A As Good as Their Words : WRITERS IN HOLLYWOOD <i> by Ian Hamilton (An Edward Burlingame Book/Harper & Row: $22.50; 336 pp.; 0-06-01623-7) </i>

Ian Hamilton, author of the definitive biography of Robert Lowell, is having fun this time out.

Obviously no book that is only 330 pages long, and covers the history of motion pictures from 1915 to 1951, can hope to do justice to its subject. “Writers in Hollywood” must be seen as a sort of primer on the subject.

If you want to learn something about the writer in the silent era, Hamilton’s got a chapter or two for you. If you’re interested in the man they called “The Writing Machine,” Ben Hecht, there are more than a few good anecdotes and some interesting discussions about the way Hecht and his partner, Charles MacArthur, worked and played (and how they did play! ). The same goes for Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Nathanael West and Raymond Chandler.

Or perhaps you’re looking for a short, neatly packaged history of the formation of the Writer’s Guild, or writers’ responses to the restrictions of the Hays Code. If so, Hamilton’s done a nice job capsulizing the arguments, pro and con.

In fact, the entire book is a kind of Writers in Hollywood’s Greatest Hits. You won’t find any of these subjects written about in great depth here; for that you’ll have to look at the primary texts. After all, hundreds of pages have been written about Chandler’s and Fitzgerald’s Hollywood experiences alone. However, that being said, I must confess that I found “Writers in Hollywood” a joy from start to finish.

First of all, the book debunks the myth that directors are the true creators of the medium. Anyone, including any honest director, knows that the script is the single most important ingredient in the making of a movie. A bad script with a cast of Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Michelle Pfeiffer and Cher is still going to be arotten movie. Hamilton understands this only too well, and in his introduction does a neat scalpel job on the myth of the auteur :

“I remember conversations in Oxford, circa 1960, when I used to go to the cinema five times a week. Outside the darkened theaters, in junior common rooms across the land the ‘auteur theory’ was beginning to take hold. On one occasion, I was particularly struck by the dialogue in ‘Sweet Smell of Success’ (the ‘Match me, Sidney,’ ‘You’re dead, go get buried’ sort of thing), and I was eager to acquire a copy of the script. To disdainful cineastes of my acquaintance this seemed a pretty low response. I should have been concentrating instead on the ‘voice’ of the director, the recurrences and antinomies by which he had made the narrative ‘his.’ ”

Hamilton attempted to do just that. He looked up the other works of the director of “Sweet Smell,” Alexander MacKendrick, but found only one other picture, some horrid “soft focus tear-jerker about a deaf-and-dumb juvenile.” The two pictures have nothing in common; one of them is good primarily because Ernest Lehmann and Clifford Odets wrote a great script.

After reading the introduction, one might think that “Writers in Hollywood” is going to be a book that rescues the names and reputations of writers who have had to play second fiddle to actors and directors, but Hamilton is too sophisticated to take this tack.

Things are never as simple as good guys and bad guys except in the movies. Many writers discussed in this book were either literary men just looking for a payday to help get them past rough times or screen writers who felt as though what they did was second-rate, that if they were “real writers” they would be either novelists, short-story writers or playwrights.

Everyone knows with what loathing Scott Fitzgerald took on the job of screen writer, and how Faulkner suffered, but few people realize that Dudley Nichols, the great scenarist who worked with John Ford, also desired to be a playwright. Even though he won an Oscar for “The Informer,” he still dreamed of taking off and doing his own work. As Hamilton explains it, one can hardly blame him. Here’s a first-hand account of how The Great Ford treated Nichols while they “collaborated” on “The Informer”:

“Nichols often found himself standing up and shouting to make himself heard. John’s typical response if they didn’t agree was that Nichols didn’t ‘understand the Irish temperament’ or that ‘he had no first-hand experience with the Irish people.’ When that didn’t work, John exploded in a tirade of personal insults, calling the writer ‘a supercilious egghead’ who wanted to write ‘a doctoral thesis on the origins of the Irish proletariat.’ When they finally did agree on a scene, Nichols would write it down, and John would go over it, making brutal cuts in Nichols’ dialogue.”

