The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (8 page)

Writers who specialized in dialogue and incorporated words and language into their work were suddenly in high demand. Screenwriters who got their start during this time included Nichols, Ring Lardner Jr., John Bright (who wrote
The Public Enemy
and
She Done Him Wrong
), Herman Mankiewicz (writer of
Dinner at Eight
and
Citizen Kane
), Laurence Stallings (writer of
The Big Parade
and
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
), Nunnally Johnson (who wrote
The Grapes of Wrath
and
The Woman in the Window
), and Alvah Bessie (who wrote
Objective, Burma!
). After Mankiewicz arrived in Hollywood in 1925, his unofficial and ironically titled “Fresh Air Fund” lured a dozen more East Coast writers out to the Los Angeles sunshine.
³⁶
He famously sent a telegram to his friend Ben Hecht: “WILL YOU ACCEPT THREE HUNDRED PER WEEK TO WORK FOR PARAMOUNT PICTURES. ALL EXPENSES PAID. THE THREE HUNDRED IS PEANUTS. MILLIONS ARE TO BE GRABBED OUT HERE AND YOUR ONLY COMPETITION IS IDIOTS. DON’T LET THIS GET AROUND.”
³⁷
Julius Epstein also received a telegram from writer friends in Hollywood: “OFFER YOU A JOB AS OUR SECRETARY. $25 A WEEK. ROOM AND BOARD. HOP A BUS.” He arrived on a Friday evening in October 1933, and by midnight he
was writing a scene that was due on Monday. “On Sunday they took me to the Paramount Theatre and the picture was
College Humor
, with Bing Crosby and Mary Carlisle. And they said to me, ‘That’s a close-up, that’s a fade-out.’ They gave me what was later to be a four-year college film school education in one afternoon.”
³⁸
By 1935, Epstein and his brother Philip were writing dozens of pictures.

Threats of film censorship during this time were of increasing concern, for studios as well as for writers. Debates about censorship started in the 1910s with city and state film boards; demands for new laws controlling content appeared throughout the 1910s and 1920s.
³⁹
To circumvent censorship at the state and local levels, the studios created the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), which directed that all films conform to its “Don’ts and Be Carefuls” rules starting in 1927. These rules were replaced by a stricter Production Code in 1930, monitored by the newly formed Production Code Administration starting in 1934. Writers felt that these idiosyncratic mandates, though not officially censorship, were similarly oppressive. No divorces, no affairs, no representations of homosexuality.
⁴⁰
Ben Hecht, who scripted
Scarface, Spellbound
, and
Notorious
and was regularly called in as a script doctor, recounted the advice his friend and fellow scenarist Herman Mankiewicz gave him about writing characters according to Hollywood logic.

“I want to point out to you,” said Manky, “that in a novel a hero can lay ten girls and marry a virgin for a finish. In a movie this is not allowed. The hero, as well as the heroine, has to be a virgin. The villain can lay anybody he wants, have as much fun as he wants, cheating and stealing, getting rich and whipping the servants, but you have to shoot him in the end. When he falls with the bullet in his forehead, it is advisable that he clutch at the Gobelin tapestry on the library wall and bring it down over his head like a symbolic shroud. Also covered by such tapestry, the actor does not have to hold his breath while he is being photographed as a dead man.”
⁴¹

Some writers would try to add a few risqué scenes, hoping that one might survive the MPPDA’s vetting process and make it onto the screen.
⁴²
Writers were deeply frustrated by the limitations of censorship, as were producers: on this they could agree. But they could do little in the face of protests
from organizations such as the Catholic Legion of Decency. Overall, writers had to give producers what they wanted, no questions asked. And if they did not produce what was expected of them, producers would threaten to start pulling scripts from the more than 40,000 that arrived in Los Angeles annually from aspiring writers.
⁴³

