The late Billy Wilder is one writer Max Wilk talks about in his book "Schmucks With Underwoods."
March 22, 2004
Schmucks With Underwoods
By Gregory McNamee
Bottom line: Screenwriting veterans -- many of them now almost forgotten -- deliver news and opinion, good and bad, about the film business and the craft of writing.
Generations before Shane Black and M. Night Shyamalan were setting records for the biggest-ticket screenplay, decades before Robert Towne and Carrie Fisher earned fortunes polishing scripts, came the ancestors: Rube Goldberg, the madcap inventor; Theodore Dreiser, Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner, the now-classic writers; Ayn Rand, the caviar-barrel philosopher.
Some of those screenwriters came and went, as when Faulkner asked whether he could work at home and then hightailed it back to Mississippi. Some big names outside of Hollywood were courted into the system but didn't live up to their nonfilm reputations -- Aldous Huxley, for instance, turned to fiction and journalism, while P.G. Wodehouse invented Jeeves the butler and found earthly happiness.
Some made vast fortunes anonymously. George Marion, for instance, was the highest-paid writer in Hollywood in the 1920s, turning out titles for the silents to clarify onscreen action for the cinema audience or add dialogue: "A traveling salesman -- up with the lark, down with the grapefruit and out with the samples!" Few knew him then, and almost no one remembers him today.
Marion had plenty of company, film and TV vet Max Wilk writes in "Schmucks With Underwoods: Conversations With Hollywood's Classic Screenwriters." From the beginning, a legion of talented writers filled New York and Hollywood, providing grist for the movie industry's mill. The script polishers weren't far behind: Wilk writes of one, Joe Farnham, who, called in to rescue a silent film, recast the subtitle "Violet, the patsy of the show. Born and raised on the stage, she knew life only as the stage reflected it" to the much more sonorous "Violet, the drudge of the troupe ... who also played parts like 'Nothing' in 'Much Ado About Nothing.' "
For their talents, some of these writers attained wealth of a kind that likely would have evaded them in other walks of life -- or other media, for that matter. Their talent and wealth begot jealousy -- to say nothing of the contempt of others in the film industry, who saw writers only as a necessary evil. Small wonder that film executive Jack Warner was moved to call his studio's writers "schmucks with Underwoods."
Yet some of those poor schmucks and their kin attained enduring fame. One whom Wilk profiles, drawing liberally on the memories of a former agent, is Ben Hecht, who wrote such classic screenplays as "Scarface" and "Nothing Sacred" before he lost his magic touch and slid into hackdom. Another is Billy Wilder, that master of all film trades, whose lively conversation with Wilk hammers on the hard work of writing. "Everybody wants to be a screenwriter," Wilder thundered. "People do not realize -- writing a film is very difficult. They do not realize that you must serve your internship, that you must develop a feel for it. And, additionally, you have to learn the mechanics!"
Others of Wilk's subjects had but a brief, shining moment in the sun. One is Evan Hunter, who hasn't been much heard from since scripting Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 film "The Birds." Hunter has been busy doing other things, writing a stream of well-received novels, and he clearly doesn't miss the biz, rumbling wisely: "If you're going to be a writer in Hollywood, you should learn how to direct. At least that way you have some measure of control over your original work."
"Schmucks With Underwoods" is a gossipy book, full of complaints about the usual things -- the low standards of audiences, the low morals of bosses, the low chances of hitting the big time. It's a little diffuse, a little unfocused. Still, aspiring screenwriters will find the filmographies a great source of ideas for remakes, which is one path to fame and fortune, while film buffs of all persuasions will find Wilk's book a pleasure to amble through.
Gregory McNamee is The Hollywood Reporter's literary critic. He can be reached at gm@gregorymcnamee.com.
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