Lip Service

The first screenwriter I ever met was Richard Matheson, who wrote Steven Spielberg’s memorable early TV movie, “Duel,” about a malevolent semitruck, and who, in 1983, was one of the authors--if that is the correct term--of “Jaws 3-D.” That year an editor sent me to interview him at his very nice home in the West Valley to talk about “Jaws 3-D” and his adventures in the screen trade going back to 1957, when he adapted “The Incredible Shrinking Man” from his own novel.

I arrived in the late afternoon, just as Matheson was finishing his daily pages, and he greeted me dressed in a jumpsuit like the ones worn by garage mechanics and Pete Townshend of The Who. He was 57, a man of many interests and talents, in manner both genial and grave and, somewhat to my surprise (since he had written it, along with others), completely dismissive of “Jaws 3-D.” The movie was about to open and he hadn’t even seen it. Nor did he plan to.

What writer, with a movie poster on his wall signed by Spielberg, could be so alienated from his work that he didn’t care to see how it turned out? But Matheson, I would learn, was not so unusual in this regard. Most screenwriters took assignments, some better than others, and were used to having their work rewritten or rewriting others, then waiting for an arbitration committee of the Writers Guild of America to decide who would get screen credit. It was all in the game, somewhat demeaning but well-paying--and almost invisible to millions who went to the movies.

“If it hadn’t been for the money I was getting for the scripts I wrote,” he said, “I would have stayed with novels because they are very much more satisfying. And I would have written a hell of a lot of very interesting books by now and I would be really good at it. I’ve written some marvelous scripts, most of which were not done well and a lot of them that weren’t made at all.”

Such could be literary success in Hollywood.

Eighteen years later, a young writer named Stephen Gaghan, a few weeks before he would win a Golden Globe for his screenplay adaptation of “Traffic” and be nominated for an Oscar, tells me he’s not going to write any more screenplays because of the difficulty he’s having on his new picture, where he’s been asked repeatedly to rewrite the ending. “I’m going to write short stories or plays,” he says.

A month later, he takes this back and says he has figured out the ending, and all is going well. He is also directing the picture now. “It’s tough, but it’s a great form,” he says, meaning the screenplay. We believe him.

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IT’S ALMOST THREE QUARTERS OF A CENTURY since “The Jazz Singer,” the first “talkie,” sent out a siren song, luring playwrights, novelists and newspapermen west to draft high-paying scenarios for Hollywood. In all that time the image of the writer in the image factory has not fundamentally changed even if the reality has, a bit.

“Writers are the women of the film industry,” the late screenwriter and novelist Eleanor Perry once reported overhearing at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The first needed and the last consulted, it is said, writers are courted, seduced and lavished with money, but in the end, are they respected? Do they even respect themselves in a film society that demands they trade in their rights as authors for a new Porsche and a house in the hills?

Whether screenwriters are respected or not, and by whom, might seem like a precious or navel-gazing question, until you come around to sharing the view offered by more than a few members of the Writers Guild that the answer has a lot to do with the quality of the movies that end up in your local cineplex. Lamenting the writers’ lack of clout in Hollywood is not necessarily just group therapy for

an ego-damaged elite but an invocation for people who care about movies to see more clearly how they get made and why many of them are not better.

“Writers usually have a special knowledge that comes from working with the material for months, even years, before production,” says screenwriter Nicholas Kazan (“Reversal of Fortune”), addressing the oft-heard complaint (which must sound bizarre to the layman) from writers that they are not welcome on the set. “They are a resource that is vastly underutilized. A writer often has the answer to a problem, an answer that would help everyone, yet the writer is usually not called, not consulted. And so mistakes creep into films.”

Writers will argue, with some logic, that in the highly collaborative medium of the movies, many skills must come together in a joint effort. But of the principals, the writer is the only purely creative artist in the mix, because acting and directing, no matter how difficult or well-executed, are still, strictly speaking, interpretive. Yet in the culture of Hollywood, screenwriters are often not treated as artists. The guild has been seeking to remedy this for years through “creative rights” amendments to the union’s basic contract with producers. These amendments would allow writers to be present for cast readings, rehearsals and on the set.

Nancy Meyers, co-writer of “Irreconcilable Differences” and “Father of the Bride” and director of last year’s “What Women Want,” asks wryly, “Do all nine producers come to the set of a movie? Yes. Do all nine writers? No.”

The uncertain status of writers in Hollywood derives from a central paradox: Films are a visual medium that begin life as words on a page. That, and the weird irony that everyone, from semiliterate moguls to savvy stars, seems to recognize the primacy of the script, but not the scriptor.

“There’s no newfangled way of getting around the essence of films,” Barry Diller, former Paramount and Fox studios top executive (now overseeing USA Films), told the Wall Street Journal recently: “You gotta read the script. There’s no substitution.”

Yet a prized script, once purchased, is treated less like the Holy Grail than a football tossed into a huddle of 11 players, each of whom has a different idea how to get it over the goal line. The director is the quarterback, producers are sending in plays and the writer is in the stands. Or at least this has been known to happen. More than once.

