"Tullyfest"
WHAT: LAVA - The Los Angeles Visionaries Association, UCLA Special
Collections and The American Cinematheque celebrate the life, writings and
films of Jim Tully (1886-1947) with a week-long "Tullyfest." Events include:
1) October 10 - LAUGHTER IN HELL screening at the American Cinematheque;
2) October 11 - REDISCOVERING JIM TULLY Bonnie Cashin Lecture at UCLA Special
Collections and opening of exhibit (open thru December) of selections from
the Jim Tully Papers;
3) October 14 JIM TULLY'S HOLLYWOOD walking tour;
4) The LAVA Salon at Musso & Frank honors JIM TULLY: A HOBO IN HOLLYWOOD
On October 15, for its fourth quarterly Salon at Musso & Frank,
LAVA - The Los Angeles Visionaries Association, makes a departure from the
celebrated subjects of past literary Salons (Raymond Chandler, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker and John Fante) to honor a forgotten luminary of
the 1930s Hollywood scene, the hobo novelist, journalist and screenwriter
Jim Tully.
The LAVA Salon, entitled JIM TULLY: A HOBO IN HOLLYWOOD, wraps up a full
week of Tullyfest celebrations stretching from Hollywood to Westwood and
back again. Tullyfest events unfold in this order:
1) LAUGHTER IN HELL film screening and talk at the American Cinematheque at
the Egyptian Theatre.
WHERE: American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood
Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90028.
WHEN: Wednesday, October 10, 7:30pm (time subject to change, check calendar
link)
COST: General Admission $11.00. Cinematheque Members $7.00. Seniors
65+/Students w/valid ID $9.
LINK: http://www.
Tullyfest week begins with a screening of the 1933 film "Laughter in Hell"
with an introduction by Jim Tully's biographers Mark Dawidziak and Paul
Bauer. Copies of their book "Jim Tully: American Writer, Irish Rover,
Hollywood Brawler" will be available for purchase from historic Hollywood
bookseller Larry Edmunds. Based on the 1932 Tully novel, this hard-boiled,
pre-code film stars Pat O'Brien as a wife-killing railroad worker who busts
out of prison and takes up with Gloria Stuart. At the time of its release,
the film gained notoriety for its no-holds-barred depiction of prison
brutality and lynching. It is rarely screened today, and was for many years
thought to be a lost film.
2) Bonnie Cashin Lecture REDISCOVERING JIM TULLY: GOLDEN AGE HOLLYWOOD'S
HARD-BOILED WRITER and opening of the exhibition THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JIM
TULLY FROM DRIFTER TO CELEBRATED AUTHOR: SELECTIONS FROM THE JIM TULLY
PAPERS
WHERE: UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library Main Conference Room, 11360
Charles E. Young Research Library, Los Angeles, CA 90095
WHEN: Thursday, October 11, 4-6pm (lecture), exhibition is open through
December
COST: Free, but reservations required and space is limited. RSVP by October
2, 2012 to UCLA Library Development at 310.206.8526 orrsvp@library.ucla.edu
LINK:
http://blogs.library.ucla.edu/
ject-of-bonnie-cashin-lecture-
For the second Tullyfest event, UCLA Library Special Collections hosts the
Bonnie Cashin Lecture by Paul Bauer and Mark Dawidziak, entitled
"Rediscovering Jim Tully: Golden Age Hollywood's Hard-Boiled Writer" in the
Charles E. Young Research Library Conference Center. Bauer and Dawidziak are
authors of the biography, "Jim Tully: American Writer, Irish Rover,
Hollywood Brawler" (Kent State University Press, 2011). The lecture will be
followed by a reception in Library Special Collections for the opening of
the accompanying exhibit, "The Life and Times of Jim Tully -- From Drifter
to Celebrated Author" curated by Lilace Hatayama. The exhibit will feature
selections from the Jim Tully Papers, including drafts of his novels and
first editions, correspondence with Hollywood celebrities, sports figures,
writers, editors, and screenwriters, research files for his non-fiction
pieces, photographs with celebrities of the day, and mementos of his strong
ties to his hometown of St. Mary's, Ohio.
