Field Guide #2: Writers
Hollywood's prickliest profession can be managed to create great work — you just need these magic words
Today in part two of our Field Guide to today’s entertainment industry professionals, we turn to that most controversial and combative of figures: the screen and television writer.
Now, given the troubles of last year, one could be forgiven for saying, Haven’t we talked enough about the travails of Hollywood writers to last us a few centuries? It’s true, the lot of the ever-suffering scribe has received more than its share of screen time of late.
But today, our mission isn’t to recount the sufferings of this noble profession once again so much as to look at — now with the strike behind us, with everyone having a lot of work to do be done — who are these strange creatures? How can their fellow inmates in entertainment look to get along with them? The fact is, the route to any movie or show runs through a writer or team of writers, and if we’re to have a smoothly running business, understanding this oddest of callings is essential.
Behind the Eight-Ball Since Day One
The hostility flowing between writers and execs is an ancient contempt, as old as Hollywood really. In the early days, the first studio bosses liked nothing more than to hire fancy celebrated novelists like F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner and then run them in circles on fruitless and menial assignments, systematically breaking them down. Sometimes it seems like Hollywood was founded just so the money people could get writers into a corner and say, See, you’re not so smart!
Since the beginning, screenwriters were cast as the house intellectuals, the brains of the aggressively populist medium but generally the least powerful people on any production; sentenced to a Dantesque eternity of watching their creations systemically dismantled and idiotized.
Writers, for their part, fell very easily into the role of victims. The unofficial Bible of Hollywood writers — William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade — is one long collection of tales of how the writer was locked out of one production or another, lost control of projects and saw his brilliant vision destroyed by Philistines.
Which is to say, the writer’s relationship to the rest of the industry has been a very unhealthy one for a long time, and anyone who deals with writers and wants to make the relationship work needs to be aware of where the scribes come into the conversation.
Who Becomes a Hollywood Writer
It’s an odd collection of in-between skills that brings someone into screenwriting. Hollywood writers are more socially adept than say, novelists or, God forbid, poets. But they generally are not nearly housebroken enough to be agents, producers or executives right off the bat.
They think of themselves as creative but are drawn to a medium that is inherently collaborative rather than one person’s lonely vision. They are seduced by a medium that produces things on a giant scale, but they are among the least powerful in that medium (exempting the very few brand-name TV creators).
One agent describes the character type, “They are — most of them — very opinionated, creative, jacks of all trades because they have had to work a lot of jobs; optimists, loners to a degree, smart, often cranky and cynical about the business after a time. The more time they spend in the barrel and the older they get, the more bitter and cynical they become.” This agent advises however, “They’re less crabby than directors though.”
In addition, the itinerant, project-based nature of writing defies attempts to put down roots and establish some security.
This tension drives many to try to do more than “just write” eventually, but in the meantime, those who would work with writers in Hollywood would be advised to tread lightly on this insecure ground.