Negotiations went nowhere, especially when Waugh discovered that MGM’s executives saw Brideshead as a love story, missing the profoundly religious theme of the novel.
where ideas uprooted from their traditions, become oddly changed in translation”-namely a booming post-war California, the very personification of America to the world. The offer was too good to pass up, especially as Britain was suffering through one of the awful phases of its age of austerity: shortages of just about everything, plus a bitter winter.Īnd so in January 1947 Waugh set off for another one of what he called those “distant and barbarous places. To make matters even more tempting, the studio also agreed to pay Waugh $2,000 per week during his stay and put him up at a first-class Hollywood hotel. To sweeten the offer, MGM invited Waugh and his wife to Hollywood for seven weeks to discuss and finalize an arrangement. The offer was tempting: the studio would pay Waugh $150,000-an enormous sum equivalent to $1.5 million today-for the rights to the novel. In 1947, the chronically financially challenged Waugh was approached by MGM about making a film of Brideshead. But just three years after Brideshead, Waugh returned to his first theme in what is perhaps the bitterest yet one of the funniest of his comic works: The Loved One (1948). Edmund Wilson argued that there were two Evelyn Waughs: the great comic genius of his early novels- Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), Scoop (1938)-and the religiously obsessed author of Brideshead Revisited (1945), whose success made Waugh internationally famous and in Wilson’s view no longer interesting.
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