Nothing New Under the Sun - Hollywood Writers

Sometimes genuine anger flared in these humorous plaints. "My chief memory of movieland," Ben Hecht wrote, "is one of asking in the producer's office why I must change the script, eviscerate it, cripple and hamstring it? Why must I strip the hero of his few semi-intelligent remarks and why must I tack on a corny ending that makes the stomach shudder? Half of all the movie writers argue in this fashion. The other half writhe in silence, and the psychoanalyst's couch or the liquor bottle claim them both." Hecht continued to write for the movies up until his death in 1964, but in his later years he devoted more and more of his time to several volumes of memoirs.

Lillian Hellman also wrote of the endless, purposeless story conferences she attended: "It was then, and often still is, the custom to talk for weeks and months before the writer is allowed to touch the typewriter. Such conferences were called breaking the back of the story." In 1966, after a long absence from film, Hellman was hired by producer Sam Spiegel and director Arthur Penn to write the screenplay for an ambitious movie about Southern bigotry called The Chase. It turned out to be a bloated disaster, and Hellman spoke to an interviewer about team playing in Hollywood. "Decision by democratic majority vote is a fine form of government," Hellman said, "but it's a stinking way to create. So two other writers were called in, and that made four with Mr. Spiegel and Mr. Penn, and what was intended as a modest picture about some aimless people on an aimless Saturday night got hot and large, and all the younger ladies in it have three breasts. Well, it is far more painful to have your work mauled about and slicked up than to see it go in a wastebasket." After that experience Hellman vowed never to write another movie script, and she kept her promise. Like Ben Hecht, she turned her attention to autobiographical prose. She returned to Hollywood occasionally to visit friends, and to consult with the producers when one of her reminiscences, Pentimento, was bought for the movies, but she refused all offers to write screenplays.

Despite their amusement at the boorishness of their bosses, most of these writers, like Hellman, began to experience a painful sense of frustration after an extended stay in Hollywood. In 1938, after a whole series of misad-ventures on scripts that were either rewritten or shelved, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his daughter, "You don't realize that what I am doing here is the last tired effort of a man who once did something finer and better...."

William Faulkner wrote an equally forlorn letter to Jack Warner in 1945, begging to be released from his studio contract. "I feel that I have made a bust at moving picture writing," Faulkner complained. "During my three years (including leave-suspensions) at Warner's, I did the best work I knew how on five or six scripts. Only two were made and I feel that I received credit on these not on the value of the work I did but partly through the friendship of director Howard Hawks. So I have spent three years doing work (trying to do it) which was not my forte and which I was not equipped to do, and therefore I have misspent time which as a 47-year-old novelist I could not afford to spend. And I don't dare misspend any more of it."

In another letter Faulkner expressed his deepest fears of what could happen to a writer trapped in Hollywood: "I don't like the climate, the people, their way of life. Nothing ever happens and then one morning you wake up and find that you are sixty-five."

Faulkner did get out of Hollywood and went back to Mississippi to resume his true vocation as a novelist. Similarly, S. J. Perelman fled California and ended his days in New York, trying to recapture the spirit of the Algonquin Round Table. Herman Mankiewicz, who had begun as a playwright and essayist, was not so lucky. He was seduced by the riches of Hollywood, and he failed to break away. Shortly before his death at the age of 56, Herman wrote his own bitter epitaph: "I don't know how it is that you start working at something you don't like, and before you know it, you're an old man." That chilling line sums up the disillusionment of writers in Hollywood; beneath their witty gibes, the alienation they felt in a town that never honored their achievements had its genuinely tragic dimension.

On the other hand, their travels among the Hollywood caliphs and commoners provided them with plenty of juicy material for their novels and plays. From Once in a Lifetime and The Day of the Locust to David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow, gifted writers have found tremendous creative stimulation in the kingdom of kitsch. They all felt a mixture of attraction and revulsion toward the business that paid their bills. Or as Samuel Goldwyn once told Billy Wilder when Wilder was feeling discouraged about a picture, "You gotta take the sour with the bitter."

__________________________

Stephen Farber is the author of Hollywood dynasties, and he is our regular film critic.

Pages: 1 2 3 4