Hollywood and Crime

While the November print edition of Empire, the British film magazine, celebrates cinematic crime in all of its gory ... er, glory--blogger Clayton Moore tells us to look for “interviews with all the principals on American Gangster, reports on No Country for Old Men and the splendid Eastern Promises, and a brilliant deconstruction of Michael Mann’s Heat”--its Web site highlights the “five writers who have had the biggest impact on the crime [film] genre.” Only one among that group--Raymond Chandler (“the booze-sodden lord of noir”)--was experienced at screenwriting. Yet the remaining quartet--Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, and James Ellroy--have all given Hollywood much of its storytelling material over the decades, and have certainly been an inspiration to many more projects not linked directly with their names.

Confirmation of that, at least as it pertains to Hammett, can be found at the Noir of the Week site. There, in the first installment of a fine three-part profile of legendary American director, screenwriter, and actor John Huston, contributor William Hare recalls how “Huston was barely able to convince [Warner Bros.] studio boss Jack Warner to give him an opportunity to ... move [into directing] by adapting”--for the third time--“noted [former] detective Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon to the screen.” However, Huston went on to produce “what cinema historians regard as the first film noir production.” Observes Hare:

A strange twist of fate early on should have convinced Huston that he was on a roll. Huston instructed his secretary to break down Hammett’s novel into scenes, leaving everything unchanged. It was his intention to proceed with his screenplay adaptation of Hammett’s work from that point.

When Huston was away from the studio a curious Warner managed to smuggle a copy of what he believed to be a script in progress. When Huston returned Warner startled him by praising what he had seen, proclaiming that the production was ready to roll and the script was fine.

Huston had every reason to believe he was on a roll since not only was The Maltese Falcon [1941] a roaring commercial success that satisfied his studio boss; he actually won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for what was supposed to be a beginning outline.

The other two sections of Hare’s John Huston analysis deal with The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Fat City (1972).

Meanwhile, with Hollywood writers expected to begin a strike on Monday--their first in two decades--against the U.S. entertainment industry, the Atlantic Monthly’s Web site has republished a 1945 essay by Raymond Chandler, in which he relates just how little power screenwriters had in his day (and probably still have) at the major film studios. The novelist’s displeasure with the whole script-preparation process is much in evidence:

Hollywood is a showman’s paradise. But showmen make nothing; they exploit what someone else has made. The publisher and the play producer are showmen too; but they exploit what is already made. The showmen of Hollywood control the making--and thereby degrade it. For the basic art of motion pictures is the screenplay; it is fundamental, without it there is nothing. Everything derives from the screenplay, and most of that which derives is an applied skill which, however adept, is artistically not in the same class with the creation of a screenplay. But in Hollywood the screenplay is written by a salaried writer under the supervision of a producer--that is to say, by an employee without power or decision over the uses of his own craft, without ownership of it, and, however extravagantly paid, almost without honor for it.

I am aware that there are colorable economic reasons for the Hollywood system of “getting out the script."” But I am not much interested in them. Pictures cost a great deal of money--true. The studio spends the money; all the writer spends is his time (and incidentally his life, his hopes, and all the varied experiences, most of them painful, which finally made him into a writer)--this also is true. The producer is charged with the salability and soundness of the project--true. The director can survive few failures; the writer can stink for ten years and still make his thousand a week--true also. But entirely beside the point.

I am not interested in why the Hollywood system exists or persists, nor in learning out of what bitter struggles for prestige it arose, nor in how much money it succeeds in making out of bad pictures. I am interested only in the fact that as a result of it there is no such thing as an art of the screenplay, and there never will be as long as the system lasts, for it is the essence of this system that it seeks to exploit a talent without permitting it the right to be a talent. It cannot be done; you can only destroy the talent, which is exactly what happens--when there is any to destroy.

While this essay may not measure up to, say, Chandler’s better-known “The Simple Art of Murder,” it’s still a fascinating look back at the Hollywood studio system in its demanding and often heartless prime.