Sikov notes that the term screwball came from baseball: it was coined in the 1930s

to suggest an erratic pitch meant to confuse the batter. It became especially popular when,

at the All-Star Game of 1934, New York Giant Carl Hubbell surprisingly "struck out five

future Hall-of-Famers in a row-Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons, and

Joe Cronin-all with screwballs" (Sikov 19). The fur coat moment similarly strikes out

the traditional narrative about Classic Hollywood. Even if only for an instant, it reveals

the contradictions that lie just below the surface and between the folds. The mysterious

coat becomes a perfectly fitting metaphor for the fortuitous juxtaposition of Classic

Hollywood and Surrealism, experienced not in the planned collaborations between the

European emigres and the Hollywood natives but in the unplanned moments that

happened by chance during the mid-1930s, as the world was making the transition from

one chaotic disaster, the Great Depression, to another, the Second World War. In these

unplanned moments, Hollywood itself begins to resemble Surrealist Paris, no longer a

linear and homogenous city, but a "little universe," where "ghostly signals flash from the

traffic, and inconceivable analogies are the order of the day" ("Surrealism" 231).

 "Hey, What's the Big Idea Anyway?"

 In Sturges's Sullivan's Travels (1941), a Hollywood director, displeased with the

studio system of filmmaking, endeavors to make an epic about the essential meaning of

poverty. John "Sully" Sullivan believes that filmmaking ought to focus more on grand

themes. So, he sets out dressed in rags, which he ironically finds in the studio's costume

department, to write his substantial thesis on poverty, to be titled "0 Brother, Where Art

Thou?" At first, it is difficult to leave the studio system behind and realize his riches-to-

rags tale. Every time he hitches a ride out of Hollywood, he inadvertently finds his way