The Manifest Destiny of J. C. Bloom follows a WWII veteran who reinvents himself as a filmmaker, only to find his life entangled with the myths, performances, and dangerous illusions that shape America’s idea of itself. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

The story developed out of a few things I was thinking about at the time I was embarking on writing another screenplay.  I had an image of a man sweating out in the desert working on a seemingly ridiculous project digging for something but not sure where.  This eventually became Harry Jensen, a famous stuntman.  Also, at the same time I had read David Halberstam’s excellent book THE FIFTIES, a history of many of the inventions of the decade that led directly to many elements of culture we now take for granted.  I wondered about a character who was lost to history, a man who actually came to the invention of all these things – franchising, commercials, Levittowns, theme parks, Holiday Inn type hotels and others. This seemed like a funny basis for a character who became William Wilde. These two things coalesced along with the glue that the book’s protagonist provided, a young man, newly discharged and somewhat aimless who throws caution to the wind and heads west, who accidentally encounters these two huge personalities, and others that set him on his path to become a legend himself.  Jonathan is sort of a wish fulfillment of a journey my dad did not take when he returned from serving in WW2, mixed in with my own love of cinema and cinema history.  I’m a cinematographer and director by trade.  So Jonathan’s also a product of what I know and love and joke about.  The first iteration of the story was a screenplay that was well-received and came close to being made a number of times.  But a screenplay doesn’t really exist on its own.  In meetings, many creative executives and producers were surprised that the script was not based on a novel, as they found it very novelistic.  So I thought perhaps the best iteration of the story was as a novel.  I had never written one and it seemed like it would be a satisfying exercise to try a different medium, where I could write for myself as opposed to for some other purpose like a film.  A book, and therefore its story, exists on its own.  When I set out to try this, I wasn’t thinking about publication, but over time, it became much more than an exercise once I had the time to really dive into revisions.  I was trying to find something to occupy my time during Covid, so I dusted off that first draft, read the hilarious but exacting notes my novelist friend Bill Madison had given me, and dove back in full stop.  Then, a year after Covid had died down, the strikes in Hollywood also gave me “permission” to revise based on additional reads of the Covid drafts. So, in a way, I’m super grateful for the down time that Covid and the strikes gave me.  Were it not for those work reprieves, the book might never have seen the light of day.

William Wilde’s Superstation is such a strange and vivid setting. What inspired that blend of commerce, fantasy, and Americana?​

This sort of comes back to Haberstam’s THE FIFTIES.  The entirety of the developments he discusses are the result of the particular American genius to monetize necessities and diversions on the backs of new technologies.  These types of innovations have been common to most decades, but the 1950’s seemed the bridge to the modern convenience economy.  The development of Disneyland made a particular impression on me as it really took the aspects of America that we had been mythologizing in cinema and made them a corporeal experience in a way, and on a scale, no one had seen before.  It was, really, a living representation of the cinematic.  And one can see a direct through line to the type of myth making, for good and ill that we see today as the technology to disseminate and experience the myth making becomes ever more refined.  The original story as a screenplay was written years ago, well before smartphones, the full pervasiveness of the internet, social media of any kind.  It was written when there were 4 TV channels and cable, and rewritten when we were in the middle of a pandemic with a President who excelled in the very kind of myth making that the book explores.  This is not to say that it is necessarily “about” the present, but the fact that it was written before this present, and seems to be even more about our present through the lens of “event’s of 70 years ago doesn’t make the book prescient.  Rather it explores trends in our history that continue to be refined, again, for good, or ill, that are a continuum of marketing genius and our abilities to tell ourselves a good tale about ourselves that we’d always like to believe.  What’s the line in Liberty Valence?  “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”  That’s what I wanted to do.  Kind of create a modern tall tale.  William Wilde is oversized like Paul Bunyan.  And so is everything he touches like the Superstation and the Wild West.  His excess needed to be matched by the characters around him.  And so the whole environment became a wacky, funny place to visit.  It was hard to leave.  It’s so much, but never too much in Wilde’s vernacular.  I wanted it all to encapsulate our own ideas of exceptionalism.  And I wanted it all to be pretty funny.

Harry Jensen seems to embody the blurred line between lived experience and legend. What role did you want him to play in Jonathan’s journey?​

As someone who idolized (and idealized) the movies, and then worked to help create the worlds that movies provide, I’ve often thought of how much effort goes into recreating a reality, to give the audience a feeling of truth. Of course, what they watch is an edited construction, as all narratives are.  However, these constructions are often based on real history, or in the case of science fiction, real and current research.  The setting of the book, in 1951, revealed itself to be a workable mid-point.  It seemed that there could be an older character who had one foot in the history and one foot in the recreation of it.  In the early days of Hollywood, there were a number of players and stuntmen who came from the same world that early westerns were portraying.  This is where their skillset could be used.  So in 1951, such a character would have been about 70, at the end of his career and still recalling the original reality.  Since the story is so much about the American marketing of myth, this character of Harry Jensen could serve as an anchor for Jonathan, a way for Jonathan to connect the process of storytelling to its original source.  While Jonathan was in the army, he documented the atrocities of the Nazis on film.  This was a first hand experience that would never leave him. Likewise, Harry Jensen, the stuntman of stuntmen, and a “real cowboy” could help give Jonathan the quest for veracity that was so ingrained in him, even as he was becoming – unwittingly at first – more adept at bending it to his own whims.  Harry is the living bridge between the fact and the legend for stories that were very important at the time and would continue to be through the mid 1970’s, exactly the height of Jonathan’s subsequent career and my own introduction into the magic of movies as a kid.  So in some way, Harry is also this connection between history and recreation for me too.

The book examines how America sells stories about itself back to itself. What myths about the American West or Hollywood were you most interested in challenging?​

I’m not sure if I was interested in challenging myths about the West or Hollywood, but I was about the process of storytelling.  One of the earliest criticisms about the book was the fact that the narrator is so unreliable.  My answer, as a novice novelist was why can’t the narrator be unreliable if they are also placing themselves as a character in the book?  The criticism came from the fact that in general writing education, the narrator should not be a character, or that the book perhaps should then be written in the first person, and, after all, I wasn’t setting out to write something avant garde or experimental.  But I didn’t see how that criticism was relevant to this project.  I wanted the book to be funny in the way the screenplay version of the story was funny.  One of the characteristics of film is that the narrator is never reliable, the filmmaker’s editorial vision runs rampant, showing us what they want us to see and withholding what they don’t.  The choice of shots, lenses, composition, movement, music, design all contribute to “commentary” on the action.  These choices can heighten the film’s humor, or dampen it.  I wanted to replicate that process in prose and the way I found to do it was by making the narrator a character, in this case a biographer who is basically in love with his subject.  This narrator is ostensibly writing a biography, but is really, and unwittingly, writing a hagiography of a director he thinks is amazing, J. C. Bloom, and can’t help but comment with all the platitudes and exaggeration such a zealot would bring to a story.  In the end, this journalism is yellow, a very American practice that was rampant and is now again with the rise of social media and partisan television.  But what this provided was a way to comment on the action in funny ways, to give readers a perspective of the ridiculousness of the story as a whole and allow them to then see how by poking fun at things the narrator takes very seriously can help them see how these things mirror a lot of what is still going on around them.  So, I’m kind of self-consciously taking a satiric approach to its world to comment about our own.  The American West and Hollywood are two iconic aspects of the American experience that lend themselves to outsize figures and mythologizing, and so seemed the perfect vehicle for a story about the making of stories and history.

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