Hollywood Tales

“You cannot take entertainment only for the monetary point of view. The movies, from its very first beginning turned into a business, sausage factory and the writer and director who is also a pretty smart fellow — were both shoved out of the picture and the man with the money, the man with the biggest easy chair and the biggest desk, and the biggest office in the man who know what to do, and most movies about ninety percent of them were made in conference by producers, and the studio owners and they were representatives of the people who actually had the money control of the studios. Their whole objective as far as I was concerned, to make a movie that would make money. It wasn’t a wrong objective for people — it isn’t wrong with oil people or steel people — nothing wrong with the movie people to try to make money — but entertainment can’t be made that way — and it ended up, just as Hollywood ended up. There are no more big studios, producers are trying to get other forms of employment and the movies are dying because they killed off the people who could make them, the writer and the director. They took away their identity. I never knew when I was writing a movie, whether my heroine would end up being called Joe or Mabel or whether the locale would be Peking of Akron.”

 — screenwriter Ben Hecht (Wuthering Heights, Spellbound) from a 1958 interview


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