Age Against the Hollywood Machine

I have a screenwriter friend who has just turned 40 and is already making plans for the disposal of his body after his death. Call him Otto.

He has drawn up a will and has asked for brochures from the Neptune Society, an organization that will arrange for cremation at a reasonable price.

Otto is in fairly good health, but he is convinced that his life is essentially over. At least his productive life. Nobody wants to hire old guys like him to write scripts when there are so many talented 15-year-olds around.

His obsession with life’s end began as a joke based on statistics by the Writers Guild of America that reveal how a writer’s ability to get work in show biz declines steadily after he or she reaches the age of 40.

It is a kind of psychological cutoff that lends validity to Jack Benny’s old running gag in which he was forever 39. Life does not begin at 40 in Hollywood. It ends.

After entering the fourth decade of his life, Otto claimed that producers and network executives began looking at him in a different way when he went in to pitch a story. And he began looking at them in a different way.

“I hallucinated that they were babies in sandboxes with little shovels in their hands,” he said to me one day. “They were drooling and saying ba-ba and goo-goo as I laid out a story line. What’s happening here?”

That’s obvious. We’re living longer but getting older sooner.

I can understand Otto’s growing obsession with the idea that his life is over. I wrote movies, pilots and episodes for television for 20 years before I was replaced by what is known in the industry as “hot young writers” with hot young ideas based on sex, violence and flatulence.

I was doing it part time, realizing with some degree of wisdom that there is no permanency in show biz. I never gave up my day job. But people like Otto devote their lives to telling stories for the tube and the screen, believing that age and experience will be respected elements of creativity. Dreams don’t die when you reach 40, except in the undiscerning minds of network executives.

I was discussing this the other day with Ann Marcus, one of television’s premier writers, who, at 80, has been dumped on to Hollywood’s trash heap. Forget that she can’t get work. She can’t even get an agent.

Marcus is among about 150 writers who have filed age-discrimination suits against 23 networks, production companies and talent agencies, claiming that they won’t give work to writers over 40. The suits are pending in L.A. County Superior Court.

A woman with more credits than would fit in any one column, she has been honored with an Emmy, several Emmy nominations and a distinguished service award by the Writers Guild. She co-created and was head writer for the satirical evening soap opera series “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” in the days when satire still had a market.

In the last few years, she’s written an autobiography and a screenplay, and a mountain of scripts and outlines that are ready to be offered whenever anyone is willing to listen. Earlier this year, her new play, “Waiting for Betty Friedan,” opened at the Theater East in L.A.

But she’s considered too old for television, and no doubt physically unable to crawl down to the abysmal level of its current standards.

Marcus was one of nine WGA members who came up with the idea of challenging the gray wall that keeps older writers out of the loop.

“Some writers were afraid to be a part of it,” she said sitting across from me in the Sherman Oaks home she has occupied for 35 years. “I’m not. I’m old, I have a good pension and a 40-year career behind me. How can they hurt me?”

An energetic woman with intense blue eyes, she bristles at the fact that the gray barrier has prevented her from competing in the world of television production.

“It’s a vicious circle,” she said. “You can’t get a job without an agent and you can’t get an agent because you can’t get work.”

For a moment, she sits in silence, a still life in a room that sings of her success: the golden Emmy on a shelf, framed credits on the wall, copies of her book on a desk, and all those scripts, outlines and ideas on a table.

Then she says, as though addressing a meeting of those who won’t listen, “I have ideas! I’ve lived a lifetime!” And, more quietly, “I want to contribute....”

Hollywood, in a general sense, is locked into the notion that only younger writers possess the energy to project excitement in a movie, which is why we have so many buildings that explode on the screen and so many cars that crash and burn. Subtlety explodes with the buildings, and nuances perish in the flaming cars.

I feel especially sorry for people like Otto. There’s little hope that a lawsuit, even if successful, will alter the state of mind that has built the gray wall. Without acne and braces, the guy hasn’t got a chance.

*

Al Martinez’s columns appear Mondays and Thursdays. He’s at al. martinez@latimes.com.