Peter Bart: The Flying Pucks Of ‘Heated Rivalry’ Remind Studios How A Buzzy Novel Can Be A Real Power Play

“All we need is one game-changer,” Jack Warner used to tell his troops when studio movies hit a bad patch. “One hit can change the town.”

Warner would be bemused that a series of novels called Game Changers is energizing the streaming sector, one of them becoming a surprise hit for Warner Bros. Discovery’s HBO Max. The steamy LGBTQ-tilted series Heated Rivalry about the secret romantic ties between two Canadian hockey stars is the creation of a formerly obscure Nova Scotia homemaker named Rachel Reid.

The concept of Heated Rivalry bounced between HBO and Netflix in Australia, Canada and Hollywood before gaining its green light. Its success is a reminder of the increased importance of the novel in streamerville — witness the omniscience of Bridgerton, Game of Thrones or even The Summer I Turned Pretty as multi-part events. Or even Dungeon Crawler Carl (with its “Parade of Horribles”). On a heavier level, Netflix’s bet on 1989 British trilogy House of Cards stoked its re-invention as a creative force.

Novels, too, were the basis this year of movies like One Battle After Another and The Housemaid. Historically, of course, studio schedules drew heavily on the works of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Margaret (Gone with the Wind) Mitchell, with heralded literati like William Faulkner, Ben Hecht or Fitzgerald also becoming overpaid failures as screenplay “fixers.”

The hard-drinking, hyper-sensitive Fitzgerald himself would have winced at any of the five adaptations of The Great Gatsby. All received difficult receptions with critics and at the box office.

Revered writers have also regularly tried their hand at another troublesome milestone, the Hollywood Novel. Across several generations, readers suffered through the star-gazing genre like Sky Rocket, absurdist efforts like Merton at the Movies and also the manic depressive Day of the Locust.

The recurring theme: Hollywood, through all of its epochs, has remained a uniquely disturbing place to live or work in. The Hollywood Novel thus evolved into “a conceit and a mirage,” in the words of Budd Schulberg, the son of a studio chief who wrote What Makes Sammy Run.

A more lighthearted take on this genre unfolds in Queer People, a funny and intriguing novel originally published in 1930 that will be republished this spring by Felix Farmer Press. Its cast of characters is idiosyncratic rather than “gay” in the contemporary sense, their careers massively disrupted by the birth of the talkie.

Its protagonist, Richard White Jr., attempts careers as a reporter, publicist, murder suspect and pianist at a bordello, intersecting a range of tyrannical studio chiefs and malevolent producers.

Written by brothers Carroll and Garret Graham, Queer People generated good reviews and enough buzz to be optioned for a movie but was never produced. In Its final chapter, its protagonist is happily seated on a boat steaming away from California and headed for a destination hopefully less disturbing.

Rachel Reid, on the other hand, continues to generate an inventory of Game Changers, her agents urgently reminding her to keep that puck flying. Her show has sprouted a range of boisterous Heated Rivalry events and theme nights at clubs in Canada and New York, and guaranteed a second season.