3) JIM TULLY'S HOLLYWOOD walking tour presented by LAVA The Los Angeles
Visionaries Association
WHERE: Tour begins at the Larry Edmunds Bookshop, 6644 Hollywood Boulevard,
Los Angeles, CA, 90028
WHEN: Sunday, October 14, 12pm (time subject to change, check calendar link)
COST: Free, but reservations are required, and will be accepted starting on
October 4 from the link below.
LINK: http://lavatransforms.org/
The third Tullyfest event is a free two-hour walking tour that will focus on
the locations which were important to Jim Tully's career in the motion
picture industry, during the teens through the 1930s. The tour will be lead
by Mark Dawidziak and Paul Bauer, who are Jim Tully's biographers and who
will be presenting at the LAVA literary Salon at Musso & Frank Grill the
following night. Sites on the tour include: Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel,
Grauman's Chinese Theater, The Musso & Frank Grill, Mark Twain Hotel and the
former Chaplin Studios.
4) Monday, October 15 - The LAVA Salon at Musso & Frank presents JIM TULLY:
A HOBO IN HOLLYWOOD
WHERE: Musso & Frank Grill, 6667 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90028.
WHEN: Monday, October 15, 2012 from 6-11pm.
COST: $100 per person, ticket price includes 3-course prix fixe dinner
prepared by Musso & Frank chefs and Salon presentations. Cocktails not
included.
TO PURCHASE TICKETS: Call Musso & Frank at (323) 467-7788 or visit the
restaurant Tuesday-Saturday between 9am and 5pm.
LINK: http://lavatransforms.org/
The fourth and final Tullyfest event is the LAVA Salon at Musso & Frank
honoring "Jim Tully: A Hobo in Hollywood."
There is simply no Hollywood restaurant more closely tied to the city's
literary legacy than Musso & Frank--a favorite of Faulkner, Fitzgerald,
Fante, Hellman, Hammett, Chandler, Cain, Saroyan, Parker, West, as well as a
new generation of luminaries.
In honor of this ongoing writerly tradition, in January 2012 LAVA (The Los
Angeles Visionaries Association) launched a dinner and lecture series, The
LAVA Salon at Musso & Frank, a quarterly literary salon and prix fixe dinner
celebrating the great writers and personalities who have frequented the
establishment.
The LAVA Salon at Musso & Frank was just named Best Literary Salon by Los
Angeles Magazine in its Best of L.A. issue.
The first Salon, featuring Dan Fante reading from his recent memoir, was a
rousing success, with Larry Wilson of the Pasadena Star-News observing "The
sold-out crowd spoke to our hunger for a Southern California literary
history." And of the second sold-out Salon, featuring "L.A. Noir" author
John Buntin discussing the true crime roots of Raymond Chandler's fiction,
Carolyn Kellogg noted in the L.A. Times that "someone who didn't know any
L.A. history would have found it to be a robust and welcoming introduction."
And at the third sold-out Salon, David Kipen celebrated the late work of F.
Scott Fitzgerald as Adrienne Crew reminded us that for all her sharpness,
Dorothy Parker had a genius for friendship.
The LAVA Salon at Musso & Frank is the brainchild of Kim Cooper & Richard
Schave, proprietors of literary and historic tour company Esotouric --
Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, James M. Cain's Southern California
Nightmare, Charles Bukowski's Haunts of a Dirty Old Man, John Fante's Dreams
from Bunker Hill -- who through 2009-10 hosted a free cultural Salon on the
last Sunday of the month at Clifton's Cafeteria. With the new series, LAVA
expands its congenial, intelligent and unpredictable cultural programming
into Hollywood with a quarterly literary Salon event held in Musso & Frank
on a night when the restaurant is closed to the general public. Seating is
extremely limited, and these intimate gatherings always sell out.