What possible motivation would a director have for not using every resource at his command--including the person who wrote the script--to make a good picture?

“The auteur theory has done a lot of damage,” Kazan says, referring to the prevailing post-’60s critical notion imported from Europe that designated the director as the primary author of a film. “Directors think they should have all the answers.”

Not all directors, certainly. “Quite honestly, insecure directors are threatened by this knowledge the writer has,” Kazan says. “Secure directors are not.”

Presumably his father, Elia Kazan, was among the latter.

As is Lasse Hallstrom, according to Robert Nelson Jacobs, nominated for an Oscar this spring for his adaptation of the novel “Chocolat,” directed by Hallstrom.

“Working with Lasse is a model of how a writer and director should work together,” Jacobs says. “We both understood that he had the final say, but it was in his best interest to solicit my opinion. And he did, often.”

Critics and other journalists have routinely reinforced the auteur theory at the expense of screenwriters largely because it solves the practical problem of attributing succinct credit or blame to a film’s multiple elements. It’s a lot easier not to bother with the writer or writers and simply refer to “Ridley Scott’s ‘Gladiator’ than to call it, properly but clumsily, “David Franzoni, John Logan and William Nicholson’s ‘Gladiator,’ directed by Ridley Scott.” But ultimately it’s also misleading.

The auteur theory has been cemented even more forcefully by the increasing use of the director’s “a film by” credit, which was rare before the 1970s (and when used was more often given to the screenwriter). Now, it’s de rigueur even for first-time directors. When a director has also written the script, of course, that’s different; otherwise writers tend to see this “vanity credit” as overreaching, sending the wrong message and diminishing the writer’s role in the mind of the audience and his film colony peers.

“Directors are not the authors of the films we write,” Tom Schulman, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of “The Dead Poet’s Society,” says in a position paper posted on the guild’s Web site.

Philip Kaufman, the director of “Quills” and also a screenwriter (“The Right Stuff”), believes writers have mistaken directors as the enemy. “I know the struggles of writers, and that there are injustices, but remember that a director might spend three or four years on a movie while a writer could write four scripts in a year and then not be around during production when you need him. And as far as credits, what about the producers? It seems to me that because writers and directors occupy the same neighborhood, they engage in these ethnic battles, ignoring the overlords who look down and are pleased to see them fighting.”

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COULD IT EVER HAVE BEEN DIFFERENT? WHEN WRITERS FROM THE EAST--playwrights such as John Howard Lawson, Herman Mankewicz and Clifford Odets--first came to Hollywood between the world wars, they brought with them the tradition of the Dramatists Guild contract, forged in New York in 1919. It acknowledged the writer’s role as creator by guaranteeing the playwright ownership of his work through the retention of copyright. Under the contract, largely unchanged to this day, playwrights licensed their plays to producers with the stipulation that no changes to the script be made without the playwright’s consent, that they be involved in selecting the cast and director and that all rights to the play remained in the author’s control.

Some of these writers quixotically hoped to transplant those same authorial rights to the movie industry, but the writer as artist did not fit the industrial mode of production the studios had established. Screenwriters were paid five to 10 times what they could make on a novel or play, but they handed over their copyrights to get that money. Early on, the distinction was made that a playwright sold a product while a screenwriter sold a service. A playwright wrote on spec (no money up front), a screenwriter on salary. It was a different kind of job for a different medium, one dominated by stars.

As it still is. Top writers can be paid as much as $3 million for a hot spec script and even $100,000 a week to make someone else’s script shine a little brighter, sums that probably make it hard for most moviegoers to feel a screenwriter’s pain at contract negotiation time. But those numbers balloon above the current guild minimum of $65,000 for a studio feature film and $18,000 for an episode of “Frasier”--and are overshadowed in any case by the much larger sums paid to the marquee actors and directors, who are economically positioned to hire and fire writers.

It was not until 1942 that screenwriters had the protection of a guild contract with the studios. During the long struggle to win that contract, an attempt was made to forge an alliance with the Dramatists Guild and Authors League of New York, a scary proposition to feudal studio chiefs Jack Warner and Irving Thalberg, who railed against outside interference and managed to bully the writers into submission.

But the writers did get a union that secured for them, if not the status of artists, then at least a grudging economic respect from their employers, which is being recalibrated this spring in contract negotiations that have been strained. (The writers’ contract is scheduled to expire after May 1.) Says David Rintels, a ranking television writer and producer and past president of the guild, “A health plan, a pension plan, residuals in TV, a percentage of revenues in cassettes and DVD, participation in foreign [revenues], all these things were won in strikes.”

But speaking to the larger issue, Rintels says, “When disrespect is part of the business, it flows through the work; it has an impact on everything.”

So how do writers get respect? Real respect? Real respect would be, as in the theater, if a writer could demand approval of the director and final cut. (Cue the teenage daughter’s line from “What Women Want”: Yeah, like that’ll be happening.) How many writers are in that position? Or ever will be, unless, like outsiders John Sayles and Woody Allen, they are able to finance their own films and license distribution of them to the studios.

