Speak No Evil About the Screenplay

The sentiments expressed by screenwriters Nicholas Kazan, Robin Swicord and Michael Tolkin are not only valid but long overdue (“Scorsese, Lange’s Script: Knock Writer of ‘Cape Fear,’ ” Dec. 2). De Maupassant--himself no mean writer--must have had some presentiment of what the future film writer was in for when he created “Ball of Fat,” for, like his good and giving heroine, we “Hollywood writers” are forever called on to save producers and directors.

The studio heads, indie producers and (above all) the directors must bear responsibility for both the “shortage of good scripts” (another fantasy, as writer D. P. Harrison points out in “Writers Are There if Studios Only Look”) and for a system that traditionally woos the writer when it needs scripts, then unceremoniously dumps the writer when the director is ready to turn “his own vision” into film.

If anyone in this town doesn’t believe this, let him recall the story of the writer who handed Ernst Lubitsch 500 blank pages of typing paper and suggested: “Here. Give this the Lubitsch touch!”

And if anyone still doesn’t get it, try remembering the 1988 Writers Guild strike when the whole industry ground to a halt because there really was a shortage of good scripts.

And, by the way, the same might be said about another Hollywood fiction concerning “older writers”: I’m several eons over 30, yet I’m currently and contentedly writing two screenplays, on assignment, for which I’m being paid in real American dollars, as mandated by our own WGA rules.

Maybe if more “old” writers, along with such younger writers as Kazan, Swicord and Tolkin, take the time to define and defend their craft, Hollywood and the public (and even some of the folks who review films for The Times) may finally realize that movies aren’t made up on the set by casts and directors. Nor do “old” writers always fade away--some just get better and better.

WILLIAM DOUGLAS

LANSFORD

Playa del Rey