On Monday, October 15, you are invited to join Jim Tully's biographers Mark
Dawidziak and Paul Bauer for "Jim Tully: A Hobo in Hollywood," a night spent
exploring a fascinating Hollywood literary figure who star blazed brightly
through the 1930s, and unaccountably faded after his 1947 death.
The son of an Irish ditch-digger, Ohio-born Jim Tully (1886-1947) hit the
road in 1901, spending most of his teenage years in the company of hoboes.
While chasing his dream of becoming a writer, Tully rode the rails and
worked as a tree surgeon, boxer, and newspaper reporter. All the while, he
was crafting his memories into a dark and original chronicle of the American
underclass. When he began to set his experiences onto paper in a style that
was hard-boiled before the genre existed, he became a literary sensation.
At October's Salon, Jim Tully's biographers Mark Dawidziak and Paul Bauer
will seek to answer the fundamental question: "Why isn't Jim Tully still a
household name?" Tully exploded onto the scene with a stream of critically
acclaimed novels, among them "Beggars of Life" (1924), "Circus Parade"
(1927), "Shanty Irish" (1928), "Shadows of Men" (1930) and "Blood on the
Moon" (1931). Yet the books were out-of-print for decades, their author
forgotten.
To answer this question, Mark Dawidziak and Paul Bauer must look to the
Hollywood of 1912, to the sleepy little suburb that Tully found and watched
grow up around him, as he built his incongruous twin careers as motion
picture publicist and independent writer. From his piercing insights into
and deep ambivalence toward his longtime employer, Charlie Chaplin, to
anecdotes of great friendships with W. C. Fields, Jack Dempsey, Damon
Runyon, Lon Chaney, Frank Capra, and Erich von Stroheim, Tully exhibited a
lust for life which was only surpassed by his devotion to his craft. By
1930 Tully was a
major American author, and had launched a parallel career as a successful
journalist. Both his novels and journalistic exposés shook the country and
his peer group in Hollywood.
But Tully's novel "Ladies In The Parlor" (1935), was declared obscene and
most copies destroyed, and Chaplin successfully prevented Tully's publisher
from releasing a biography of the actor. By the mid-1940s, crippling
physical ailments and family heartbreak left the writer on the ropes. With
his death in 1947, his name quietly slipped from the front ranks of American
Letters and into obscurity.
Since 2009, Kent State University Press has been rectifying this long
neglect with a series of Tully reprints. And in 2011, it published Mark
Dawidziak and Paul Bauer's definitive biography, "Jim Tully: American
Writer, Irish Rover, Hollywood Brawler," drawing on new information found in
the Tully papers at UCLA Special Collections.
The time is ripe for a revival of interest in this fascinating American
character, and we invite you to play a part in it at the October Salon and
at all of the October TULLYFEST events.
Also appearing at the Salon is Howard Prouty (Acquisitions Archivist at The
Academy Foundation/Margaret Herrick Library and proprietor of ReadInk) with
the latest in his popular series of talks on a famous Los Angeles book
seller with a history of Hollywood's landmark Pickwick Bookshop. And before
and after the formal dinner and Salon presentations, guests will mingle with
Hollywood historian Philip Mershon (proprietor of The Felix in Hollywood
Tour Company).
THE BACK STORY:
For much of the mid-20th Century, to rub shoulders with America's greatest
novelists and screenwriters, one needed merely to go to the corner of
Cherokee Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard. Here, within the tight triangle of
the Writer's Guild offices, Musso & Frank Grill and the Stanley Rose
Bookshop, flowed the commercial and social sap that nourished the tree of
American letters. The famous minds who congregated still inspire awe:
William Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald, John Fante, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell
Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, William Saroyan, John O'Hara,
Dorothy Parker, Nathanael West and many more.
