The Sun in Winter

It has never been proved that the brain of a screenwriter liquefies at age 60, but the belief that it does persists in Hollywood.

That’s why writers in that age group have a difficult time getting jobs. Those who do the hiring fear that cranial liquefaction will occur and that the brains of the writer will spill out onto their floor.

There has never been a documented case of this having happened, although a 15 1/2-year-old senior television executive did say he detected the symptoms in a writer of “vintage age,” as he put it, who suddenly seemed to lose it.

The way I understand it, the vintage writer had submitted an idea for a love story involving two teenagers. The executive asked if the writer, being old, felt he was qualified to write about young people.

The vintage writer got a strange look in his eyes, leaned in and said he was not a serial killer but only the year before had written a hit movie about serial killings and, his voice rising, added that he could similarly write about teenagers even though he was not at that precise moment one of them.

The executive, known for his wisdom in such matters, realized that just as only young people can write about young people, only serial killers could possibly write about serial killings and therefore assumed the man was a psychopath in the early stages of brain liquefaction and had him thrown out.

The situation, however, did provide an idea for the network. It is now looking for two teenagers in love to write about two teenagers in love on the condition that they remain in love at least until the script is completed.

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The story demonstrates the attitude of Hollywood studio and network executives toward older writers. Don’t take my word for it. The Writers Guild of America West recently released a two-year study that says if you’re a scriptwriter over 40, you’d better start learning a new trade.

Employment rates in the industry decline to the point of nonexistence for vintage writers. In 1997, 73% of guild writers 30 or younger were working, compared to 46% of those in their 40s, 32% of those in their 50s, 19% of those in their 60s and a minuscule number of those beyond that, whether or not they had suffered any form of neurological meltdown.

“The emphasis on youth is dumbing down the industry,” according to Larry DiTillio, chairman of the guild’s Age Awareness Committee, who announced at the start of our conversation: “I’m 51 and proud of it!” He didn’t do a one-armed push-up, but I believe he could have.

He feels that the intellectual level of film and TV entertainment has devolved to that of a 14-year-old boy and isn’t likely to improve in our youth-obsessed culture. What 14-year-old boys like are glimpses of naked women and humor based on flatulence. Ask any network executive.

“It isn’t that the executives have an innate prejudice against older writers,” DiTillio continued in a spirit of equanimity. “They just don’t connect with a guy over 40. They look at you as though you’re their father and ask themselves, ‘Do I want to work with Dad?’ ”

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Producer David Wolper, honored recently for 50 years in the industry, agrees that age discrimination against writers is a problem and doesn’t understand why it should be. Wolper, 71, has made more than 700 films and TV programs that have won 150 awards, including four Oscars and 51 Emmys.

“Picasso painted until he was 91 and Pablo Casals played the cello until he was 97,” he said the other day. “Art doesn’t suffer with age. I just finished 10 hours for CNN on ‘Celebrate the Century’ and used the same writers I’ve used for 20 or 30 years. They’re in their 60s and they’re great.”

He hires writers, he says, not ages. “Some writers dry up in their 30s, some don’t. It depends on the individual. But Hollywood is getting younger. They have no respect for older people. That’s true of the whole country.”

The 18th century philosopher Vauvenargues wrote that “old age gives light without heat, like the sun in winter.” But then he also wrote: “To have taste, it is necessary to have soul.”

If it is so, to interpret Vauvenargues, that older writers know words but lack passion, it is also true that youth, because it lacks soul, lacks taste. Soul emerges through joy and pain and despair and with a richness of experience that only age can acquire.

Eventually someone may figure out that heat and light, youth and age, are the combined qualities required for excellence. Even the input of watery brains would be an improvement over what the entertainment industry has managed to achieve with hardly any brains at all.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at: al.martinez@latimes.com