My brain is pretty much elsewhere at this point, so I'm not recalling if Daniel Fuchs gave all those funky names out to the characters in the source novel--though I'm virtually certain that Shubunka is front & center. (Fuchs' three "Williamsburg" novels are focused around Jewish life in 1930s Brooklyn, with LOW COMPANY pushing into an area that was ripe for something akin to a noir treatment.)
Fuchs was highly ambivalent about Hollywood, and alternated between snobbery and slack-jawed wonder at the frenzied focus of the industry once a film was put into production. Because of his own protracted crisis of confidence as a writer and his "of two minds" attitude by Tinseltown, he did best when adapting the work of others (i.e. Don Tracy's pulp novel CRISS CROSS, and Sutton Vane's semi-supernatural play "Outward Bound," which Warners filmed as BETWEEN TWO WORLDS). His biggest industry success, however, was LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME, from his own story, for which he won an Oscar. (Eddie played this in NC a number of years ago--we leave it to others to determine just how "noir" it is.)
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