World Film and Television Progress (1938)

Continuing "Hollywood is Where You Hang Your Head' ■■■BBS ■■ wind up every night at one or another of the night spots at two, three, four, and five in the morning. You go to all the class-conscious events of the town from plain parties to banquets for visiting writers from Europe. You get a little mixed-up too. On the one hand, you admire a man who earns three thousand dollars a week for his interest in the proletariat, and, on the other hand, you don't quite know. Is he really interested in the proletariat? If he isn't, what of it, so long as he keeps on donating money to the cause? And so on. I once believed Hollywood was the one place in America that would pleasantly solve, under Capitalism — which I for one do not want to see substituted by Communism — the problem of keeping a good writer in money without taking away from him whatever it is he has that makes him good. I'm not so sure Hollywood can do such a thing. Now, in Russia the Government takes care of its writers, keeping them in money and comfort. That is the sort of thing I, as a writer, would not care to tolerate. One does not like being patronised, even by a government. In Hollywood you allegedly earn your money. If it is three hundred dollars per week, you don't feel guilty because three hundred dollars is six or seven times as much as a steel worker earns for doing much harder work ; you know a half dozen proletarian writers are earning twice as much, three times as much, and ten times as much. And more power to them, and to Communism too, for that matter. No hard feelings, just so it isn't patronage. Only you can't hang around as long as the proletarians because you don't like not being able to do something with a form you believe is too important to be wasted on tenth-raters and the public they have created. You're in favour of taking the same people and creating a new public. You don't care if the Communists don't care about creating a new public. That's their affair. Hollywood can be of no use to the American writer (as a writer) because it doesn't need or employ writers. Those in Hollywood now called writers are not writers — they are : (1) idea men, (2) story discussers, (3) plot men, (4) dialogue writers, and (5) if they write at all, collaborators. The first necessity of the writer, privacy, is completely out of the question in Hollywood. By privacy I mean inward aloneness, without which I personally feel no good writing can ever be done. This does not mean, however, that Hollywood is a place to avoid. On the contrary, every American writer ought to visit the place, take a job at as large a salary as he can get, and hang around until he is fed up. If he never gets fed up, so much the better, or worse, depending on who's judging. If he gets fed up and doesn't dare leave town because he has got used to the money, again so much the better, one way or another. The chances of doing anything integrated (from one man's point of view) are practical!) non-existent. You can't run the whole show because they don't do it that way. A picture which you see in fifty-five minutes and which at best is lousy is the result of long, hard work on the part of at least three hundred human beings, two of them sub-geniuses. An artist (as I call them) in order to produce a work of art, of any kind, in any form, must run the whole show. There isn't or aren't two ways about it. For the fun of it, nevertheless, first-rate American writers should not hesitate now and then, or at least between books, to visit the bright little village. It isn't half bad. The people, at their worst, are only ambitious, competitive, sly and stupid. I am very fond of them. Above: Hollywood Boulevard Below: Another scene from ''Boy meets Girl' This article first appeared in the weekly 'Time and Tide" to whom we arc indebted for permission to reprint. 73