Hollywood was built on the work of underappreciated writers

Just ask Chandler, Faulkner and Fitzgerald.

A friendly reminder: It’s not content. It’s STORIES! Crafted by writers that helped to create and sustain the film, then the television business. There would be no studios, no networks had it not been for writers bringing stories into existence week after week, year after year, fueling the economic system which is Hollywood.

Here is an L.A. Times article to provide a history lesson about the importance of writers in Hollywood … and the persistent lack of respect for the key contribution writers provide the process of cinematic storytelling.

In 1945, barely two years into Raymond Chandler’s career as a screenwriter, the man whose hard-boiled fiction did much to make film noir into an art form had already wearied of the town and its treatment of writers.

“Hollywood is a showman’s paradise. But showmen make nothing; they exploit what someone else has made,” he wrote in an acerbic essay published in the Atlantic.

In barbed zinger after zinger, the man who gave us private investigator Philip Marlowe described Hollywood as a cauldron of “egos,” “credit stealing” and “self-promotion” where scribes were ruthlessly neglected, marginalized and stripped of respect; toiling at the mercy of producers, some of whom, he wrote, had “the artistic integrity of slot machines and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur.”

Nearly 80 years after Chandler excoriated the industry, a new generation of scribes says that not much has changed and has taken to the picket lines to denounce the pileup of indignities.

Long unappreciated, writers for the screen big and small complain this time around that they are now not simply undervalued but underpaid too. In the era of Peak TV and the rise of powerful disruptors like Netflix and Amazon, they say profits have ballooned for the studios and their executives who’ve reaped billions, while they’ve been streamrolled — subjected to worsening working conditions and deprived of a sustainable living.

The article cites notable writers who worked in Hollywood including Herman Mankiewicz, Dorothy Parker, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It also cites one of my favorite Hollywood anecdotes.

Irving Thalberg, the first great Hollywood producer, had a contentious relationship with writers. In a meeting with some writers at MGM, Thalberg is quoted as saying, “What’s all this business about being a writer? It’s just putting one word after another.”

To which Lenore Coffee responded: “Pardon me, Mr. Thalberg; it’s putting one right word after another.’”

Putting. One. Right. Word. After. Another.

Writers know how to tell stories.

If producers could do that … why don’t they?

If studio executives could do that … why don’t they?

The fact is, with very rare exception, they can’t.

That’s why they need writers.

And that frustrates the hell out of them. Hence, their current greed-inspired wet dream about AI replacing writers.

AI may produce content. But it cannot write stories. Not anything worth filming.

When you look at the proposals the WGA presented to the AMPTP, they are extensive and important. But just as writers are adept at creating subtext in dialogue, those proposals have a subtext of their own and that is …

Respect.

Along with everything else, we want respect. Something the entertainment industry has assiduously refused to give us for a century.

For the rest of the L.A. Times article, go here.

For the latest updates on the strike and news resources, go here.

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