“No screenwriter has final draft,” says David Freeman, a novelist as well as a playwright and screenwriter, whose feature credits include “Street Smart” and “The Border.” “You are a cog in an industrial operation that hasn’t changed that much since the studio system. It’s the throwing of other writers at scripts that’s the problem. But it’s only writers who see it as a problem. As long as studios see rewriting as a system, I don’t see how things will ever change. And I don’t know how you can ever expect a writer to have respect in such circumstances.”

“It’s by nature a patronizing relationship,” says Donald Margulies, who won last year’s Pulitzer Prize in drama for “Dinner With Friends.” He has written 17 screenplays (none produced) and is adapting Tom Wolfe’s novel “A Man in Full” into a miniseries for NBC. “You’re viewed as the person who generates drafts of material that will then be handed over or reworked by others, some of whom are writers and some of whom are not.”

While there’s good money in rewriting, there’s also increased anonymity, with so much time devoted to work that will either never been seen or never credited. “Today it’s hard for a screenwriter to build a body of work,” says Victoria Riskin, a writer and producer and daughter of screenwriter Robert Riskin, Frank Capra’s frequent collaborator. “My father wrote at least one or two major screenplays a year that were produced. No one could say that today.”

“It’s painful,” admits “Chocolat” writer Jacobs, “We’ve all been through it as writers, being rewritten. And rewriting others. I think as much as possible the original writer should be retained.” Jacobs, at the moment, is rewriting someone else’s earlier drafts of “The Shipping News,” again for Hallstrom.

Throwing a lot of money at script development also does nothing to strengthen the bonds of mutual respect among writers. “Money does cause a lot of division in the guild, as it does in society,” says Nicholas Kazan. “If somebody rewrites you for a lot of money, you hate them.”

“There’s no way out of it,” says Nancy Meyers. “The only way I’ve been able to solve that problem is producing and directing my own work.”

It’s not a solution open to all writers, although for some years this has been the standard operating method in episodic television, where writer-producers such as David Kelley and John Wells call their own tunes, hiring multiple directors to implement their weekly scripts--which they supervise and control completely.

Television, which long ago eclipsed feature films in overall revenue, only recently has begun to match movies in critical esteem as reviewers and audiences acknowledge the writing and acting on shows such as “NYPD Blue” and “The West Wing” to be better than many feature films. Yet it seems even the most successful TV writers, many making $500,000 year or more, are still of dimmer renown than someone such as Alan Ball (himself a TV writer) who found the time to write “American Beauty” and won an Oscar for it.

“I think feature writing still has a prestige to it that TV writing doesn’t,” says Roger Director, former supervising producer for TV’s “Moonlighting” and author of the 1996 novel about a television writer, “A Place to Fall.” “But it’s gotten blurrier and blurrier as more screenwriters are writing TV pilots.”

At the same time, he doesn’t see the writer-centered culture of television carrying over to film any time soon. “It’s about final accountability. In television, final accountability rests with the writer-producer. In film, it rests with the director.”

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WHEN THE GUILD GOT ITS FIRST BASIC AGREEMENT IN 1942, THE CONTRACT contained the defining clause that lingers to this day: “The studio, hereinafter referred to as the author”--making it clear where the writer stood after the sale of his or her work.

“In features, you’re not going to have any change until you eliminate the corporate ownership of the screenplay,” says Millard Kaufman, the 84-year-old screenwriter of “Bad Day at Black Rock” and “Raintree County.” “It was brilliant of the studios to arrange that way back when because once you have corporate ownership of the screenplay, a writer no longer has any say about anything.”

“It’s dreamland to think that writers will ever have the right to approve the later changes in their scripts,” says Chuck Weinstock, producer of last year’s “Joe Gould’s Secret” and “Where the Money Is.” “No financier is going to pony up $75 million and then surrender control of a story like that.”

No doubt he is right. But what does this tell us? That movies may be simply too rich for writers. They cost too much. There’s too much at stake. Powered by $20-million stars, they are behemoth corporate enterprises that dwarf the mere creative impulse at the heart of storytelling.

And what is that worth in any case? Some years ago, between the time I met Richard Matheson and before Michael Douglas knew that he would one day be cast as a brooding novelist in “Wonder Boys,” I went to interview Mr. Douglas and, in passing, asked whether he had ever made peace with Ken Kesey, the embittered author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” the book that Douglas had produced into an Oscar-winning film.

Kesey had been publicly upset about his rejected screenplay and disputed contractual percentages from “Cuckoo’s Nest,” and I wondered how messy that was for Douglas considering that “Cuckoo’s Nest” had, in effect, launched his Hollywood career. He said he had been a big fan of Kesey’s, and the falling-out had indeed hurt. “I always felt very sorry that Ken was left with a feeling of animosity,” he said. But then he added something. He said that Kesey had cleared, at the time, something like $800,000 from the profits of the film. Which was, Douglas noted, “not bad for a writer.”

Ouch. Something about that phrase stung, and still does. Probably he would say today that he was kidding. But who in Hollywood would deny that, joke or no joke, Michael Douglas was simply telling the truth?