With each studio churning out fifty to sixty films a year, studios were desperate for material. Novelists and dramatists were lured to Hollywood for their talent—and for their names. Aldous Huxley adapted
Pride and Prejudice
and
Jane Eyre
, P. G. Wodehouse reworked one of his short stories for
A Damsel in Distress
, Lillian Hellman wrote
Dead End
and adapted her play
The Little Foxes
, Nathanael West scripted
It Could Happen to You!
and
Five Came Back
, Dashiell Hammett wrote
Watch on the Rhine
, Dorothy Parker worked on the original
A Star Is Born
and
Saboteur
, George S. Kaufman wrote
A Night at the Opera
, Moss Hart adapted his play
Winged Victory
and wrote
Hans Christian Andersen
, and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote
Three Comrades
. Many arrived on the Santa Fe Railway’s Chief during the 1920s. However, it is worth noting that the first substantial wave left New York only
after
the literary market started to collapse. The migration was instigated by neither the coming of sound nor the stock market crash. Richard Fine estimates that 138 writers working in the Los Angeles film industry between 1927 and 1938 were eastern transplants, most from theater, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, and literary agencies.
⁴⁴
Of these, about 30 percent came before 1930; the percentage would increase to 50 percent by 1933. The rest came over the next few years. As John Schultheiss has documented, there was also a regular stream of British authors moving through Los Angeles during those years.
⁴⁵
Expatriate writers arrived from Europe in the mid-1930s, many of them fleeing the Nazis. Distinguished writers descended upon Los Angeles, renting out bungalows, basking in the sunshine, and trying to harness their skills for a new medium. Many considered screenwriting a sideline occupation secondary to their true profession. Some were quite successful; others found the pay and the parties more alluring than trying to work for boorish producers and studio heads.

The famous novelists courted by producers and invited to their parties often struggled in this new industry. One of those notoriously unmoored was F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was shocked when he came to Los Angeles and realized, “This is no art. This is an industry.”
⁴⁶
Thinking back on his first difficulties, Fitzgerald explained that he was not so much above the industry
as baffled by it. “The truth is that I got scared. I was scared by the hullaballoo over my arrival, and when they took me into a projection room to see a picture and kept assuring me it was all going to be very, very easy, I got flustered.”
⁴⁷
While he perfectly captured the characters of Hollywood in his novel
The Last Tycoon
, Fitzgerald, like many other writers, could not adapt his novelistic skills to script form. Billy Wilder, who wrote
Ninotchka, Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd
., and
Some Like it Hot
, described the irony of Fitzgerald’s failure in Hollywood: “He made me think of a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job. He did not know how to connect the pipes so that the water would flow.”
⁴⁸
Wilder’s comment speaks to a sense of hierarchy of the two writing forms: novel writing as art, screenwriting as skilled labor. And yet no single group of writers entering Hollywood succeeded more than another in terms of their ability to translate their talent to scriptwriting. Some playwrights had great success, as their knowledge of dialogue was invaluable, and journalists had the ability to write at great speed. Virtually all of them, though, had to adjust to the rules of Hollywood, where producers controlled not just the script but also the writers themselves through a legal contrivance known as the long-term contract.

IMAGE 7   Members of the social club The Writers. c. 1930.

Screen Writers’ Guild Records, 1921–1954, Writers Guild Foundation Archive, Shavelson-Webb Library, Los Angeles

Studio heads and producers were shrewd showmen and often ruthless overseers. Writers were expected to write every day on the job, as Jack Warner
reminded his stable with a memo. One of their key instruments of control was the seven-year contract, which stipulated that the studio had no obligation to hold on to a writer as an employee for more than six months at a time, but that the writer was obligated to remain with the studio under the terms of the original contract if the studio chose to exercise its semi-annual options, which it had the right to do for seven years. Some successful writers, like Philip and Julius Epstein, were quite prolific; the pair wrote seven scripts in 1935, all of which were made into films. But their success did not guarantee a pay raise.
⁴⁹
For young writers, this was a “kind of indentured servitude,”
⁵⁰
because the contract also transferred to the studio all rights to a writer’s material.

