The seven deadly sins of Hollywood (1957)

THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS OF HOLLYWOOD Sir Alexander and Lady Korda are in town and Greene and Annakin join them for dinner. Annakin detects an extraordinary resemblance between a character in his film to be played by Robert Morley and Sir Alex. But as Green has assured him that he never puts a close friend in any of his stories, Annakin attributes the similarity to coincidence. The script completed, the director and the author return to London. Annakin reflects sadly that they have not visited one dive that could honestly be described as dingy or occupied a single room with peeling wallpaper. It is all most disappointing. You might just as well be writing a film script with Noel Coward. I reflect sadly that I have not picked up from Mr. Greene one original sin that I could honestly describe as deadly and attribute to Hollywood. He is a glutton where sin is concerned and insists on hogging all the blame himself. Few authors (as distinct from scriptwriters) are so tolerant of Hollywood as Graham Greene. Clifford Odets made a violent attack on the place in his play The Big Knife, in which he had a movie tycoon prepared to resort to murder in order to protect one of his "properties" — a big box-office star. Despite this attack, Mr. Odets was working in Hollywood as a script-writer when I was there. Budd Schulberg, who wrote that very fine film On the Waterfront, has given us some biting, very funny and certainly unflattering portraits of Hollywood people in What Makes Sammy Run and The Disenchanted. Richard Brooks, a highly talented director — he made The Blackboard Jungle — has written a very bitter novel about Hollywood, The Producer. Why is it, you may wonder, that writers more than any other group of people should be so derisive about 198