Hollywood tales

“Writers rarely received long contracts to begin with, their talent being seen as more provisional, not groomable, like actors. While sound [in 1927] drove the studios to scour New York for anybody capable of writing words in quotation marks and hundreds more writers — playwrights, novelists, short story writers — quested westward, few stayed on, perhaps one in four. Contracts for these arrivals were generally short and low-paying, rich by Depression standards but meager for Hollywood, only a few hundred dollars a week for a few months, sometimes a few weeks… Dore Schary was in a draft of four young playwrights ushered into Harry Cohn’s office at Columbia in 1932. The others were Larry Frank, Gilbert Pohle, and Lou Levenson; vetting them, besides Cohn, were Walter Wanger, Frank Capra, and Robert Riskin. Cohn lit a cigar and asked Frank what he wanted to write. Schary remembered:

I winced as Larry, losing his poise, burbled, ‘I’d like to do a story about a gangster’s moll. I believe these women have been neglected in crime movies’… I could read the quick negative attitude of our audience. Levenson was next… he essayed that he would like to write a tough, honest, true, real, hard-boiled newspaper story. Since Front Page had already furrowed that territory, it seemed doubtful to the jury that Levenson could outdo [Ben] Hecht and [Charles] MacArthur. So it was two down and two to go. Gilbert was next at bat, and he boldly declared, ‘I write like Noel Coward.’ That was three down, and Cohn called on me. I said that all day I had felt like a milk bottle waiting to be delivered, and I would write what I was asked to write, and do my best to make it good. Cohn chuckled and said to the others, ‘I told you, Walter, he was no dame.’

Of the four, only Schary lasted.

 — from “What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting,” by Marc Norman