The screen writer (Apr-Oct 1948)

•n Where Do You Go From Here? H w w Z H FOR fifteen years now the Screen Writers' Guild has been stressing the importance of the writer in the making of motion pictures. If I may say so without seeming to be presumptuous, I have been doing that very thing for more than twice as long as the Guild. It would be very easy for me to devote this article to a recapitulation of that theme, but it seems to me that an anniversary is time for critical re-examination rather than for uncritical praise. So, I should like to ask what has happened to the creative writing talents of Hollywood ? What are you writers afraid of? Why does it seem that you have no real faith in your abilities? And finally, what are you going to do about it? Let me state my thesis plainly and at once. Hollywood screen-writers are, or have become, in large part, a group of skilled technicians who have sacrificed their aspirations to artistry in exchange for the security of a weekly pay-check. And that security even, has turned out to be a slender reed when lush times have passed. Their basic motivation seems to be easier money rather than harder, and thus better, work. When the Big Money, or the thought of it has come in the door, creatfveness has flown out the window. Let me make one or two other thoughts plain at the outset. I am making no moral issues here. Everyone has a right to choose for himself what he wants out of life. I do not deny to any writer the ethical right By SAMUEL GOLDWYN to decide whether he prefers Jimmy Fidler's Four Bells to the work, the discipline, the self-denial, the sacrifice that is necessary if one is even going to dream in terms of Nobel. Nor do I mean to say that the fault — if we can use that term — is that of the writers alone. Producers — including myself — who have set up the system which has permitted and encouraged writers to write with too much of an eye on the payroll must bear their fair share of the blame. But I take it that serious screenwriters are more interested in getting at the root causes and cures, if any, of their own problems than in pointing the fingers at others. One more preliminary before I return to my basic theme. I am not addressing myself here to the large group of word carpenters who make their living by re-writing Westerns, whodunits, what-is-its and so forth every other week for "X" budget pictures. These are honorable men who make no pretense at serious artistry and if they use the paste pot and shears as often as the typewriter, it is not for me to criticize them. T*> UT I am talking to that large ■*-'body of Guild members who say that they take the profession of screenwriting seriously and who, indeed, do have the potentialities of writing like men instead of like automatons. What has happened to their creative talent? I have always been in agreement with the thesis that the screenplay is a form of literature by itself — that writing for the screen is an art all its own. What bothers me deeply is why the practitioners of this art in Hollywood have failed, on the whole, to become truly creative artists but rather have been content, in the main, to remain little more than glassblowers, huffing and puffing and blowing up slender ideas — their own or others — into some sort of shape for the screen. What has happened to fresh, honest, vital, original writing for motion pictures? As far as I can see, it is at the vanishing point. The reason — from the writers' point of view — seems to be clear. Hollywood writers have sacrificed their potential as truly creative artists for the gold in these here hills. Writers have sought mainly the stimulus of the weekly pay check as their incentive for writing and in the process have lost their ability to think and to create and to write out of the stuff of human relationships in the world around them. I firmly believe that the moment a writer becomes convinced— and adjusts his method of living to that conviction — that he "must" earn five hundred or a thousand or two thousand dollars a week he has compromised himself so seriously with his artistic convictions and abilities that he is at that point well nigh lost as an artist. I am no believer in the "art in a garret" theory, for comfort and decent living and reasonable security are as much an artist's right as anyone else's — although much of the world's greatest art has been > z Z < > The Screen Writer, April, 194 19