The Riverside Press-Enterprise
TO `Sunny Siberia'
For months, novelist Anthony Marra had been “pingponging” between two book ideas, one set in Los Angeles and one placed in Southern Italy. Then, at the end of a trip to the Italian island Lipari, where his great-grandmother’s family had lived, Marra noticed a plaque dedicated to those who had been exiled to the island during Mussolini’s regime.
He was reminded of something he found in his research on Los Angeles.
“German and Austrian emigrés would sometimes refer to L.A. as Sunny Siberia,” Marra says by phone from Oxford, Mississippi, where he had recently arrived for a stop on his book tour. “It struck me that the same term could have been applied to Southern Italy at the time. I realized that I wasn’t really choosing between two different books, but rather halves of the same novel, and it would tell the story of these two sunny Siberias on either ends of the world and this one family divided between them.”
The resulting book, the just-published “Mercury Pictures Presents,” connects World War Ii-era Hollywood, where a number of immigrants fleeing European fascism found success, with Mussolini’s Italy. The connection comes through the character Maria Lagana, who spent her childhood in Rome and adolescence in Los Angeles’ Lincoln Heights neighborhood, ultimately landing a job at a B-movie studio. After the U.S. enters the war, the studio pivots to making propaganda films. Meanwhile, Maria and her family, like many other Italian immigrants, have been labeled “enemy aliens.”
It’s a novel where characters are tasked with proving how American they are.
“Throughout the novel, everybody is constantly trying to reinvent themselves. Obviously, that’s one of the great, mythic archetypes of immigration to America, the idea that you can reinvent yourself,” says Marra. “But I think that idea becomes even more charged and even more fraught when you need to reinvent yourself in order to escape the very nation and nationality that you fled.”
With equal doses of comedy and tragedy, “Mercury Pictures Presents” explores the lives of a multi-ethnic group of Angelenos as the war progresses. “I think that both comedy and tragedy aren’t opposing forces, but rather different ways of approaching similar ideas,” says Marra.
Marra himself is from an Italian American family. “My dad grew up in Brooklyn. Initially, I was thinking about setting something in that world,” he says. “Of course, if you do that, you’re competing with Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, and who in their right mind would do that?”
But Marra had lived in Los Angeles for a period of time and he became interested in learning more about the Italian American communities that formed across the burgeoning metropolis.
“One of the periods that was most interesting to me was the period of World War II, when many Italian Americans, if they were still citizens of Italy, were classified as enemy aliens,” Marra says.
He adds, “You had this very strange situation in which people who had, oftentimes, fled from fascism arrived in L.A. only to be lumped in with the very persecutors that they had escaped.”
Marra points out that the Italian American Museum of Los Angeles has photos showing the cameras and radios that were confiscated from local Italian American residents.
“Obviously, it pales in comparison to what Japanese Americans endured during that same period of L.A. history, but it was this small window into a lost world that I really hadn’t heard or read much about previously,” he says.
Initially, Marra’s dive into the world in which “Mercury
Picture Presents” exists began with film, particularly those made by people who had immigrated to the U.S. “I’ve always been a huge fan of screwball comedies,” he says. “So movies by Ernst Lubitsch or Billy Wilder were my gateway into this world.”
Marra also points to the development of the film noir genre as a product of immigration. “One of the fascinating film aspects of the period is the emergence of film noir, which we see as this quintessentially American artistic medium, which it is, but it was really the creation of German emigré directors who blended German expressionist cinematography with hard-boiled American pulp,” he says. “I think that just watching the movies of the period, you can step back from them a little bit and try to piece together how they actually were created, how they came about. That became the rabbit hole that I tumbled down.”
It took time for Marra’s novel to unfold. He began working on what would become “Mercury Pictures Presents” in 2014, but it wasn’t until the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic that it truly took shape. At the time, he and his wife were living in a one-bedroom apartment in Massachusetts with a lot of closets. Marra turned one of those closets into a small office. “For the first time in quite a while, during the early days of the pandemic, I would get up every day and sit in my closet and feel like I was stepping into L.A. or Italy,” he says.
Over the seven years between the inception of “Mercury Pictures Presents” and the 2022 publication of the novel, Marra says, events that transpired in 21st century America resonated with the themes that drive the novel: fake news, for example. “It’s certainly something that these characters are dealing with as they create propaganda reels that combine documentary footage with staged reenactments,” says Marra.
Conspiracy theories, too, are something that impacts the L.A. in this novel. “The idea of conspiracy theories is something that really grips L.A. immediately after Pearl Harbor, when many in Los Angeles believed that L.A. would be the next city to come under attack,” says Marra. “This resulted in all kinds of outlandish conspiracy theories that today, we look back at with shame and a bit of horror.”
He adds, “There are certain things that reappear throughout our history. When we read the front page of the newspaper today, it’s maybe easy to lose track of the fact that some of these issues are things that we’ve been dealing with for a long time.”