So that’s why they’re so grumpy

It probably began with Mack Sennett. The nearly illiterate, purely instinctive producer of silent comedies used to sequester his “writers” (their main job was concocting knockabout gags) in a room where no books, periodicals or playing cards were permitted. According to recollections reprinted by Marc Norman in “What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting,” there were a few cushionless chairs and a bench with multiple armrests, which prevented anyone from lying down on it. Lunch was a tuna sandwich and a glass of milk because, the master said, “Eating heavy food makes writers logy.” There were a couple of typewriters in the room, but they were never used. Once a sequence evolved it was described to the director from scribbled notes. He was expected to shoot it from memory, while the writers returned to their grousing.

Norman’s heavily anecdotal (and error-strewn) history of screenwriting encourages us to believe that, except for the money and except, perhaps, for scriveners who add a hyphen and a second title -- “director” -- to their credits, the conditions under which movies get written have not greatly improved since Sennett’s day. From the beginnings of the movies, writers have always been regarded as necessary nuisances. They provided structure and intertitles for silent pictures, but that was a medium that conveyed most of its meanings visually, which meant that the director was early established as the writer’s superior. There were a few famous screenwriters in those days (Anita Loos, June Mathis, Frances Marion), but mostly it was easy to platoon anonymous functionaries off and on pictures, especially as moviemaking became an increasingly industrialized process.

Sound production greatly enhanced this trend. The need for dialogue made writers much more important cogs in the machinery, but it also ratcheted up hostilities between them and the studios, partly because the studios reached out to playwrights, novelists and journalists from the East, most of whom volubly despised their Hollywood working conditions. They had known something better -- publishing house editors who worked thoughtfully with them on their manuscripts; the Dramatist Guild’s standard contract, which forbade tinkering with their words. There arose, in Hollywood, a certain amount of wistful talk about establishing that contract as the model for the movies.

But it was too late. The habit of hiring rewriters to rewrite the rewrites was too well established, making it near impossible to establish the writer-as-author, especially when as many as 10 of them might have worked on a script, which in any case was likely to be an adaptation of a pre-existent novel or play. Only later, when the likes of Preston Sturges, John Huston and Billy Wilder claimed the director’s chair, could anyone plausibly claim “authorship” of a movie. Except eventually they ceased to be thought of as “authors” and, for better or worse, became “auteurs.”

In dealing with the studios, directors have huge advantages over writers. They work in public, which makes them hard to fire, and they do something that seems, even to their most arrogant employers, magical. Writers, conversely, work secretively and are thus easily dismissable. Besides, everyone thinks he can write -- if only he had the time. That’s the bad reason -- there are good ones -- why directors get that “film by” credit that drives writers crazy.

There have always been ways for screenwriters to prosper psychologically without becoming directors. You might, for example, drop in on Hollywood from time to time, pick up some good dollars and then retreat to your “real” work as, among others, Lillian Hellman and William Faulkner did. Or, if you chose to stay, you might take a craftsman’s pleasure in doing the best you could in the circumstance (Daniel Fuchs, Nunnally Johnson and Philip Dunne seem to have managed that) while prospering pleasantly. The surest way to disaster was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s. He saw the potential for converting screenwriting into a traditionally defined art and found his curious sobriety rewarded with spotty employment and a lot of contempt. For most writers the answer was the Writers Guild.

Its foundation was difficult; the studios fought it hard and nastily, but eventually it achieved much -- minimum-wage standards, excellent pension and health plans, residuals for the reuse of material, an often fractious (but more or less functioning) method of arbitrating credits. But the one thing the writers wanted most it has never fully accomplished. That is the granting of genuine respect, as opposed to the conventional compliments of award season (“In the beginning was the word” and all that stuff). The problem is that respect cannot be negotiated. How do you put it into contractual language? How do you make sure that a studio development executive treats a script and its creator with the consideration months of thought and effort demand? How do you prevent directors and actors from improvising improvements on the set? The answer, of course, is that you cannot.

Which is why the Writers Guild of America is so persistently cantankerous. Essentially, its members are seeking heart balm -- compensatory payment for the contempt and impatience that is their frequent lot. That may seem ungrateful of them, considering that a top screenwriter makes money that other sorts of writers -- the John Grishams of this world excepted -- can only fantasize about.

Here a comparison between movie guys and book guys may be in order. The former’s payments arrive at mandated stages (treatment, first and second drafts, etc.) even if what they turn in is hopeless -- and that says nothing about the fringe benefits. A novelist, however, submitting the first third of his book, can have it rejected out of hand -- no second chances -- and, worse, be obligated to return the advance he has earlier received. And, of course, he is responsible for his own health and savings plans. Given these circumstances, it is sometimes difficult for the objective observer to muster much sympathy for even a mere modestly successful screenwriter. As Economic Man, he has everything his more literary fellows don’t have -- except the one thing that may matter most: undiluted pride of authorship.

It would have been good if the amiable Norman, who won an Oscar for his contributions to “Shakespeare in Love” but whose track record is otherwise undistinguished, had paused to reflect more seriously on some of these almost existential issues. That’s particularly so since his book appears while another writers strike is in angry progress. We are told it is motivated by a determination not to be screwed again, as the guild was decades ago on home video residuals. What we don’t know is whether payments for use of the writers’ material on the Internet and the iPod will prove worth the pain.

What we should know, no matter how the strike is eventually settled, is that it is not addressing those issues of status and self-regard that, rankling and festering, lead to these periodic explosions. The writers and producers are, as usual, talking about largely symbolic nickels and dimes. But the inflated rhetoric of their conflict, which surely plays a part in preventing quick agreement, is historically determined, almost fated, with both sides locked into their positions by resentful habits of mind -- the beginnings of which are lost in the mists of time, the resolutions to which will not be untangled at any bargaining table. It’s a kind of a systemic curse, which no one deserves and which, one sadly thinks, no one will ever banish.

Richard Schickel is the author of many books, including “Elia Kazan: A Biography.” His next book, “Film on Paper,” will be published early next year.