Hollywood screenwriters protest strike. Bebeto Matthews (AP)
More than 11,000 Hollywood screenwriters have gone on strike. The claims come as a result of changes in the industry brought about by the pandemic and the consolidation of the so-called platforms in the global consumption model: more streaming, fewer cinemas.
They also denounce that the new business model has favored what they call a gig economy, a remuneration system based on piecework that offers no guarantees of stability over time, intentionally encouraging unfair competition between authors. By having to work for on-demand platforms like Netflix or Disney, until recently screenwriters no longer received the royalties agreed upon for mainstream media reruns of films and series.
There has not been a writers’ strike since 2007 and the strikers are demanding that their work be compensated for what these 15 years have brought to the film industry. The gap between what the production houses are offering and what the writers are asking for is about $345 million. The strike will be long, both sides calculate that; matter of months, just like the previous one.
“Hollywood is easy to hate, easy to despise, easy to defame,” said Raymond Chandler in an essay on American writers and Hollywood published in The Atlantic Monthly (predecessor of today’s The Atlantic) circa 1945. Even today it can be read with great benefit. And he added: “Some of the best slanders are the work of people who have never walked through a studio door.”
The latter was not exactly the case for Chandler, a prolific detective novelist and esteemed screenwriter of his day, but who does not shy away from bitter criticism of the stifling studio system that has prevailed in Hollywood for more than eighty years. But he’s less outraged by the Hollywood financial system of his day and more by the fundamental perversity of trying to “exploit a talent without giving him the right to be a talent.” Orson Welles is the best-known example, but he wasn’t the only one.
Still, Chandler reserves the thickest caliber for his fellow writers, whom he considers “a miserable bunch of mercenaries.” He adds that he has no doubt that they would rather become much better writers and earn their living in something that has the decency of a liberal profession.
“But that’s not going to happen to them because most of them spend all their time doing a job that has as good a chance of quality as a Pekingese becoming a Great Dane.”
It was in this despicable world of work that Francis Scott Fitzgerald found material for his twilight work: the seventeen stories he wrote in the last two years of his life—he died in 1940—collected in Pat Hobby Stories. In the proverbial list of indelible characters that literature offers, I will always rank Pat Hobby at the top.
A silent-film survivor, like Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond, Pat made—no one ever explained how—up to $2,500 a week and owned a swimming pool, but in the talk theater that sparked demand for writers in 1927, already there wasn’t room for him. Even so, Pat would not squeeze any technical innovation out of Hollywood.
He persisted in committing pathetic script bungling—adding dialogue, cutting descriptions—to gain access to the sets and sit in the cafeteria alongside the extras dressed as cowboys and the platinum Marie Antoinettes. He trusted in the return, the “second act” that the American dream, according to Fitzgerald itself, does not grant to anyone.
In 1939, Pat is 49 years old, drunk, and earning $250 a week by luck. His last two wives have already given up asking him for child support. Morally, his tendencies are the same as those of a rat.
Fitzgerald sublimated some of his own failed Hollywood experience into two characters. One of them is Monroe Stahr, the brilliant and tragic film superproducer and star of The Last Tycoon.
One of Fitzgerald’s best biographers, Andy Turnbull, says that Stahr embodied in fiction the aspirations Fitzgerald made toward Holywood and Pat Hobby, the humiliations he accepted, and the humiliation he plunged into in search of success. The amazing thing is that for us, hobby is never hateful or pitiable.
Fitzgerald’s master hand sculpts an unsinkable, idiosyncratic, never entirely pathetic loser whose meanness makes us chuckle. Pat doesn’t cast bitter thoughts about Hollywood business, his judgments about the “dream factory” are rather dispassionate and pragmatic. He states calmly that the Hollywood ideal is to make films without the need for writers.
Not being the supportive type, Pat certainly wouldn’t agree with the striking writers’ union today decrying the threat posed to the union by the use of artificial intelligence. “What I want is a free ticket to the private performance, Mr. Marcus,” he says of Pat Hobby and Orson Welles, “and everything else stays the same.”
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