The Movie Racket - The Complete And Total Dope

( Originally Published 1944 )

They feed me best that rob me of my bread;

MANY persons believe that the largest money for the deliberately money-minded writer is in Hollywood. As a matter of fact it is not. Successful playwrights who never approach Hollywood often make more money. Writers' salaries in Hollywood range into astronomical figures when computed or thought of on a yearly basis.

There are a few writers in Hollywood who make as low as fifty or seventy-five dollars a week. Many make between two hundred and fifty and five hundred, and a few make between five hundred a week and five thousand a week. A very few have even gone above five thousand dollars per week. Notably, Ben Hecht.

There is, however, no way that the new writer can say to himself: "I will go to Hollywood and become a screen writer." The thing is almost never done legitimately. A few writers in Hollywood do all the work, while for every actual working writer there are at least four who do practically nothing but get much better money. Many of these latter did come to Holly-wood to be writers; but they did not succeed through their writing. Usually the real Hollywood writer attains to his access to Big Dough and the studio's list of stock players through deeds of valor in other branches of writing. Among the highly-paid writers in Hollywood who do the actual writing for pictures you will find many known novelists, short story writers, and playwrights. Of late years you will also find writers who were first heard of through radio writing and a few (and among these latter some of the most highly-paid) who wrote vaudeville comic skits.

However, you can sit out there in Podex, North Dakota, and write a novel which if it becomes a Best Seller will fetch you to Hollywood as though you came upon a magic carpet. Even if the novel "stinx for pix." That is, if it is a novel which has no picture value whatsoever, if your publicity as a consequence of the publication of the novel is formidable, that'll do the trick. You'll be sent for—possibly—after the novel is bought for pictures. As a matter of fact, if you want to see Hollywood that badly you can include in the sales contract for the novel the provision that you be hired to work on its screen version. If such a depressing thing happens to you you will be asked to assist, with several half-wits who once were probably book-makers, in changing your novel into something so unlike it that you will be as surprised as the audience about what comes Out of it. This experience not seldom turns "money-writers" back to the Straight and Narrow path of literature (for a time at least). But to sum up, your chances of becoming a Holly-wood writer without first becoming some other sort of writer are not worth considering. Firing prospective movie scripts at Hollywood is a waste of time.

Many young writers of both short stories and the novel ask themselves how best they can include in their work something that will lead it Hollywood-ward.

This is a much harder question to answer than the tyro believes. He always thinks that a person like myself, for instance, who has worked for pictures, should be able to give him a definite formula. This is absolutely impossible for the simple reason that many novels, plays, and some short stories, are bought by Hollywood not because of what is in them but be-cause of the publicity value that surrounds them.

There are certain rough rules, however, that may help a bit.

Hollywood's foremost problem is, of course, casting. The whole of Hollywood lives, moves, and has its being on the Star System. A star of magnifique magnitude does not want, ordinarily, to be "topped" by a protagonist lead, feature players, or supporting players. An ideal Hollywood novel, or short story, or play, is one that contains a stellar part that overwhelms everything else inherent in the work. Of course, every now and then Hollywood, at its wit's end, grabs up a whole handful of stars and throws them opposite each other in a bunch of expensive junk which almost always fails. Usually, however, the ideal top box-office picture contains a solo part which makes everything else insignificant.

Many Hollywood stars are cranky and able to force their idiosyncrasies upon the producers. They will shun a story that gives anyone else a chance. They want all the "takes," or lines. Most writers do not realize it, but many times the purchase of a story property '(as Hollywood calls a novel, play, or short story) is influenced by the star. Most of the stars pore through the late novels and short stories looking for a vehicle. They always look for something wherein they can be the whole show. Finding something of the sort they will go to the studio, demand that the story be purchased, and go into expensive vapors if it is not.

Let me give you a case in point of the power of stars in this respect; a very funny situation which, alas, alack, I must limn without any names.

A certain menial employed in Hollywood, at an institution where he was constantly in touch with the stars, wrote a lousy movie original. He got in touch with a star and showed it to the person. (I am using "person" not derisively but to cover up the sex of the "person.") This "person" casually looked at the type-script, and, being customarily stinking drunk, said, in the presence of witnesses: "I want it." This star is a free-lance player, much sought after. Gossip carried to the studio in question the situation and the star's statement. Several studios got in touch with the menial and wild bidding started for an utterly no-good story. The bidding finally mounted to such proportions that the menial would be fixed for life. He sold the story to the highest studio bid.

