Mercury Pictures Presents Too Ambitious but a Good Read

 

 

MERCURY PICTURES PRESENTS (2022)

By Anthony Marra

Hogarth/Penguin Random House, 408 pages.

★★★★  

 

 

 

I adored Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra, though it is what I call half of an epic. By that I mean it should have been either twice as long or have jettisoned half of its plot lines because there’s too much going on to be contained in 400 pages.

 

It is a film about a Hollywood studio, though not Paramount, MGM, Universal, or Twentieth Century Fox. The 1930s into the 1950s is often interpreted as a Hollywood golden age. From the standpoint of movie quality that is perhaps true, but there were obstacles to be considered such as the impact of two world wars and a little thing called the Great Depression. It wasn't so glamorous to work in the movies either. Only stars and big companies came through those years intact, and not even they were unscathed.

 

Mercury Pictures Presents is about a second-tier studio that didn't have surefire box office stars. (One suspects that RKO was one of Marra's inspirations; it often leaned upon Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre repertory company for acting talent.) Even in its heyday Mercury was a cut-rate concern. It was owned by two eccentric brothers, Art and Ned Feldman, who simultaneously love and despise each other; lately they opt for the latter option and engage in tit for tat games. Mercury maintains a staff that ranges from disgruntled to trapped. Its best talent is Eddie Lu, who would like to do Chekhov, but as a Chinese American he is relegated to portraying Yellow Peril types such as an evil Chinaman or a Japanese villain. Maria Legana is a resident alien and Eddie's illicit lover.* She also has a couple of maddening Italian aunts who don't understand why she's not married and continues to work in the office of Mercury Pictures. Add to the wild menagerie of characters several displaced Europeans working for bargain basement wages, a major character who literally isn't who he is, and an American gangster who runs afoul of Italian mobsters. This is merely the short list of the strange characters in a novel that mixes drama, humor, acerbic dialogue, scheming, heartbreak, delusions, and sweetness and (mostly) gets away with it.

 

Mercury Pictures once did moderately well. Its current fate, though, isn't on the screen, but on a battlefield pitting Artie against Ned. In the good old days, “Artie” took care of movie making in California, and Ned stayed in New York City to write checks and keep the books. Recently, though, Ned has come to California with the intention of wrecking Mercury Pictures in a grab-the-money-and-go maneuver. Should the studio fortunes pick up, Plan B is to push Artie out of the business. 

 

To be fair, Artie is an oddball. He keeps a rack of toupees to fit every occasion and has names for each: the Heavyweight, the Casanova, the Edison, the Mephistopheles, and so forth. Were it not for the command-by-fake-obedience acumen of Maria, Mercury Pictures wouldn't be worth a roll of used celluloid. She's so valuable that even Ned will try to blackmail her rather than let her take another job. Rest assured; she’s not the only one being extorted. 

 

All of this alone would have been literary gold, but Marra adds other layers. Much of the novel's action takes place in Italy, both during Mussolini's rise to power and again during World War Two. These sections involve everything from assumed identities, a stolen car, an ever-patient Italian American mother, an accidental cameraman who wants to emulate Robert Capa, and falsehoods that become truths in surprising ways. 

 

Marra adds even other subplots, including the construction of detailed sets to be destroyed for less than noble purposes, movie razzle dazzle, an FBI investigation, an Italian policeman, and a story about Louis Harrington, a black GI whose tale parallels that of Dorie Miller, but without Miller's heroic ending.** As you can probably tell, there are so many irons in the fire that some of them seem tacked on. Frankly, some of the novel is a mess, though credit goes to Marra that he pulls out of such moments with less damage than is done to Mercury Pictures. 

 

Luckily, Marra's novel has memorable characters, inspired silliness, labyrinthine backstabbing plotting, and shifting winds that make an enjoyable read even if you get lost. If you do , my best advice is to take the lead from Vincent, he who would be Robert Capa. He made an analogy to between one of Capo's photos and Mercury Pictures: “The less you saw, the better it looked.”

 

Rob Weir

 

* Illicit because the laws in many parts of the country forbade interracial relationships.

** Miller was a black ship’s cook who manned an anti-aircraft gun during Pearl Harbor when its white gunner was killed.