Hollywood, the utterance falls to the ear like an enchantment. LIGHTS. ACTION. Hollywood, whispering dreams across time. Circa 2023. CUT. Hollywood on strike. Dreams grind to a halt. Reality streams...

The first group to go on strike in Hollywood this year has been the Writers Guild of America, comprising screenwriters. Their quarrel with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers has to do with minimum wages and terms of employment, but that you already know. What you might want to know is that writers have always had a conflicted relationship with Hollywood. For every successful writer, there were hundreds who failed or felt cheated and excluded. In 1994, Jorja Prover, an anthropologist who studied Hollywood, wrote, “… the writers were seen as essential but unremarkable." Her book, a product of her research, is titled No One Knows Their Names: Screenwriters in Hollywood.

Writers' Block

When the films transitioned from silent to talkies --- in the late 1920s and 1930s --- there was a surge in demand for writers. Many playwrights, novelists, poets and journalists played the Hollywood hand. Nathanael West, who is today remembered for his novel The Day of the Locust, was a screenwriter. So was Aldous Huxley; he wrote the screenplays of Pride and Prejudice (1940) Jane Eyre (1943). He even wrote a script of Alice in Wonderland, but Disney found it “too literary”. It is said that during the golden period of screenwriters, there were as many as seven of them working on a single movie script of a big studio. In an essay titled The Writer in American Films, Stephen Farber writes, “Movies were seldom written. They were yelled into existence in conferences that kept going in saloons, brothels and all-night poker games.”

The Sound And the Fury

The script was a continuously and randomly evolving and improvised thing. And that is possibly the overarching reason/excuse for many omissions and commissions. Take for instance, the iconic film Casablanca (1942). Its acknowledged screenwriters are Julius and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch. But, according to Frank Miller, who wrote a book on the making of the film, the ending of the film came from Casey Robinson who is not mentioned in the credits. Miller said in an interview: “He was the first to suggest Rick’s sending Ilsa off for the good of the cause.” The Author of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, moved to Hollywood towards the end of his life — he died at 44. Fitzgerald was not very successful as a screenwriter. You would not have seen his name on the credits, but he worked on the screenplay of Gone with the Wind too. Speaking of which, here is an anecdote. Clark Rhett Gables meets William Faulkner on a dove hunting trip organised by Hollywood director Howard Hawks. Faulkner apart from being a novelist was quite a successful screenwriter at Hollywood. He was a friend of director Hawks and got a lot of work from him for a good many years. So Gable says to him, “Oh, do you write, Mr. Faulkner?” Faulkner replies, “Yeah. What do you do, Mr. Gable?”