The star was called in, told that the story had been bought, and asked to play,: in it. The "person" then read it for the first time, announced that it stank to the high Heavens, and the hell with it. The story was never produced. The menial will live comfortably the rest of his life on the proceeds. The studio, the star, nobody was particularly concerned about the matter one way or another. It was just, as they say in Hollywood, "One of those things."

One thing somewhat helpful in "slanting" a novel or a short story toward pictures is the realization that most pictures are made, roughly speaking, in seven parts (reels). That is to say, having seen a movie or two, ask yourself: "What is there in my story or novel that will divide nicely into the seven-reel adjustment?" In these seven reels, usually, one reel "tops" another. The first reel begins slowly, introducing the characters, background, and situation. The second reel develops the first plot situation; but, unlike a short story (an average short story), from that point on you have to go through the intermediate stages of advancement, or topping, through reels three, four, and five, until in reels six and seven you come to a sharp dramatic crux which usually a short story cannot space out (it usually takes a novel-length to. do this) . However, a few thoroughly smart short story writers, even within the five to seven thousand word length of the average short story, indicate briefly action and situation that would build up the third, fourth, and fifth reels.

Depressingly enough the "chase is still prime Hollywood fodder. Even the most naive sort of chase is valued toward the end of even the most serious story or novel. Next to sex the chase is the most valuable of all Hollywood assets.

The League of Decency, the Hays Office, the Parent Teachers Association, and other associated organizations have mostly taken away sex; so that the chase today in Hollywood assumes as large proportions as it ever did larger perhaps.

To sum up, then: if you can, in your novel or short story, have the leading protagonist far more important than any of the other characters; think and write in terms of accelerating tempo of Action and situation; throw in a climactic scene that devolves around a chase; in this way you are slanting, as far as you possibly can, your vehicle Hollywoodward; there is nothing else of which I know that will help to this end.

As for Hollywood itself, for authentic information of which I am constantly besieged, here are some random bits of information. "Old Bagdad," my daughter calls it, because when you take a look at most of the fulsomely-arrived screen cuties off stage they are indeed Old BAGs with Sugar DADdies. The working-over they get in order to "arrive" is really something.

But before I have at Hollywood with a McCormick Reaper-after which you will admit that Hollywood has been reaped let me first say that my daughter and I have been here for ten years. Night and Day. We haven't been out of Hollywood two hours in ten years. We went to Long Beach once, and both of us broke down and wept and howled with homesickness after we had been away an hour. To the disgust of our host and hostess we had to be hauled back to Hollywood forthwith. Since that time nothing has ever coaxed us away from Hollywood again; nor shall anything coax us away from Hollywood again. We certainly will never leave voluntarily. And if dragged out we shall go biting and screaming and clutching with our nails at every lamp post, upon all of which our cocker spaniels have repeatedly functioned.

As I say, my daughter and I love Hollywood and we stay here because we love it. It is the only place in the United States I have ever lived and I have lived all over the United States where I have never been bored. It is the most delightfully vicious place in the world, and I would not see any part of it re-formed. In the years to come, in the centuries to come, tales will be told and writ of Hollywood in the manner of the tales now told of Bagdad. When re-searchers rumple old files for data on Hollywood they will come across things that Jim Tully, and I, and a few others have written, and they will say: "My God! There are a couple of guys who actually told the truth about Hollywood. How in the world did they get away with it?"

I have worked on the Hollywood movie lots for five years: M. G. M., Warner Brothers, Universal, and Columbia. I still contribute "originals" to the studios, under another name and through a unique arrangement I have mentioned elsewhere. All of my ten years here have been spent with every sort of Hollywood personality, from producers to property-room custodians. I have known intimately a dozen actresses (little ones), and have heard their stories inside out. I know every boulevard and back alley in town; every dive, bookmaker, hooker shop, and flossy atelier of what are called the "Arts" in Hollywood. I have at one time or another met nearly every outstanding Hollywood "poisonality" (as they call them here).

