From Otto Friedrich, City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s (1986):
In Hollywood [c. 1941] there were no censors, no storm troopers, no interest in controversy or politics of any sort. This was the place dominated by Louis B. Mayer, and Mayer liked Andy Hardy movies. Brecht remained Brecht. He read in a copy of Life that an Ohio farmer named Frank Engles had been selected, together with his wife and three children, as the state’s “most typical farm family,” and that the Edgeless had been hired to spend a week living their typical family lives in a model home at the Ohio State Fair. Brecht thought it would be interesting to to imagine what would happen if Ohio’s typical family should start quarreling bitterly on the night before the state fair opened, and then smashed up the model home that had been prepared for them.
And then there was bread. Brot. The tastelessness that emerged from the American assembly lines seemed to the exile from Berlin to symbolize everything that was lacking in American society.
Back in the 1920s, Brecht had started an adaptation of The Pit, Frank Norris’s epic novel about the extravagances of the Chicago wheat exchange, but what had interested Brecht was not the wheat exchange as such but the corrupting process that separated the growing of wheat from the final loaf. As in his Saint Joan of the Stockyards, he wanted to pit the soulless entrepreneur, Joe Fleischhacker, against the humble creator, the baker, and to dramatize the creator’s triumph over the merchants. After a long talk with a German-American writer named Ferdinand Reyher, Brecht wrote in his Arbeitsjournal: “I tell Reyher the plan for the Joe Fleischhacker in Chicago, and in a couple of hours we develop a film story, The Bread King Learns Bread Baking. There is no real bread in the States, and I really like to eat bread: my main meal is at night, and it is bread and butter. R thinks the Americans have always been nomads, and nomads understand nothing about eating.” The idea of these two nomad writers was that Joe Fleischhacker, the villainous millionaire, should find happiness in munching bread baked by a poor farmer’s wife. When he tried to buy her recipe, waving his checkbook as a weapon, he was told that good bread required not only good flour but “one day of good work; one world of good neighbors; a heart of good will; and a good appetite.”
Brecht finished this peculiar scenario on a Saturday night in October of 1941, and he was so pleased with himself that he hurried over to MGM the following Tuesday to present his creation to Max Reinhardt’s don, Gottfried, who was then working as an assistant to one of the studio’s leading producers, Bernie Hyman. “For an hour and a half,” Reinhardt recalled, “Brecht fascinated me in his unalloyed Augsburg dialect with a film story about the production, distribution, and enjoyment of bread… He had the right man but the wrong place, and he had no illusions when I said as he left that I would try my best to sell the story.” Reinhardt apparently did make some effort to interest MGM in Brecht’s idea, but the results were predictable. Brecht’s scenario, Reinhardt later observed, “had as much chance of being sold to MGM as ‘Gone with the Wind’ had of being played at the Berliner Ensemble.”
But Brecht did have illusions. He registered his idea about bread at the Screen Writers Guild to protect his claims on it. And his journal records at the end of 1941 include a frantic assortment of movie projects: a biography of the labor leader Samuel Gompers, which William Dieterle hoped to direct; an adapatation of Arthur Schnitzler’s comedy Reigen, which was supposed to interest Charles Boyer; a lost work known as Days of Fire. The journal even contains lists of Brechtian titles: Refugees Both, The Senator’s Conscience, The Traitor, and … Boy Meets Girl, So What?
“Again and again,” Brecht wrote, “seeking a living, I am told:
Show us what you’re made of
Lay it on the table!
Deliver the goods!
Say something to inspire us! Tell us of your own greatness!
Divine our secret desires!
Show us the way out
Make yourself useful!
Deliver the goods!
