of my non-disclosure agreement, I won’t mention the name. Like a lot of cults, they are extremely litigious.” Early on, we learn that Davis was blacklisted shortly after his return from Nicaragua for following protocol during the Writers Guild strike of 1988. Although these vignettes are often quirky and sometimes absurd (most notably the chapter “Not Oliver Stone”), Hollywoodski’s 40-year trajectory underscores the brutal reality of the entertainment industry. Most of Davis’s adult life is wasted in this place, which, perhaps more tragically, he doesn’t seem to mind.

Readers piece together the key moments in his career, with each chapter labeled by year. The earliest glimpse we get comes in the form of Davis’s short story “Individual Medley,” from 1981, in many ways the beginning of his screenwriting career as his film school friend adapts the story into an Oscar-winning live-action short. The irony, of course, is that the Oscar doesn’t credit Davis; as he opens one chapter: “Oscar. Yeah. I got one. Kinda. Sorta.” Then, a few chapters later, we encounter a more recent short story titled “Written Out” (from 2007). Dropped into the narrative, these two stories invite readers to judge for themselves: has Davis developed his talents since 1981, or has his time in Hollywood actually taken away what talents he ever had?

It is worth nothing that, with the exception of a few sections, Mathews published most of these chapters in various literary journals as stand-alone short stories. But the sequencing in Hollywoodski makes the novel deliberately jarring, disorienting, and engaging—as if to offset Davis’s boredom, which we experience vicariously. For this reason, these seemingly disparate stories are best understood as a whole, one that sheds light on an industry that hasn’t changed much in the past century, according to the perspective of one faded screenwriter.