“Writers in Hollywood,” Raymond Chandler

I can’t remember who sent me this link — HT to you whoever you are! — but this is pretty special. This is an article written by Raymond Chandler in 1945 in Atlantic magazine. It you check his credits on IMDB, apart from his novels and stories, he has only a handful of actual screen or TV writing credits: Double Indemnity (screenplay by Chandler and Billy Wilder), And Now Tomorrow (screenplay by Chandler and Frank Partos), The Unseen (a shared adaptation credit), Strangers on a Train (shared screen play credit), and one episode of “77 Sunset Strip” (shared teleplay credit). In fact the only sole credit Chandler has, as far as I can tell, is Blue Dahlia. So perhaps one can understand both his sympathy for screenwriters yet loathing for the craft. An excerpt from his lengthy piece:

I hold no brief for Hollywood. I have worked there a little over two years, which is far from enough to make me an authority, but more than enough to make me feel pretty thoroughly bored. That should not be so. An industry with such vast resources and such magic techniques should not become dull so soon. An art which is capable of making all but the very best plays look trivial and contrived, all but the very best novels verbose and imitative, should not so quickly become wearisome to those who attempt to practice it with something else in mind than the cash drawer. The making of a picture ought surely to be a rather fascinating adventure. It is not; it is an endless contention of tawdry egos, some of them powerful, almost all of them vociferous, and almost none of them capable of anything much more creative than credit-stealing and self-promotion.

Hollywood is a showman’s paradise. But showmen make nothing; they exploit what someone else has made. The publisher and the play producer are showmen too; but they exploit what is already made. The showmen of Hollywood control the making — and thereby degrade it. For the basic art of motion pictures is the screenplay; it is fundamental, without it there is nothing. Everything derives from the screenplay, and most of that which derives is an applied skill which, however adept, is artistically not in the same class with the creation of a screenplay. But in Hollywood the screenplay in written by a salaried writer under the supervision of a producer — that is to say, by an employee without power or decision over the uses of his own craft, without ownership of it, and, however extravagantly paid, almost without honor for it.

I am aware that there are colorable economic reasons for the Hollywood system of “getting out the script.” But I am not much interested in them. Pictures cost a great deal of money — true. The studio spends the money; all the writer spends is his time (and incidentally his life, his hopes, and all the varied experiences, most of them painful, which finally made him into a writer) — this also is true. The producer is charged with the salability and soundness of the project — true. The director can survive few failures; the writer can stink for ten years and still make his thousand a week — true also. But entirely beside the point.

I am not interested in why the Hollywood system exists or persists, nor in learning out of what bitter struggles for prestige it arose, nor in how much money it succeeds in making out of bad pictures. I am interested only in the fact that as a result of it there is no such thing as an art of the screenplay, and there never will be as long as the system lasts, for it is the essence of this system that it seeks to exploit a talent without permitting it the right to be a talent. It cannot be done; you can only destroy the talent, which is exactly what happens — when there is any to destroy.

Chandler ends the piece with an intriguing quote: “For the very nicest thing Hollywood can possibly think of to say to a writer is that he is too good to be only a writer.”

Of course, this is back in the old studio days where writers signed long-term contracts, wrote for hire, and were expected to produce a specific number of pages per week, working — literally — bankers hours. All that has changed, but some of the dynamics Chandler discusses in the article still persist.

By the way, Chandler and Wilder despised each other. As I recall on Double Indemnity, they ended up dividing the work day into two parts so that one would come in early to the studio office to work on their portion of the script, then the other would clock in later. If someone has a link to any anecdotes about their ‘working’ relationship, please post in comments.

For more of the 1945 article, go here.

UPDATE: Found this excerpt from a interview with Wilder in The Paris Review. Priceless stuff.

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