Complaints by today’s Hollywood wordsmiths echo those of such forebears as Chandler, Parker and Fitzgerald. What they most want is respect.
In 1945, barely two years into Raymond Chandler’s career as a screenwriter, the man whose hard-boiled fiction did much to make film noir into an art form had already wearied of the town and its treatment of writers.
“Hollywood is a showman’s paradise. But showmen make nothing; they exploit what someone else has made,” he wrote in an acerbic essay published in the Atlantic.
In barbed zinger after zinger, the man who gave us private investigator Philip Marlowe described Hollywood as a cauldron of “egos,” “credit stealing” and “self-promotion” where scribes were ruthlessly neglected, marginalized and stripped of respect; toiling at the mercy of producers, some of whom, he wrote, had “the artistic integrity of slot machines and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur.”
Nearly 80 years after Chandler excoriated the industry, a new generation of scribes says that not much has changed and has taken to the picket lines to denounce the pileup of indignities.
Long unappreciated, writers for the screen big and small complain this time around that they are now not simply undervalued but underpaid too. In the era of Peak TV and the rise of powerful disruptors like Netflix and Amazon, they say profits have ballooned for the studios and their executives who’ve reaped billions, while they’ve been streamrolled — subjected to worsening working conditions and deprived of a sustainable living.
Chandler might as well have been writing about today when he called Hollywood a place where degradations, such as the “incessant bone-scraping revisions imposed on the Hollywood writer by the process of the rule of decree,” were routine — and where a screenwriter’s billing “will be smaller than that of the most insignificant bit-player.”
Chandler concluded that such humiliations were by design, “a deliberate and successful plan to reduce the professional screenwriter to the status of an assistant picture-maker, superficially deferred to (while he is in the room), essentially ignored, and even in his most brilliant achievements carefully pushed out of the way of any possible accolade which might otherwise fall to the star, the producer, the director.”
In many ways, the new fight is about the old fight, and that has always been about respect.
“These struggles have been going on for over a century,” said USC history professor Steven J. Ross, who pointed out that screenwriters first organized in the 1910s.
During Hollywood’s golden age of the 1930s and ’40s, when moviemaking operated under the studio system, the moguls who ruled over the industry exhibited little appre