The first film of the “golden age” of Hollywood that made an impression on Anthony Mara was “Casablanca” in 1942. It is directed by Michael Curtis, a Hungarian of Jewish origin who immigrated to America during the interwar period, and its writers, Julius and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch, are New York-born American Jews. None of this was originally known to Anthony Mara, who watched the film as a teenager in the late 90s. Then he only discovered that some of the features of the characters were already familiar to him, as they passed into colloquial speech. “Later, what made me feel special about Casablanca,” the author tells us today, “is the fact that it was a film made by and for European refugees, which, more than any other at the time, defined how Americans thought of themselves.

In her latest book, Mercury Presents, Mara addresses precisely these questions. The protagonist of the novel is the Italian Maria Lagana, who, along with her mother, arrived in the United States as a fugitive from Mussolini’s fascist regime and works as a producer at the bankrupt Mercury Pictures film studio in Los Angeles. Due to a childish misdeed, Maria’s father, an activist lawyer, was sentenced by the Fascists to exile (or “confino”) in a village in Calabria, and while he tries to keep in touch with his daughter and then flee, World War II is imminent, flaring up and escalating . Since the attack on Pearl Harbor, Mercury Pictures boss, middle-aged narcissist Artie Feldman has been working with the US government to produce war propaganda films to eliminate the possibility of bankruptcy. And Mara creates a novel that pays homage to America’s European exiles, Hollywood’s golden age, and cinema’s ability to create hope and illusion.

“One of the nicest things about writing a Hollywood novel is that you can sit back and watch old movies and call it research,” Anthony Mara tells us, half-jokingly and seriously. Writing a book, of course, was based not only on watching movies. The 38-year-old writer himself lived in Los Angeles, where his wife is from, but for a while he vacillated between a story set in Hollywood and a story set in southern Italy. “In the end, everything came together when my wife and I went on a trip to Lipari, a small island off Sicily, from where my great-grandmother’s family emigrated,” says Mara. “This is an amazing place, part of a group of tiny volcanic islands with beautiful scenery and stunning beaches. On one of our last days, we noticed a small plaque set high up on a wall covered in vines. The plaque is dedicated to the anti-fascist artists and intellectuals exiled in Lipari by Mussolini. I had never heard of this chapter of the island’s history and it was hard for me to imagine that this paradise island was once Mussolini’s Alcatraz. I also learned that some German and Austrian refugees described Los Angeles as “sunny Siberia” and thought that the same term could be used for Lipari. I realized that a novel about Los Angeles and a novel about Italy are not different books, but two parts of one, which will tell the story of two “sunny Siberias”, at two ends of the world, and a divided family. between them.”

The main character, Maria Lagana, needs to maintain an additional balance: she must organize the production of Mercury Pictures, avoiding the intricacies of the Production Code, the American film censorship agency that operated from 1931 until the late 60s. Her boss, Artie Feldman, believes his subordinate will be up to the task thanks to the experience she has gained sending letters to her exiled father, which are scrutinized by the Italian authorities. “Through this experience, Maria learns to use innuendo and innuendo to avoid the censorship that prevailed in Hollywood at the time,” explains Mara, adding, “If you have ever watched an old American movie and wondered why happy couples sleep in different beds . . that’s because the Hollywood censors sanctioned it. Some of the best films of that era were written by European expatriates like Billy Wilder, who drew on their personal experiences to overcome the mechanisms of repression and censorship.”

Life is essentially an absurd enterprise, and the absurd is most eloquently expressed through comedy.

But if censorship was not absent in Hollywood, if it was true in the US at the time, that another Italian immigrant, Vincent Cortese (who comes to Los Angeles and finds that “you travel from one end of the world to the other, only to find yourself again in confino”), were such practices then commonplace for all the warring powers? “In American culture, we are very proud of our role in World War II,” Mara replies, and continues, “Especially considering that since then we have provoked so many destructive conflicts in other countries, we take satisfaction in the fact that at least in World War II we were on the side of the angels. And while this is true, I also think it obscures how U.S. politicians have used the war as an excuse to engage in political practices uncomfortably reminiscent of those of Germany and Italy of the same period, be it the transportation of Japanese Americans. in concentration camps or for the sharp restriction of the freedoms of European refugees. One of the contradictions that fuels my novel is the fact that during the war, European immigrants formed the backbone of the American film propaganda apparatus, although, as Axis natives, they were deprived of the very rights and universal freedoms they defended. their films.

To immigration, xenophobia, art, propaganda, heroism and human compromise, Anthony Mara approaches with imagination, insight, tenderness, but also with humor. What is its significance for the author? “As a reader, I am often annoyed by novels that lack humor,” he replies. “Usually they don’t seem very realistic to me. Life is essentially an absurd enterprise, and the absurd is most eloquently expressed through comedy. The characters in the novel often find themselves in preposterous situations, such as a German-Jewish refugee actor who, in World War II Hollywood, can’t find any other job than to play the very Nazis he thought had escaped. For these characters, humor is a way to understand the incomprehensible. Moreover, it is a useful tool for any writer. This reduces the author’s arrogance. It removes the space between the reader and the character. I try to move around the range of the keyboard to give the book as much emotional range as possible.”

Maria is cheerful, ambitious, with a charming defiance – “think of the character Rosalind Russell in Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday, only a little wittier and a lot more Italian,” says Anthony Mara. Aside from Maria’s resemblance to the protagonist of His Girl Friday, there are more than enough cinematic references throughout Mara’s novel. “Each time, I wrote the chapters of Mercury Presents along the lines of another genre of film that was popular in the 1940s, from screwball comedies to film noirs and war films. One of the pleasures of writing a novel about this world is to draw from its means of expression and subvert them,” says the author.

Does he think cinema, like television, has changed the way writers tell their stories? “For decades, cinema and television have influenced literature more than literature,” the author notes. “Movie, more than any other cultural force, has changed the way writers approach scenes, dialogue, storytelling pace. One of the interesting trends of the last twenty years is high-end television, borrowing from the tradition of the novel, where episodes act as chapters in larger narrative cycles. For a long time, writers wanted their novels to be cinematic. Now the creators of Netflix want their shows to be fiction.”

And what does Mara, who lived in Eastern Europe and wrote two books set in Chechnya (“Constellation of Life Phenomena”) and the Soviet Union (“The King of Love and Her Child”), think about how modern war is presented, as in Ukraine ? This is the first case to be covered so extensively on the Internet, with all possible ramifications. “Every new technology, from radio to movies to Twitter, creates new opportunities for propagandists,” the author concludes. “But these technologies also offer people new ways to counter the shams that governments are spreading. The lies spread by the Kremlin have more reach thanks to the Internet, but the Internet also gives millions of Ukrainians the ability to record and share photos, videos, and testimonies. Although the fighting continues, Russia has already lost the information war.”