There is plenty about Hollywood I don't know; but what I do know about it I know indisputably. So now the hell with that, and let us proceed to kick the teeth out of Hollywood yet again as one often does to a loved one to keep her in line-even at the risk of being repetitive. Anyway, some things bear repeating.

From the writer's standpoint Hollywood is a shambles. There are about six hundred "writers" in Hollywood; yet of these about sixty do practically all the writing.

These sixty are men who were sent for by Holly-wood because of .the success of their plays, novels, short stories, radio ,scripts, or even poems.

On most feature pictures you will see four writing credits. Actually in most cases more than four "writers" worked on the script, and got paid for it; while, always, one man wrote it.

When you see the writing credits on a motion picture you will almost always see the name of one writer who is familiar to you a man (or woman) who writes other things, and became famous for other things before he came to Hollywood. He is the man who actually wrote the picture. The rest will be stooges who somehow managed to chisel in on the credit lines or the money profits.

A motion-picture script, for a standard seven-reel feature, runs about a hundred and twenty-five to a hundred and fifty pages. These, however, are not solid pages. They are pages broken up by script directions and dialogue, and they average about a hundred and twenty-five words to the page. A good writer can do such a script in a couple of weeks, with plenty of elbow room; a bad writer can do one in a couple of days; a very good writer can do one in a month but practically ,all scripts take from three months to three years to complete.

This is because of the "helpers" that the real author who writes the script has thrust upon him. Without helpers the cost of the average motion-picture script could be cut to at least a quarter of its usual cost, and greatly improved as to quality. These helpers, called, in Hollywood-and nowhere but in Hollywood "writers," are a constant source of amazement to all who behold them.

When Hollywood advanced from its crude early days to its cruder later days it was gradually discovered, to the astonishment of the crew who founded Hollywood, that writers really could write.

For many years Hollywood's founding fathers thought that writing was some sort of three-shell game that everybody could play; so they let anybody write scripts producers, directors, actors, prop boys, et al. Then one day a producer, just as a novelty, imported a real writer from the East and had him .do a script. It turned out, of course, amazingly better than anything ever before written in Hollywood. And so the people who founded Hollywood learned that being a writer, like being an electrician, was a sort of trade that you actually had to know something about.

At first the Hollywood Founding Fathers were alarmed and dismayed to make this discovery; then they started sending in droves for real writers from the East, because invariably when a picture was written by a real writer it did better than when it was written by a producer, director, actor, or gaffer.

Finally real writers took over all the writing in Hollywood. To the profound annoyance of everyone else in Hollywood they began to earn sums as great as actors and directors earned, because studios stole them, one from the other, by increasing their salaries. Hollywood never got over resenting writers. In every imaginable way Hollywood tried to break its own crew into writing; and found to its further dismay that writing is a trade that cannot be learned by writing motion pictures.

It became obvious, to Hollywood's boundless chagrin, that no amount of writing motion pictures, on the part of one of its own, ever made a motion-picture writer, or any other kind of writer, out of him. That holds true to this day. THERE IS NOT ONE WRITER OF MOTION PICTURES, IN HOLLYWOOD, WHO LEARNED TO BE A WRITER BY WRITING MOTION PICTURES, OR WHO HAS EVER BECOME ANY KIND OF WRITER, EVEN A MOTION-PICTURE WRITER.

The reason is clear. A motion-picture scenario is not a particular type of writing in itself. It is a form of play writing; and writing plays is the hardest type of writing in the world. The best writers in Holly-wood today were playwrights before they came to Hollywood.

A real writer, in any branch of writing, was such the first time he mussed his diapers. No amount of instruction in any kind of writing will make any kind of writer out of anybody unless he was a writer in his mother's womb. I don't mean a genius; or even a slick-paper trained seal. I merely mean that there is a "knack" to any kind of writing, which comes in the germ plasm, and comes in no other package.

The more Hollywood began to realize all this the more it fretted. Hollywood's own raised livid hell when an Eastern writer was imported to write a picture; it kept insisting that those who founded Holly-wood should give the writing jobs to each other. But it simply couldn't be done. Finally it was more or less settled by saddling "helpers" upon the real writers.

