Another Plot Against the Screenwriter

Remember the one about the particularly naive ingenue who wanted to get to the top? She slept with the screenwriter. RIM SHOT.

And here’s Entertainment Weekly’s recent definition of a screenwriter: “In Los Angeles, anything with opposable thumbs.”

RIM SHOT.

“There is only one thing I can recall being treated with anything like the amusement and contempt and condescension reserved for screenwriters,” screenwriter Robert Towne writes in the July Esquire. “And that is the city of Los Angeles itself.”

Towne’s observations are part of an Esquire special section devoted to “The Writer in Hollywood,” a comprehensive compilation that says pretty much the same things people have said since there have been talkies.

These days, top writers command more than $1 million a script. Los Angeles has shed its flaky image--at least with folks on the other coast, if not those in between. But as Towne and the other writers gathered here report, the screenwriter still can’t get respect.

In her lead piece, New York Times reporter Aljean Harmetz pins down the problem: “the screenplay can never be more than the blueprint for the movie.”

“Screenplays that are a mess,” producer Larry Mark tells her, “turn into fabulous movies, and fabulous screenplays become awful movies.”

That peculiar truism informs the twisted, fun-house existence of the writer in Hollywood--an existence that’s been analyzed often by the handful of writers willing to break away from the money trough long enough to attempt to gain some perspective.

Mostly, though, the analysts wind up repeating the same insightful anecdotes about Warren Beatty.

Same thing here. Chip Brown’s examination of Hollywood’s tortured efforts to bring to the screen Peter Matthiessen’s 1965 novel, “At Play in the Fields of the Lord,” is an amazing saga.

Otherwise, there’s not much in this classic Esquirian journalism that any plumber or sushi chef living within a 200-mile radius of Morton’s hasn’t heard before. (But then, Esquire is a national magazine, and as Harmetz points out, UCLA Extension enrolls more than 4,000 wanna-be Robert Townes in cities nationwide each year.)

The real scoop on what makes Hollywood tick can be gleaned from the fiction in Esquire’s traditional “Summer Reading” section.

Start with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story about hack screenwriter Pat Hobby. First published in 1940, Fitzgerald’s “A Man in the Way” is a sly look at Hollywood plagiarism and cachet in a relatively innocent era.

Compare that to David Krane’s surreal and subtly demented story about a painter who gets a call out of the blue from Warren Beatty and winds up doing lunch and dinner and more with a cameo cast that includes everyone from Phoebe Cates to a banjo-strumming George Segal.

But the piece de resistance in the package is Bruce Wagner’s “A Writer’s Assignment.” This yarn about a floundering screenwriter and limo driver named Bud Wiggins will make anyone with opposable thumbs cringe.

At first it seems as if Wiggins is on a lucky streak. First he gets a call from a Los Angeles Times Calendar writer who wants to interview him. Then his long-remiss agent calls.

With the Calendar writer in tow, he takes a meeting with a gaggle of important producers and a famous actor. Then, as John Gregory Dunne would say, “complications ensue.” The ending is painfully funny, and summarizes the writer’s life and Hollywood hubris better than six compilations of screenwriters’ ruminations.

With its high-concept plot and totally believable characters, Wagner’s story has all the earmarks of a terrific . . . well, you know.

REQUIRED READING

OK. It’s unanimous. Now that the male gender has been added to the swelling ranks of the abused, the planet is now populated entirely with victims.

As the cover story in the June 24 Newsweek puts it: “What teen-agers were to the 1960s, what women were to the 1970s, middle-aged men may well be to the 1990s, American culture’s sanctioned grievance carriers, diligently rolling their ball of pain from talk show to talk show.”

That the male is in trouble is not news. Men commit suicide at four times the rate of women; men between the ages of 18 and 29 are three times as likely as women to be alcoholics; men’s life expectancy is 10% shorter than women’s, and the grim statistics, as quoted in a package of articles in the current Utne Reader, go on and on.

Five years ago, Utne offered its first package of articles on the budding men’s movement. Since then, Robert Bly’s “Iron John” has spent 30 weeks on the bestseller list, and the men’s phenomenon has taken off, becoming--according to Newsweek--”the first post-modern social movement, meaning one that stems from a deep national malaise that hardly anyone knew existed until they saw it on a PBS special.”

Newsweek offers a glibly intelligent overview. Utne is more serious and--to use a word that has become taboo in most men’s circles--sensitive.

Each comes to the reasoned conclusion that men are hurting so badly it’s time for things to change.

It would seem, however, that a few things demand clarification before the gender moves on to the sort of “manifesto for men” and men’s political agenda that Utne’s lead article envisions.

For instance, in all these stories the newly appreciated male victims are depicted in sorrowful sympathy: the displaced farmer, the father who lost his children in a divorce.

But who is the victimizer? Usually, some abstraction such as Industrialized Society or Capitalism or, as writer Andrew Kimbrell puts it in Utne, “the pseudo-male stereotypes propagated by the male mystique.”

It seems that until men do a better job of defining their oppressor, real or imagined, they’ll have a hard time standing up to it, her or (most likely) him.

There are worse ways to go than the way of convicted murderer Robert Alton Harris, who probably will die in the San Quentin gas chamber. The electric chair, in which the dying prisoner’s eyeballs sometimes pop out, is more unpleasant. So, too, is death by firing squad, in which the prisoner dies as a result of “blood loss caused by rupture of the heart or a large blood vessel or the tearing of the lungs.”

But Harris’ death is not likely to be cheerful, according to “This is Your Death,” the cover story in the July 1 New Republic. As a former San Quentin warden explains death in the gas chamber: “At first there is evidence of extreme horror, pain, and strangling. The eyes pop. The skin turns purple, and the victim begins to drool.”

Within 10 or 12 minutes, Harris will die of asphyxiation. As one Johns Hopkins doctor says: “We would not use asphyxiation . . . to kill animals that have been used in experiments.”

SHREDDER FODDER

Thomas Hagey is the undisputed king of the “animal parody book.” Now, spurred by the success of his previous efforts, Cowsmopolitan and Playboar, Hagey has created Penthorse.

Hagey and his staff have lavished great attention on their product, creating a slick and extremely well-produced pseudo magazine that captures the flavor of the original right down to the columns, cartoons and ads.

But why ?