Given this brutal, bullying method of work, who can blame Nichols for wanting out? Hamilton tells us that Nichols actually made it to a farm in Connecticut, where he intended to write plays, but he lasted only a year and came back to the money and security of Hollywood once again.

The book briskly covers the experiences of Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Chandler. All three hated screen writing to a greater or lesser degree, though Hamilton points out that Fitzgerald attempted to persuade himself that he was working in a new and powerful medium that had superseded novels. Indeed, Fitzgerald even persuaded himself that he had succeeded in becoming a good screen writer, and there is a long, brilliantly realized chapter in which Hamilton dissects a fight that Fitzgerald had with Joe Mankiewicz over their collaboration on “Three Comrades.” Fitzgerald struck a pose that he was on the side of art and quality while Mankiewicz was a paid hack ruining his genius, but Hamilton points out that in this picture, neither of them wrote very good dialogue.

Fitzgerald, by any professional standards, was a lousy screen writer, and for a time, a ridiculously overpaid one. The idea that Hollywood didn’t appreciate him is absurd. Producers over-appreciated him until they finally got the drift. The great prose writer couldn’t learn the new craft.

As entertaining as all of this is, I can’t help but wish Hamilton had dealt with the question of why neither Faulkner nor Fitzgerald were any good at their new craft. I think it has to do with artistic obsession. Novelists, especially American novelists, tend to mine their obsessions time and again.

We all know the ruined Fitzgeraldian hero--the rich young man gone to seed as he overdoses on money, Champagne, romance. We all know the Faulknerian hero--the sex-and-family-obsessed backwoodsman--a Snopes or a Compson. These are richly developed characters, multilayered, tragic. The plots of their lives revolve around their own obsessions, and on the rich ironies that their creators invest in them.

Screen writing, on the other hand, is something else entirely. Here’s Huxley, as quoted in Hamilton’s book:

“I work away at the adaptation of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ for the moment--an odd, crossword-puzzle job. One tries to do one’s best for Jane Austen; but actually the very fact of transforming her book into a picture must necessarily alter its whole quality in a profound way.

“In any picture or play, the story is essential and primary. In Jane Austen’s book, it is a matter of secondary importance (every dramatic event in ‘Pride and Prejudice’ is recorded in a couple of lines, generally in a letter) and serves merely as a receptacle for the dilute irony in which the characters are bathed. Any other kind of receptacle would have served the purpose equally well, and the insistence upon the story as opposed to the dilute irony that the story is designed to contain, is a major falsification of Miss Austen.”

It seems to me that this is the very crux of the matter. And not only is plot more important than character; in movies, character is completely dictated by plot. In short, “What does the hero do?” is the main question, not “How does he feel?” or “What does he think?”

Huxley, by the way, was very successful in Hollywood. He saw screen writing as a kind of interesting puzzle that he wanted to solve. He greatly enjoyed his stay in Los Angeles, as did Ben Hecht, who railed against the stupidity of Hollywood but had a hell of a good time. And screen writers Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges became hugely successful writer-directors, which is the smart bet. As anyone in the game knows, becoming a director is the only way to protect what you have written and assure yourself that you’ll see it on the screen.

Among the many amusing stories in “Writers in Hollywood,” one of my favorites is about Brian Foy, a man known in 1933 as the “Keeper of the Bs” because of his low-budget assignments. Foy bragged that while he was at Warner, he made one picture 11 times. First he made a movie called “Tiger Shark,” a fishing story, in which Edward G. Robinson lost his arm. Then he remade the picture with the exact same plot as “Lumberjack,” only in the second version the hero lost his leg. Then he remade it again as “Bengal Tiger,” but this time the hero was a lion tamer and lost his arm. Etc., etc.

It’s easy to laugh at Foy’s cynicism, but it’s also instructive. A hero fighting against the odds, one of his arms ripped off; a tiger, a shark, a giant ape standing between him and the girl, the treasure; saving the town, the country, the world . . . This is the stuff of most movies, not vision or personal obsessions.

Remember, folks, they made it 11 times because all 11 times it made money.