And at the center of it all was the famed "Back Room" of Musso & Frank, the
oldest restaurant in Hollywood. Beginning in 1936, in response to the
restaurant's growing popularity, Musso's expanded its operations into a
small room tucked behind the Vogue Theater. A door was punched through the
west wall of the dining room, and a haughty door man installed. His
instructions were simple: the back room was to be the exclusive domain of
Hollywood's literary lions, their friends and romantic partners. It was
called, informally, The Cocktail Room or The Round Table or the Algonquin
West.
The party raged on, six nights a week, for twenty glorious years.
In 1955, Musso & Frank expanded to the east, and the contents of the "Back
Room" -- the long bar, chairs, light fixtures, coat racks-- were moved
wholesale into the "New Room." The "New Room" was no longer the exclusive
retreat of literary Los Angeles, but the writers kept coming. Today, Musso &
Frank's clientele still includes celebrated novelists, screenwriters, poets
and songwriters, all of whom cherish the old world hospitality, traditional
Continental cuisine and opportunity to soak up the same rarified air that
nourished the greats.
LAVA co-founder Richard Schave, the Salon host and co-curator, says "I would
argue that along the bar in the old Cocktail Room, somewhere between the
drinking, bragging, fighting and general hell-raising, the better half of
the Hard-Boiled School of American Letters was hashed out and put down on
paper. The purpose of the Salon is two fold. First, to set the record
straight on some basic milestones: the rise and fall of the original
Cocktail Room and its reincarnation as the "New Room" and the symbiotic
relationship Musso & Frank shared with the legendary bookshop next door,
Stanley Rose's. Secondly, a more ephemeral aim: in these hallowed rooms,
that still bear the nicotine stains from Raymond Chandler's pipe and Charles
Bukowski's cigarettes, we want to seek out and amplify the spark which all
those great souls have left behind. Musso & Frank is just bricks and mortar,
but incredible ideas and connections were forged here, and we believe that
spark is waiting to be reignited and make its impression felt in Los Angeles
again."
Each Musso's Salon evening will focus on different aspects of Hollywood's
literary lore, feature fascinating speakers and special guest historians,
and be hosted by LAVA co-founder Richard Schave.
Mark Echeverria, 4th generation General Manager/Proprietor of The Musso &
Frank Grill, says "For 93 years The Musso & Frank Grill has been a keystone
in Hollywood's ever-evolving history. Some of the world's greatest people
have walked through our doors, sat at a booth or a bar stool, and dreamt the
unimaginable. That is what makes Hollywood so unique: unimaginable things
come true. Musso & Frank Grill has always been that inspiration in people's
lives to make the impossible, possible, and it is now time to tell the true
story of the people who put Hollywood on the map, and the restaurant they
did it in--The Musso & Frank Grill. We are extremely excited to work with
LAVA to bring you living history in a setting where history continues to
happen, even 93 years later. So please enjoy an authentic dinning experience
you would have found in the early decades of last century, and bring
yourselves back to the time era of the literary giants, and truly get a
journey through the history of Hollywood, in the restaurant that Hollywood
grew up around, The Musso & Frank Grill."
Future Salons will focus on the life and works of Charles Bukowski,
Nathanael West, Christopher Isherwood, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and
other fascinating characters who've contributed to nearly a century of
literary culture at Musso & Frank.
ABOUT LAVA: Through participation in LAVA, a select group of creative
professionals come together to promote cultural programming that speaks to
the urban experience while promoting positive public space. LAVA's creative
partners share a love for L.A. and unique ideas for exploring it in their
work. Formed by social historians RICHARD SCHAVE and KIM COOPER --
proprietors of Esotouric bus adventures and the 1947project time travel blog
series (including On Bunker Hill and In SRO Land) -- LAVA brings together
L.A.'s most visionary promoters, artists, writers and thinkers.
Applications from prospective LAVA members are being taken at
http://lavatransforms.org/
To learn more about LAVA, please visit http://www.lavatransforms.org
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