The screen writer (Apr-Oct 1948)

Group Insurance Report SIX members of the Guild have had occasion to file claims under the group insurance policy since its establishment a little over two months ago. Richard English, who broke his arm playing baseball, filed the first claim and received the first check issued by the National Casualty Company of Detroit. Frank Davis, Wells Root, and Lamar Trotti were hospitalized by illness, and Lionel Houser has been confined at home. Karl Tunberg was injured in an automobile accident. Members are reminded that payment of compensation is available immediately in cases of accident or hospitalization and beginning with the eighth day of illness. Claims that are filed at once will be paid during the time that you are incapacitated. Numerous members of the Guild have expressed interest in the extension of our policy to cover their families as well as themselves. To meet this demand, the insurance company has developed a new provision under which dependents in the immediate families of members can be insured at an added semi-annual premium of $14.00. Under this arrangement, wives, husbands, and dependent children can qualify for the same hospitalization indemnities as members. To put this into effect, 75% of those now insured will be required to subscribe. The Board feels that the provision is decidedly advantageous and will shortly circularize the membership concerning it. PAUL GANGELIN ^ Lionel Houser (Continued from Page 7) is because nobody could write as much as one needs to — especially on a rewrite desk — and retain any of that precious and essential zest for the search for exactly the right word or phrase to fit a particular emotion, as filtered through the writer, which genuine writing requires. Men on rewrite regularly grind out thirty to forty pages, sometimes more, on an evening paper, in a single day. Most of the stories except for the names are duplicates of ones they have done a thousand times before. While it is true that no two events are ever alike, there is nonetheless a great similarity between one court hearing and another, one July 4th parade and another, one city council meeting and another. But that is no reason why the stories should be the same ; the differences do exist. Years of work on a newspaper accustom a man to functioning in the midst of a clattering crowd of people, typewriters and phones. When he tries to work alone, as he must to create anything good, the natural difficulties of this lonely, hard experience are greatly aggravated because he has become so used to working in the middle of a group. It is after all only normal to like to be with other people and to commune with them in work, and it has always been a hard lesson for the writer to learn to function successfully in a daily routine of utter alone-ness ; but he must, of course. The newspaperman gets so used to leaning on the group-function that he cannot do without when it comes time to write something of his own, because he has added habit to the basic dislike of working alone which he would have to combat anyway; the double burden is too heavy to bear. It seems to me that a man would be better off to work at a Safeway grocery, drive a cab, clerk in a hotel, teach school, cut film or almost any thing in the world than work on a newspaper if he thought he had the talent to write pictures, plays or novels, and had, meantime, to earn his living. He would be more than likely never to find out whether he could write anything or not, if he went on a paper. I think I saw in my city room days a great many men who had the gifts to accomplish good things and who would have done so had they not gotten into the newspaper quicksands. FOR some reason I have never fathomed, newspapers never let reporters quote people as they really talk. Nobody ever actually speaks in the stilted language which you see framed in quotation marks in every newspaper. Partly this is the reporter's fault and, in turn, the fault of the way he learns his trade; customarily he jots down rough phrases and then, when writing the story, uses his own words to expand the notes into full sentences. However, it is true that if he did put it down exactly as spoken 2+ The Screen Writer, August, 1948