The United States in the aftermath of World War II was a mess of angst and confusion. Despite, or perhaps because of, the mythologies of economic growth and suburban (read: lily-white) utopia, the American dream necessitated enormous pressure to conform. There was little tolerance for those who didn’t toe the line. Just think about the Red and Lavender Scares. Or the Ku Klux Klan and the lingering horror of Jim Crow. Add to all this the existential terrors triggered by the dawn of the atomic age, and what you get is a nation awash in its own anxieties, unable to reckon with or recognize itself. Even in the hedonistic hotbed of mid-1950s Hollywood, transgressions were barely tolerated—and then only if well concealed.
In his third book, The Future Was Color, Patrick Nathan goes down this rabbit hole and lands in a darkened Babylon: a film community both decadent and paranoid, in which lust, excess, dread, and disillusionment are never far from the surface, a microcosm of McCarthy-era cultural whitewashing. And yet, Nathan is more interested in what rebellion might have looked like—an alternate universe where people might strip themselves down to some sort of purer essence, motivated by the specter of impending apocalypse. Centered around a character named George Curtis, a hack screenwriter of low-budget horror films, the book juxtaposes nihilism with a yearning for significance, capturing slivers of kaleidoscopic beauty while portraying a landscape that is complicated and confusing for those who refuse to go along. The result is a book that explores decadence, but in the most thoughtful way, a compulsive page-turner with layers of subtext.
George is a queer, Jewish immigrant from Budapest who has come to Hollywood with a pocketful of secrets, numbly conforming to the black-and-white present while attempting to find an ideal version of himself. He’s unsatisfied with his work and what he’s become. Yet, he’s also bought into the culture’s conventional wisdom, a prisoner of those who condemn people like him. “What men do is not love,” he tells a companion.
As the 1956 Hungarian Revolution unfurls, George finds a reason to recalibrate, to write something political, to become a voice of significance. He finds a patron in the faded actress Madeline Morrison, who lives in a dazzling Malibu compound with her husband, Walt, also an aging star. The two of them are old Hollywood, now irrelevant, wealthy, and walled off.
Madeline offers George a room in which to work, to find himself. “George did not sleep,” Nathan writes, “and instead began to work again, to seriously work. There was no longer any point in being private, in being discreet; he’d found a way to say what he wanted to say and there was no way anyone could refute it.” At night, however, he and other guests become captive to Madeline’s ongoing social experiments—a series of debased cocktail and dinner parties, culminating with a chemically enhanced trip to Las Vegas, where George sees a bleak vision of the future. These events and trips, carefully curated by the hostess, are performance pieces, intended to allow guests to drop their guard.
Such experiences are both appealing and repellent to George. Even as he indulges sexually and chemically, longing to reinvent himself without judgment or social restrictions, he cannot help but be tormented by his new life, judging those around him and his own willingness to participate in activities that feel foreign to him. “As we are in the belief that we’re meant for some great purpose,” he imagines, “that tomorrow…we’ll live as the wealthy live, we are in truth conditioned to expect very little of our lives. It feels closed off to us to enjoy life.”
Nathan captures the essence of humanity and personal trauma in an addictively entertaining nutshell: agonize, feel torment, promise to act and change, only to let it fade and backslide as we get distracted by desire and guilt. Afterward, we repeat the process, even as we understand the futility of it all. Only with the perspective of time can we measure transformation. George and Madeline part after the trip to Las Vegas, but his evolution continues. Looking back, he remembers, “People talked about that night…for the rest of their lives.”
George ultimately finds what he’s looking for, far from the madness of Hollywood. “There is,” Nathan writes, “very little to say of joy.… It may be that’s what’s so special about it, that it’s nondescript, even banal.” Yet, even if we may not recognize or define joy until long after it has passed, The Future Was Color reveals that our pursuit of it is never inconsequential. In fact, you might say, it is the most important journey we can undertake.•
Erik Himmelsbach-Weinstein is the director of communications for the California Native Vote Project. He spent more than five years as the senior director of video for sports and features for the Los Angeles Times and has worked as an editor at Spin, Los Angeles Reader, and Orange Coast. His work as a documentary writer-producer has appeared on VH1, ESPN, the Food Network, and NBC.
