The Writer and Hollywood

The recent strike by screenwriters in Hollywood resolved in time for this year’s Academy Awards ceremony has renewed my interest in the artistic or economic interactions between authors and the film industry. Author Alexander King once stated: “The films take our best ideas. We work like slaves, inventing, devising, changing to please the morons who run this game. We spend endless hours in search of novel ideas and, in the end, what do we get for it? A lousy fortune!” Film producer Sam Spiegel once quipped: “Fifty thousand dollars for your thoughts.”

That the relationship between writers and the leaders of the film industry has always been strained, at times antagonistic, and that in many cases the situation continues today, is almost a given fact in Hollywood. Nevertheless, when young untested novelists can collect a million dollars for screen rights to their unpublished manuscripts and even the average screenwriter can command hundreds of thousands of dollars just to polish a film script, the writers’ reluctance to work with Hollywood becomes difficult for most moviegoers to comprehend.

Perhaps this inability to understand the confrontational relationship between writers and film producers is the result of a failure to grasp the complexity of the conflicts at work in such a kinship. After all, any investigation of the history of the relationship between the writer and Hollywood may reveal as much about the impact the cinema has had on American literary art and American society as it does about the positions of the principal parties involved.

No one would deny that the art of filmmaking was altered forever when the narrative forms of literature were introduced to the cinema on those early days of the silent-film era. As has been noted, D.W. Griffith’s adaptation of Thomas Dixon’s novel, The Clansman, into a movie masterpiece with controversial content, Birth of a Nation, not only readjusted the expectations for fiction in film by the growing American audience, but also further defined the way in which future directors would view their own medium.

As Francois Truffaut stated: “When cinema was invented, it was initially used to record life, like an extension of photography. It became an art when it moved away from the documentary. It was at this point that it was acknowledged as no longer a means of mirroring life, but a medium by which to intensify it.” Thus, the dominant form for filmmakers became fictional storytelling on screen. Accompanying the acceptance of plays and novels as legitimate sources for narrative film, directors discovered they often had to make an effort to enter into an uneasy alliance with the playwrights and novelists who gave birth to those narratives.

During the silent-film era, difficulties between novelists and filmmakers did not occur on a large scale. Still, in the beginning, as the first books were adapted for the screen, film producers did attempt to reject any arguments that fees ought to be paid for screen rights, declaring that the publicity received by both the book and its author would be ample reimbursement for all rights. When the courts upheld the claims of authors for monetary compensation, the economic concerns of novelists and playwrights were protected; however, an additional regard for retention of authorial rights was forfeited. The writer relinquished any entitlement to power over the production process of the film when the business transaction took place, except in the rare occurrence that this aspect was otherwise covered in the contract.

The film studios acceded to the demands for payment of writers but held firm on contract concessions that would surrender any power or control over the final film product. Anyway, at the time such statements were considered unnecessary by most writers and, therefore, did not appear in the contracts. In the 1920s, the novel was a prominent art form, and American novelists—led by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway—were among the country’s noted celebrities. In addition, along with the literary critics and academics, most American fiction writers did not take cinema seriously as an art form or as a potential source of competition, a rival.

Even into the 1930s, Hollywood was merely a place for a novelist to make some quick cash between publications, as clearly illustrated in the biographical accounts of Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, both of whom despised working in Hollywood. Each detested the artificiality of its environment, mistrusted the motives of its inhabitants, and questioned the worth of its work, but neither could refuse the lucrative offers originating from the West Coast. Faulkner summed up his attitude toward working in film when he commented: “Hollywood is the only place in the world where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.”

Writers who in the 1920s viewed the movies as harmless diversions not worthy of serious consideration soon came to see films as a threat to their positions in society and to their art. The economic depression of the 1930s forced Americans to clutch more tightly to their income—that portion spent in nonessential areas, including entertainment, lessened—and the cost of a movie ticket was cheaper than the cover price of a novel. When fewer novels were bought, fewer were published, while the production of films flourished. With a few exceptions, novelists lost their position as celebrities, replaced by the larger-than-life figures of the silver screen. Perhaps most importantly, with the transition from silent films to all-talking features, filmmakers trespassed upon territory formerly the exclusive property of the playwrights and novelists—words.

Directors now had the ability to alter the language—perhaps to tailor the words used by the novel’s narrator or play’s characters—in order to suit the cinematography, and even Shakespeare's words were not immune to this. Many writers felt their work violated in the process. The attitude of screenwriters seemed no better. In 1933, James M. Cain wrote: “Of the three hundred or so writers actually employed in Hollywood, I suppose I know fifty, and I don’t know one who doesn’t dislike movie work, and wish he could afford to quit it.” Cain was one of the few novelists able to adjust to writing for film. Working in Hollywood for nearly two decades (1931-1948), he understood that cinema represented a separate medium, a separate art form, and to expect re-creation of another medium was unrealistic, perhaps even undesirable.

As Cain explained: “That thing up there isn’t primarily the record of a novel, a play, or a story. It is a series of photographed pictures.” The logical conclusion one could infer, therefore, was that those who control what pictures appear and in which order they are presented would possess the power, would be the medium’s true authors.

By the end of the twentieth century writers were beginning to take advantage of this knowledge. For decades American authors followed advice similar to that once rendered by John Updike when he suggested that the author ought “to take the money and run. And hide, ideally. For the author owes, at least, his Hollywood benefactors a tactful silence.” This recommendation was seconded by Nicholas Delbanco, a former student of Updike who has had his own negative reactions to seeing his novel transferred to film, when he counseled writers to “follow Woody Allen’s wisdom, to ‘take the money and run,’ and avoid dealing with film people.”