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Mercury Pictures Presents

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With Mercury Pictures under financial pressures, Artie has been summoned to face the Senate investigation, accompanied by the ever reliable Maria. Maria is in love with a Chinese American actor, Eddie Lu, condemned to playing stereotypes that bring him real life dangers. A glimpse of Germany in the inter-war years is provided by the miniaturist Anna Weber, devastated by the loss of her son, Kurt, when her Nazi husband is given custody. In San Lorenzo, portrait photographer, Nino Picone, escapes, arriving in LA with a stolen identity. With Pearl Harbour and the American entry into WW2, the fortunes of Mercury Pictures change dramatically as they make morale boosting war propaganda, but the emigres are designated enemy aliens, made to feel unworthy and unwanted. Anna heads to Utah, with her miniaturist talents being utilised by the American military. The characters lives intersect and connect as we learn of their pasts, present and sometimes their future. A novel so rich and wondrous . . . that there’s only one word for Anthony Marra: genius.” —Sally Mann Let’s not get carried away. But I suppose that’s the impression we want to make on these East Coast bankers. It takes a genius to know when to be taken for a fool.”

Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra - Publishers Weekly Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra - Publishers Weekly

You look like Elmer Fudd’s dad,” Maria said, “and the Yankee Doodle Douchebag across the table won’t see who you really are.” Mercury Pictures Presents is a work of historical fiction set in the Italy of rising fascism between the wars. Then the action shifts to California in the late 1930s, more specifically Hollywood and the titular studio which is to become home to many in the flight from Hitler and Mussolini. While we are inside the sometimes manic everyday studio operations led by Artie Feldman, we are even closer to Maria Lagana who has traveled from a village in Italy to Hollywood with hopes, sorrows, delayed dreams, and lots of intelligence.

The following is from Anthony Marra's Mercury Pictures Presents . Marra is the New York Times bestselling author of The Tsar of Love and Techno and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena , winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and longlisted for the National Book Award. Maria smiled. “In that case, you’re a regular Einstein, Art.” “Hey, you laugh, but you of all people should know being underestimated is a competitive advantage. When these Mayflower Society Wall Street suits see me, they’ll think they can use my fedora as a bedpan. It goes against everything they’ve been taught to take a loudmouth immigrant in a bad rug seriously.” The concept of “other” carries through this novel. As war approaches in the States, there are good and bad, or enemy, aliens. Many of those who escaped from Europe and found a place in Hollywood and elsewhere are now looked at differently. Even before the war’s start, some groups aren’t really acceptable except for the B grade movies.

Review: “Mercury Pictures Presents,” by Anthony Marra - The

Besides, my father was a defense attorney in the early days of Mussolini’s regime. I’m not unfamiliar with show trials.” So, what of that antic voice that seems so non-Marra? Particularly early on, the narration is rife with extended, sardonic descriptions, no more so that when we’re spending time with Maria’s great aunts, who serve as a kind of comic chorus. Characters banter in sharpened one-liners, which is perhaps fitting in the Hollywood studio, but it’s there among the Old-World Italians, too. At times, it feels like we’ve stumbled into an Aaron Sorkin script. In response to pro-interventionist messages in recent movies, a group of isolationist senators accused Hollywood of plotting with Roosevelt “to make America punch drunk with propaganda to push her into war” against Germany and Italy. Congressional hearings were hastily arranged to investigate these charges and propose legislative remedies. And Artie Feldman, ever reliant on the free publicity of controversy to find an audience, wanted to both undermine the legitimacy of the investigation and capitalize on his newfound notoriety with Mercury’s next movie. He soon has cause to question that vision as internment camps spring up across U.S. deserts, and as the Marias of America must begin registering as “enemy aliens” and be sentenced to their own confino, a five-mile radius encircling their homes. It's been six years since publication of Anthony Marra's last book, and finally the wait is over. With Mercury Pictures Presents, he carries the themes and style he'd honed in his two earlier masterpieces, and has created another. I'd thought the WWII era had been so thoroughly milked that further reworking would be redundant, but Marra has breathed life into a story centered around the collection of emigres attracted to Los Angeles and their contribution not only to the movie industry, but to the cultural enhancement of the country as well.Just to ease the dramatic tension, though, I’ll state up front that, in the end, Marra melted my heart, and I view Mercury as a worthy addition to the author’s canon. A genuinely moving and life-affirming novel that’s a true joy to read.”—Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere

Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra: 9780451495211

Mercury’s films run afoul of isolationist America, and Artie is hauled in front of the Senate Investigation into Motion Picture War Propaganda. The premiere of Maria’s film, “Devil’s Bargain,” which retells Faust through the lens of Nazi collaboration, causes a riot; fortunately for Mercury, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor the next day, and Artie is hailed as a visionary.Marra did an excellent job exploring the themes of exile and confinement. Several characters experience both emotional and physical exile, detached from their loved ones, the place they love, and/or the traditions and way of ... - JHSiess

Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra | Waterstones

Fifteen years later, on the eve of America's entry into World War II, Maria is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional lives from falling apart. Her mother won't speak to her. Her boss, a man of many toupees, has been summoned to Washington by congressional investigators. Her boyfriend, a virtuoso Chinese-American actor, can't escape the studio's narrow typecasting. And the studio itself, Maria's only home in exile, teeters on the verge of bankruptcy. That’s the second time this year. Christ, when will it end?” “Life’s nasty and brutish but at least it’s short.” German was the language Anna thought, counted, dreamed, prayed, and cursed in; it was lovely to remember that it could be beautiful, even if she knew Germany too well to ever speak German beautifully again." Later, she helped the U.S. military in its war effort against Germany. This is an epic tale that begins in pre-WWII Italy and continues in wartime Los Angeles. It is the story of Maria Lagana, who flees Rome with her mother after her father is arrested by the Fascist regime. She rises from the typing pool to associate producer at Mercury Pictures, a B-movie studio with aspirations to play with the big boys at MGM, Warner Brothers, Paramount. The studio execs, rival siblings Artie and Ned Feldman, don't let a shady deal pass them by and soon Artie is being called to testify before Congress for violating censorship protocol. Like Philip Roth’s classic The Plot Against America, Anthony Marra’s Mercury Pictures Presents is an explicitly political novel that reminds us of the fault lines running through American society and correcting images of America’s mythic and heroic past. Perhaps heroic for some, but not for America’s immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities. Mercury Pictures Presents will stand as a classic novel of the run-up and early years of World War Two in America.As a daughter of the Greatest Generation, I saw many characteristics in the characters that I observed in my own parents. Theirs was a generation focused on survival. First, during the Great Depression and then World War II. Like my parents here in ... - JHSiess Not only is Mercury Pictures Presents a fabulous story, it’s Anthony Marra’s intriguing style of writing and his unlikely descriptions that makes the novel so entertaining and thought provoking. New York Times reviewer Matthew Specter provides this example from the book: A rusted-out rowboat decaying on a bank is presented as “a visual index of local fungi and a nursery for deciduous saplings.” Both clever and artful, Marra’s writing aptly reflects the characters of the story. For years, Maria had devised strategies for smuggling the profane beneath the most sensitive censorial snouts. At her best, she passed more colorful bullshit than Babe the Blue Ox. Set in 1940s Hollywood, soon peopled with refugees from fascist Europe, it is the story of Maria whose socialist father was sentenced to internal exile in Mussolini’s Italy. She and her mother immigrated to America, and now she is associate producer at Mercury Pictures, underpaid and uncredited. Her boss Mercury studio founder Artie Feldman names his toupees and is mired in a never-ending battle over studio control with his twin brother. Maria loves a Chinese American, but miscegenation laws force them to keep their relationship under wraps. Her father, in exile, had saved the life of a young man, Nino, whose mother takes him in. He helps the boy with an education. Nino escapes Italy using a false identity, and years later he seeks out Maria to tell her what had happened to her father.

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