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What I'm talking about is The American Writer and Hollywood. By Hollywood I mean, naturally, the motion picture manufacturing industry. This industry has in a number of cases been generous to and kindly toward deserving American writers. It has enabled them to live, as it were, like kings. It has brought them from cold climates to a warm and pleasant climate, ideal for sleeping during the afternoon. It has lifted them from crowded slum streets populated by overworked and sickly human beings to clean, broad boulevards lousy with healthy, handsome, and under-worked human beings, generally in sports clothes. It has taught them how to dress, where to dine, what to drink,
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and how to do a small but pleasant variety of other things.
In return, however, the industry has not once, to my knowledge, received from any writer that force which has been the source of the writer's particular distinction. The industry, if it has gotten anything at all from the writer, has gotten something the writer discovered in Hollywood and is no good anywhere else. This thing may be politely called the ability to graciously wangle, bluff, and make friends.
For money, doing these things isn't worth the inner suffering that follows each day's performance.
If it were for comedy, one could tolerate one's self after the performance.
At best the writer wangles for something not worth getting; he bluffs about something he could never be serious about ; and he makes friends with people he ordinarily would study carefully.
The fault is neither the industry's nor the writer's; the industry is in no need of literary genius, or expert talent. The industry does not photograph prose, it photographs people and places.
The most respected writers of Hollywood have not written and cannot write a decent story, essay, novel, or play. For the purposes o\~ the industry, they don't need to be able to