At first the real writers howled to high heaven about the helpers. The battle raged for years. But the producers won out. Now every real writer in Holly-wood works with from four to forty helpers, all of them getting as much as he does, and three of them getting equal screen credit with him. Out of the six hundred "writers" employed in Hollywood seventy-five per cent of them never have written anything, never could write anything, and never will write anything.

All the writing in Hollywood is done by a handful of writers, somewhere between sixty and a hundred and sixty, EVERY ONE OF WHOM WAS A NAME WRITER BEFORE HE CAME TO HOLLYWOOD.

Once in a while you'll see magazine stories or novels with the names of typical Hollywood writing fakes on them. This simply means that the guy found a good writer broke, and paid him to write for magazines for him, or to write a novel he could put his name on. One such Hollywood character fake writer has had the same writer (ghost) write numerous magazine stories and articles for him, and more than one book.

So what are you to do about such a discombobulated mess, if you want to have a crack at Hollywood?

Send in originals? Don't be silly!

If you send an original to a Hollywood studio it will be rejected unopened. You have to get an agent.

How do you get an agent? It is very simple. You simply show him your Screen Credits.

If you haven't got any Screen Credits how are you to get an agent? You can't unless you have "connections."

How are you going to learn to write screen script? The only way you can really learn is by working on a Hollywood lot.

But you cannot work on a Hollywood lot unless you can already write screen script.

OK so we are at an impasse.

But people do get agents in Hollywood, and do learn to write screen script, and do get jobs as writers in Hollywood without screen credits. That end al-ways comes through Hollywood selecting you, rather than you selecting Hollywood.

The Hollywood readers (they now grandly call themselves screen analysts), seeing something of yours in a magazine, or on the stage, or in book form, will perhaps send for you. If they do, you will be taught screen script in a half-hour by your stenographer. You will be given from four to fourteen helpers, three of whom will take seventy-five per cent of your screen credit away from you, and you will then have become, magically, a screen writer.

Actually, there are other ways; but they take money. If you have enough money to invest you can come here, party with the right people and, if you are a very good mixer, get yourself across as a screen writer. But if you are a good mixer and have money to invest in such a venture you probably won't be a writer which won't matter, really, because you can then become a helper-writer, receive just as much credit and just as much money; get just as toothsome women and live in just as pink a house as a real writer.

The difference between real Hollywood writers and helper-writers is that the real writers have to be had in Hollywood, whereas the helper-writers could easily be dispensed with. The net result of jettisoning them would be a tremendous improvement in the quality of motion-picture writing. Whenever you see a writer in Hollywood who did not first make a name for himself in other branches of writing you see a fake writer one who does no writing at all.

Every word of movie script written in Hollywood is actually written, or projected, or suggested by one of a hundred or so writers, all of whom are members of the Authors' League of America, and every one of whom was a playwright, novelist, short story writer, or radio writer before he became a movie writer. That, as I said before, is because movie writing is not a form of writing; it is writing, period.

If you have written short stories, novels, plays, or radio script, I could sit down with you and in thirty minutes teach you how to write good motion-picture continuity. If you have not achieved a name in some branch of writing I COULDN'T TEACH YOU TO WRITE MOVIE SCRIPT WITHOUT FIRST TEACHING YOU HOW TO WRITE SOMETHING ELSE. It would take me from a year to eternity to teach you how to write something else first; depending upon how much of an inherent knack for writing you possess.

I have (without charge) taught people to write, yet in every case all I did was point out to them a way to direct something they had already in them. I have written and sold everything: novels, plays, short stories, articles, advertising copy, newspaper copy, poetry, trade-magazine articles, greeting cards, religious articles, propaganda, counter-propaganda; but with all that in the record I am still not a great writer because I was not born a great writer.

Though they may have only a smattering of the knowledge and technique that I have spent years mastering, there are certain types of writers I can teach in a very short time to write infinitely better than I ever could. (Remember, please, I do not teach writing for money so don't write and make me any propositions.)

On the other hand there is a certain type of person that I couldn't teach to write anything, not even if I were to labor with him off and on for years. Often in the past I made the mistake of trying to help these people with their writing; a mistake I've outgrown, now that I've learned how to tell the difference at the outset between a potential writer and a never-could-be writer.

