Spider Boy: A Scenario for a Moving Picture was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1928, and it is Van Vechten’s Hollywood novel — one of the earliest literary satires of the film industry and a precursor to the more celebrated Hollywood novels of Nathanael West and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Doolittle Doolittle Doolittle Doolittle Doolittle Doolittle Ambrose Doolittle — Van Vechten’s comic naming was by now expected — is a successful New York novelist who is brought to Hollywood by a film studio that wants to adapt his work. He finds a world of staggering wealth and total cultural vacancy: the moguls are generous, hospitable, and deeply stupid; the stars are beautiful and interchangeable; the writers are either alcoholic cynics or wide-eyed innocents about to become alcoholic cynics. The “spider boy” of the title is the studio system itself — a web that catches every kind of talent and reduces it to product.
The novel is lighter than Van Vechten’s best work, but its observations about the film industry were sharp enough to remain relevant for decades. Hollywood’s ability to purchase talent and then waste it, to express boundless enthusiasm for art while understanding nothing about it, and to confuse fame with achievement — these themes would be developed more darkly by later writers, but Van Vechten got there first, and with his characteristic good humor.
Collecting Spider Boy
First edition (Knopf, New York, 1928): Cloth binding with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $75–$200
- Without jacket: $15–$40