Studios even looked ahead, adding into contracts new technologies that were still in the development phase but might prove profitable down the road. For example, when the first television sets appeared in the late 1920s, even though telecommunication would not be a viable delivery system on a popular level until the late 1940s, the studios included clauses regarding television in writers’ contracts. Devery Freeman, who wrote
Ziegfeld Follies
and for
The Loretta Young Show
, remembered:

This was a time when . . . studios took the philosophy that when they hired a writer they were buying his ideas, they owned them forever in perpetuity. . . . My first contract . . . you would see that they would throw in everything but the kitchen sink in terms of the future. The future that they didn’t know about. They were tying up television rights. . . . Now [when I signed that contract,] television didn’t exist. . . . Perhaps a picture was being sent experimentally, but television didn’t exist. It was just a remote long-range billion-to-one shot theatrically to most of our way of thinking, yet, just on the off chance, it was put into contracts. I know it was in my contracts.
⁵¹

With control of content and of contracts, studio heads monitored writers, their writing, and, in many ways, writers’ ability to move up in status in Hollywood. Producers could change scripts at will without the writer’s agreement or even knowledge. Thalberg regularly had a series of writers working on the same script, not only to ensure that he could get the story he wanted, but also to guarantee that his stars would not be idled by a script delay.
Thalberg’s biographer explained: “In a deadline situation, he often sought the inspiration of two or more writers. He reasoned that he couldn’t afford to wait for one writer to come up with a solution he so sorely needed.”
⁵²
William Ludwig described the frustrations attached to this common practice: “You never knew who else was working on your material. There could be six, eight, ten, twelve [writers] working on the same thing. You didn’t know whose script was eventually going to be used or if any one script was going to be used. They might say they wanted my first scene and your
second scene and somebody would patch it together and you had no way of determining it.”
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IMAGE 8   After getting this letter from Jack Warner, writers Julius and Philip Epstein called a meeting with Warner to tell him they finally found the perfect ending to
Casablanca
. They came up with it at 8:30
A.M.

Screen Writers Guild Records, 1921–1954, Writers Guild Foundation Archive, Shavelson-Webb Library, Los Angeles

For this reason, writers had great difficulty in securing credits, even when they were deserved. Sometimes one writer would redraft another’s script entirely. Others became experts on endings, on love scenes, or in punching up comedy. Still, producers often assigned writers because they were available rather than because they were good at a particular type of script.
⁵⁴
Carey Wilson, who wrote
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
and
Mutiny on the Bounty
, was one of those writers Thalberg depended upon for last-minute rewrites. Whether Wilson’s changes were substantive or not, Thalberg always compensated him not just with pay but also with his name in the credits. Donald Ogden Stewart, who adapted
The Philadelphia Story
and
Holiday
for the screen, argued, much like Frederica Sagor, that the best way to ensure credit was to be the last writer before the start of production: “It became a game to be the last one before they started shooting so that you would not be eased out of screen credit.”
⁵⁵
Those writers who learned to work the system used their success to demand solo credits, to affiliate with a particular producer or director who appreciated their skills and respected their writing, or to become directors or producers themselves.
⁵⁶
Preston Sturges wrote and directed
Sullivan’s Travels
and
The Lady Eve
; Nunnally Johnson wrote and directed
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
and
The Three Faces of Eve
; Ernst Lubitsch wrote or co-wrote many of his films before coming to the United States and continued the tradition when he arrived in Hollywood; and Billy Wilder co-wrote and directed
The Lost Weekend, Sunset Blvd
., and
The Apartment
. Among those who became producers were Charles Brackett, who co-wrote and produced
The Lost Weekend
and
Sunset Blvd
.; Joan Harrison, who wrote
Rebecca
and
Foreign Correspondent
and produced
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
; and Dore Schary, who wrote
Boys Town
and later worked for many years as head of production at MGM and was eventually made president of the studio.