Screen Guilds Magazine (May 1936)

To Richard - - With Love O N May Second, 1936, or False Armistice Day, the Screen Writers’ Guild held a somewhat notable fiesta at the Hollywood Athletic Club. Thous¬ ands of words were spoken, many of which have since been eaten with sugar and cream and a liberal sprinkling of bran, but only five of them have re¬ mained scrawled on my heart. They were uttered by Mr. Richard Schayer, if memory serves me, as I rather wish it didn’t. Mr. Schayer said many words, but it’s those five that are my boys. Lifted, dripping from their context,— a context entirely of “ against’s”; against amalgamation, against the Guild, against a new order of anything on earth, against, though I still cannot figure how the subject ever came up, Russia—they run as follows: “It is a soft racket. ’ ’ Mr. Schayer was referring to writing for the screen. Mr. Schayer announced, in an out¬ burst of autobiography, that he had been writing for moving pictures for twenty years. Well—I can wax auto¬ biographical, too. I have been writing for moving pictures for two years. Tell me if you can, for I am unable to tell it to myself, which of us has eighteen years up on the other. “It is a soft racket,” said Mr. Schay¬ er, and doubtless deemed that his words were those of pride and praise. So did he sum up his side of the case; but there are other sides—there is, if you must have names and dates, my own. I do not feel that I am participating in a soft racket (and what the hell, by the way, is a hard racket?) when I am writing for the screen. Nor do I want to be part of any racket, hard or soft, or three-and-a-half minutes. I want to earn my living, and, naturally, I prefer it to be a good one. I can’t, God help me, make it by my hands, so I must make it by my brain. Let me be the first to say it—I haven’t a great deal to give to the screen. But if it were not proportionate to what I take, I shouldn’t be doing it at all. I want no feeling of guilt, no sense of having gyped some¬ body, when I endorse my weekly cheque. And, boy, have I got my wish! For my lot has not lain parallel to Mr. Schayer’s; I have never in my life been paid so much, either,—well, why am I here, and why are you, and why is Mr. Schayer ? But I can look my God and my producer—whom I do not, as do many, confuse with each other—in the face, and say that I have earned every cent of it. I DIDN’T set my wages, any more than you did yours. The producers did that. It was they who paved the streets of Hollywood with gold. Well— those 1924 debts were beginning to crowd up on me, and I came. Where should I have been, if I hadn’t? Why, in the gutter, of course. And yet I sometimes realize, when I have a rare, open moment to spend on wistfulness, that you really don’t get a very good view of the stars, from a patio in Bev¬ erly Hills .... When I dwelt in the east (and I’m the one that was taunting Mr. Schayer with drifting into unsolicited auto- ^1 have never in my life been paid so much, either—well, why am I here, and why are you, and why is Mr. Schayer? But I can look my God and my producer— whom I do not, as do many, confuse with each other—in the face, and say that I have earned every cent of it. ^ • 8 By Dorothy Parker . . . You’re wrong. This is not the New Yorker, t)ut merely the Screen Guilds’ Magazine, and the proper medium for this piece. biography!) I had my opinion of writ¬ ing for the screen. I regarded it—all right, sue me—with a sort of benevolent contempt, as one looks at the raggedy printing of a backward six-year-old. I thought it had just that much relation¬ ship to literature. (I still do—all right, take it to the Supreme Court.) I thought, “Why, I could do that with one hand tied behind me and the other on Irving Thalberg’s pulse!” (Fooled you that time, didn’t I?) Well, I found out, and I found out hard, and I found out forever. Through the sweat and the tears I shed over my first script, I saw a great truth —one of those eternal, universal truths that serve to make you feel much worse than you did when you started. And that is that no writer, whether he writes from love or for money, can condescend to what he writes. You can’t stoop to what you set down on paper; I don’t know why you can’t, but you can’t. No matter what form it takes, and no mat¬ ter what the result, and no matter how caustically comic you are about it after¬ ward, what you did was your 'best. And to do your best is always hard going. What makes it harder in screen writ¬ ing-pardon me, Mr. Schayer, if I differ from you, but I assure you it’s inten¬ tional—is the money you get. You see, it brings out that uncomfortable little thing called conscience. You aren’t writing for the love of it or the art of it or the hell of it or whatever; you are doing a chore assigned to you by your employer, and whether or not he might fire you if you did it slackly makes no matter. You’ve got yourself to face, and you have to live with your¬ self. You don’t—or, at least, only in highly exceptional cases—have to live with your producer. Y OU see, Mr. Schayer, if you write a poem—oh, come on, now, can’t you take a joke?—or a short story or a novel, you don’t get much for it. Writ- (Continued on Page 24) The Screen Guilds’ Magazine