One thing has distressed me many times, when I have time from my drinking, gambling, and wenching to be distressed about anything. It is the fact that the greatest writers in the country never write anything. Continually I come across people in all sorts of places who could top any American writer functioning to-day. Yet they write nothing because they just aren't interested in writing. These are the Mute Inglorious Miltons of the trade.

In another way my life is made sad, when some-times I am weak enough to let it be made so, by a horde of "writers" who have had the misfortune by some fluke to sell an article or a short story, and who are not writers at all, and never will be writers, and never could be writers; but who will go on trying to be writers, because of that one sale, until the day they die.

So far I have been talking about Hollywood to amateur writers. Perhaps I should include something about it for the arrived writer.

Those of you who have good slick-paper magazine credits, novel credits, and play credits, and who still are not sent for by Hollywood, can accomplish this end, if you want to, without too much trouble. More of you should, for reasons implicit in earlier paragraphs.

The first thing you must have is an agent. A lot of you, I know, eschew Hollywood agents because you know them for a blood-sucking, cutthroat tribe, which they are (all except my agent and one or two others we will include for the sake of keeping away libel and slander suits the one or two other good ones I refer to may be the very agents who will read this and want to sue me).

There are eight major studios in Hollywood; and there are four hundred and eighty-five listed agents. These agents attach themselves as blood-suckers to the Industry, and the Industry pays them off because they are part of the piratical crew. Nevertheless you have to deal with one of them if you ever come to Hollywood.

The easiest way to deal with them is through your own Eastern agent. Every large Eastern agent has a hookup with a Hollywood agent. Get your Eastern agent to arrange with his Hollywood correspondent for a visit, on your part, to Hollywood. During such a visit the Hollywood agent, unless he takes a dislike to you for one reason or another, will introduce you around Hollywood, make appointments with producers for you, perhaps "try you 'out," usually with a ten- or twenty-week contract. Then, if you've got the goods, you're set, even before you have a really big best-seller; and don't be afraid of movie script. It is impossible for anyone to learn who has not written other things; it is childishly simple to learn if you have successfully written other things. On every lot there are stenographers who know it inside out. The studio will assign you such a stenographer. If, in addition to her studio salary, you slip her an extra twenty-five to fifty bucks a week she can show you how to turn out movie script to compete with the very best being done. Movie writing is simply writing, only the paragraphing is different. The screen directions can be memorized in a half-hour by any bright lad sitting with a bright studio stenographer, providing he keeps his mind on what the stenographer is saying and his hands in his pockets.

I am speaking now to really arrived writers; not to writers with a circulating-library novel or two to their credit, or a few pulp-paper yarns. Not that I wish to slight pulp-paper writers. They would be the best of all Hollywood script writers; but Hollywood will have nothing to do with them. When Hollywood buys a novel it always calls in a slick-paper writer to turn the novel into what it would have been in the first place if it had been published in a pulp-paper magazine as a serial; but Hollywood insists that pulp-paper writers cannot write for it, and makes slick writers turn everything it produces into pulp writing as best they can. Pulp-paper writers could do it a hell of a lot better, since all movie narrative presentation on celluloid is pure pulp stuff.

I know from sad and gloomy experience that I am likely to get an avalanche of letters, as an aftermath of this chapter, asking about Hollywood agents. I positively will not recommend a Hollywood agent to you, nor you to a Hollywood agent. Nor will I give you a list of such agents any more than I will, or could, give you a list of the syndicates buying tabloid short stories.

If you want to shop around among agents subscribe to the Hollywood Reporter or to Daily Variety. In these publications you'll see agents all bragging hideously about themselves and recommending them-selves as though they were tooth paste. Also, by subscribing to either the Reporter or Variety, you will gradually see what agents place what writers and where and how and in connection with what.

I try to be honest. (And, boys and girls, give me Credit for it; you have no idea how much it costs me year in and year out.) The plain fact of the matter is that drag works in Hollywood much more fluently than in most American Industries. There is one SURE FIRE road to Hollywood which anyone can take and it is taken time and again. If you have a friend who is a producer, agent, director, actor, actress, or writer, such a friend can get you into Hollywood faster than any ability on earth could get you in. Plug an angle like that and you're a cinch for Hollywood. (But gossakes, kiddies, don't try to use me I haven't got that much drag in Hollywood.) But to get back now to the amateurs.