"Schmucks with Underwoods"

Treated more like factory workers than artists, Hollywood screenwriters -- currently threatening to strike -- have never gotten much respect. Do they deserve it?

By Laura Miller

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Oct. 25, 2007 | "A screenwriter is not really a writer; his words do not appear on the screen. What he does is to draft out blueprints that are executed by a team." So wrote Paul Schrader, writer of "Taxi Driver" and co-writer of "Raging Bull," two of the greatest films of the late 1970s -- though chances are you were only dimly aware of that, and think of them both as Martin Scorsese pictures. That the writer on any film project is regarded as a second-class talent, negligible at best and a nuisance at worst, is one of the hoariest chestnuts of the movie industry, and even the writers themselves can't seem to help polishing it every now and then. So Marc Norman -- a screenwriter himself, winner of an Academy Award for "Shakespeare in Love" -- abundantly documents in his new book, "What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting."

Last week, American screenwriters (for television as well as film) overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike, their first in nearly 20 years, if their union, the Writers Guild of America, can't agree to a new contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Rather than settling cutting-edge issues like Internet and cellphone rights, they are going to the mat over several long-standing quarrels left over from a previous contract, most surprisingly (to some) the payment of residuals, royalties dispensed to writers whenever their work is resold in another format -- cable, home video and other technologies. According to reports, it came up again as part of an elaborate dance of feints and parries typical to labor negotiations, but it testifies to the way that, for writers in Hollywood, resentment never dies; there's always another kick coming along to revive it.

Why should this be? A good script seems an essential ingredient of a good movie, and what director in his right mind would start filming without one? D.W. Griffith, for one. Norman launches his book with a description of the making, in 1914, of "The Birth of a Nation," an ideologically dubious, decidedly racist but nevertheless seminal picture that was apparently shot without a screenplay. Of course, there had already been a play, based on a novel, "The Klansman," that Griffith knew well. (He'd acted in the play.) But the tendency of a mere stack of paper to seem irrelevant once you have cameras rolling, horses galloping and girls screaming for help was established at the very beginning.

The long, sad saga of mistreatment at the hands of ruthless moguls and Napoleonic directors unfolds from there. Mack Sennett, director of the Keystone Kops and other classic silent comedies, kept a team of writers working in his "Gag Room" in cell-like conditions, without telephones or newspapers, and forbade them to eat anything beside a tuna sandwich and milk for lunch because "eating heavy stuff makes writers logy." Jack Warner, of Warner Brothers Studios, called his staff writers "schmucks with Underwoods" and used to sneak over to their building to check that the typewriters were going. The infamously nasty Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures did the same thing, and when he heard the clacking of keys as he passed the window, would scream, "Liars!"

Norman attributes some of this animosity to the essential mystery of the writing process. To the tough, practical, working-class men who founded the movie industry, it looked suspiciously like loafing. "None of them were quite sure what a screenwriter did," he writes, "or even how he did it. Certainly he or she delivered an artifact, a screenplay, that worked or didn't, but where did it come from? ... Did it take them a year to write a screenplay, or only one day and then they waited a year to hand it in? There was no telling because nobody could see the work occur."

That's the thing about any kind of writing: It may be difficult, but it sure looks easy -- you can do it in your pj's! Until the advent of reality TV talent shows like "American Idol," most of us existed in blissful ignorance of the sheer number of completely untalented people who remain convinced that they are destined for stardom. But consider this: Although practically anyone can instantly recognize tone-deafness when they hear it, in a world where fewer and fewer people read at all, bad writers can go on believing in their (unappreciated) genius indefinitely.

People realistic enough to recognize they're not cut out to be actors or directors can nonetheless persuade themselves -- after reading a manual or two or by taking one of Robert McKee's famous "story seminars" -- that they can write. In recent decades, as Norman observes, this has led to jokes about "how everybody in Los Angeles was busy writing something; industry professionals were constantly having manuscripts thrust at them by hairdressers, by pool men, by their shrinks." And why not, when an editor and art director from Esquire magazine seemingly pulled the original screenplay for "Bonnie and Clyde" out of nowhere in 1965, launching two brilliant, glamorous, lucrative careers?

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