Hollywood's embrace of writers hit its stride in the 1930s. William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathaniel West, and William Saroyan were among those called west to write for the newly emerging sound film. The voices that gave their writings such uniqueness rarely transferred into films and were often sacrificed to create commodities for popular audiences increasingly enthralled with movie going. How, then, would a black writer in Hollywood fare? Not many were given the opportunity, and those who arrived were disappointed, as in the case of Langston Hughes who went to Los Angeles to work on the 1939 film Way Down South. Rather than realistic portraits, Hughes found reproductions of the very stereotypes he and other writers were trying to deconstruct. He noted, “Of course, Negro novelists do not sell their novels to motion pictures. No motion picture studio in America, in all the history of motion pictures, has yet dared make one single picture using any of the fundamental dramatic values of negro life – not one. Not one picture. On the screen we are servants, clowns, or fools. Comedy relief. Droll and very funny. Such Negro material as is used by the studios is very rarely written by Negroes” (“To Negro Writers” 128). Other African American writers who attempted to work in Hollywood included Wallace Thurman who wrote for Warner Brothers and Zora Neale Hurston who had been hired by Paramount.

While not being allowed significant input into the representations of blacks in movies, black writers were surrounded by white writers’ imaginings. The early twentieth century saw many films by white directors that framed blacks in expected ways. Several versions of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin stood in for portrayals of black life. The Selig Polyscopic Company filmed a traveling Uncle Tom troupe to produce Uncle Tom's Cabin's Parade (1903). Edwin S. Porter made a silent Uncle Tom's Cabin or Slavery Days (1903) and Universal Pictures invested two million dollars in their Uncle Tom's Cabin (dir. Harry A. Pollard, 1927). D. W. Griffith's virtuosic The Birth of a Nation (1915) and David O. Selznick's Gone with the Wind (1939) would permanently cement these images in popular American culture. Géza van Radványi's 1965 German Onkle Toms Hütte (using Serbian farmers in blackface) showed that such representations had longevity and international reach.