Guilds Vs. Producers--The Writer's Life

You could make an argument that Hollywood screenwriters are the most envied members of the nation's work force. Even those of us who may know better tend to see them through a misty scrim, living like Jeff Bridges in The Muse, making piles of money in a trade that requites no heavy lifting. We imagine them sitting in s sun-splashed room and alternating daydreaming trips to the couch or the gazebo with jaunts to the Ivy. There they'll sit with an actress--I actually spoke with a screenwriter who sat on a hotel balcony running prospective lines with Monica Bellucci while she sunbathed--or maybe Dustin Hoffman (he is the epitome of charm when things are going his way.)

"They are, I suppose," says David Thomson in The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, "the most protected class of writers in the world...there are a few hundred writers in Hollywood who earn good livings, own ample houses, send their children to private schools and look forward to fat pensions. Good for them. But that is not writing and it has been a disaster for spirit and risk in American films, for character and story. It is why the Chinatown trilogy will never be made."

Thomson's book turns on the single point that Robert Towne, for many the most talented screenwriter of the postwar era--and maybe ever--has led an artistically occluded, and in terms of latter-day writerly satisfaction, miserable existence.

Grossly boiled down, Thomson's thesis is that it's not just the sequel-clotted, dumbed-down studio system that's responsible for this state of affairs. He says the WGA's own reward system--"the health plan, the pension plan and the [fee] minimums are impressive"--has meant "it is very important for the screenwriter to stay employed...[the WGA] has protected its members at the cost of writing."

It's incumbent upon me to disclose that my wife, like WGA head Patric Verrone, is a Guild member who works mostly in animation. She and he have corresponded--and held divergent opinions--on how to deal with the aid and comfort of the animation clan; like reality TV and online writers, they are among the most dispossessed in terms of guild coverage of their work. She often gets to do fulfilling projects that are mostly for kids, thus avoiding some of what Thomson would call the agonies of big-time feature-writing success. As he writes regarding Towne:

And that's how someone who was once among the best writers in Hollywood, and who might have written a fine novel about the life and times of Jake Gittes and Los Angeles, became the man who made a small fortune writing two Mission: Impossible pictures. The gap between Chinatown and umpteen possible future Mission: Impossibles is the lament of this book.

It might be considered Towne's answer that using the same producers (Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner) who made him rich, he adapted and directed the artistically sincere (all too sincere, for some critics) Ask The Dust. I've spoken with Towne on many occasions, including the dark days when Jack Nicholson was directing off The Two Jakes with what he felt was inadequate help from Towne, who was otherwise engaged (and at one point far away in the South Pacific. I remember a long, hot day on the set at an Ojai golf club with Nicholson and Harvey Keitel enacting the title roles (Bob Evans, originally slated for the second part, was funereally present in the near vicinity). I especially recall asking Nicholson about an apparently morphing plot point, then watching him say, "Aw, it's a mystery, thank you very much," and stalk off--later to return with his usual gentlemanly eloquence.

These thoughts came rushing in after an update e-mail exchange talk with Stephen Schiff, who besides being an union activist and council member--thus amply quoted in this space recently--is a credentialed member i=of the intelligent order of screenwriter. A sometime critic for the New Yorker, he was sought out by George Clooney for a revision of Leatherheads. How he lifted the Bale for Clooney makes for an interesting look at both the joys and uncertainties of the trade:

On Leatherheads, I didn't visit the set and kept tabs only occasionally. All I know is that when I spoke to George about a month ago he told me he was editing in his villa on Lake Como, right across from the wine cellar where he and I brainstormed while I was writing the script.

Yes, I did do time at the fabled villa, and the reality was as rich as the fable - though I didn't stay there. Instead, George put me up at the nearby Villa d'Este, for which sorry accommodations he repeatedly (and facetiously) apologized.

George was by far the biggest news up and down the lake - so much so that, on one occasion, the police came by, claiming that they had spotted a paparazzo in the bushes near his pool. Then, after a cursory investigation, they whipped out their own cameras, so that they could have their photos taken with George.

Every few minutes, people would pass by in boats on the lake, yelling George's name and trying to get a glimpse of him. It's hard work being a movie star, and George handles it with the sort of aplomb that can only come from having arrived at his position already seasoned and mature. By the time George Clooney became George Clooney he was already a grownup - and I think in a way he's grateful for that. It certainly goes a long way toward explaining his expertise at doing the job of being a celebrity.

Working with George was a complete pleasure, since he is as smart and funny as rumor has it, and all of his best jokes (and a few of his worst) got into my script - which is maybe why he rewrote me before production. What we were trying to do was create a veritable 30's-style screwball romantic comedy, set at the helter-skelter birth of the National Football League. (This, I hasten to add, is also what the earlier writers, Rick O'Reilly and Duncan Brantley and Steven Soderbergh, were going for). I haven't seen what George filmed, but I know that the screwball spirit reigned supreme, and nobody I can imagine him casting in the female lead role would "get" that spirit better than Renee Zellweger. So my hopes are high.

As Schiff said on an earlier post, his hopes for a settlement between the guilds and the producers were also reasonably high. Thorny as the issue of ancillary rights for web and other digital content may be, he sees a formula potentially being deduced from stats like he recent figure in the Hollywood Reporter--"they said that the download business will be $1.3 billion by 2011--and that's not chump change... you have to feel a little sorry for management because it still has to parade its enormous success before Wall Street and then it has to come home and speak poor mouth to the guild."

In the coming month, the producers' side will be given every chance to have the innings in rebuttal. They are hardly less entrenched than the writers, who just upped the ante by sending up a trial ballon (as unveiled by the New York Times' Michael Cieply) threatening to actually strike around the time of their October 30 deadline, hereby unplugging any number of features struggling to finish off scripts. Also Friday, Variety's Peter Bart warned that, "If neither side budges, the range of possibilities strains the imagination. The WGA could strike, but it runs the risk of defection by some of its loftiest members.") The mood of their opposition recalls something uttered by fiery Fox chief Darryl F. Zanuck--a sometime screenwriter, yet!--back in 1936. It came when the Screen Writers Guild (then the union body) threatened to join forces with the rabidly left, New York based Dramatists' Guild. Said Zanuck, at a time in labor history when such threats were a little less remote than they are today, "If those guys set up a picket line and try to shut down my studio, I'll mount a machine gun on the roof and mow them down."