One for the Sons of Bitches

Do you know who wrote your favorite film? If the names Sidney Howard, Frances Goodrich, and Joseph Stefano fill you with a sense of admiration, then congratulations on recognizing what most of us consider trivial: These are the people who wrote the classics Gone With The Wind, It’s A Wonderful Life, and Psycho. Even among filmmakers, the obscure status of screenwriters tends to be the norm—director Nicholas Ray once grumbled, “If it were all in the script, why make the film?”
Ray was referring to the gulf between the script and what ultimately shows on the silver screen. By the time a finished flick hits your hometown theater, the screenplay, just one small part of the overall process of filmmaking, has devolved into a mongrel combination of original and consumer demand. Sometimes, as with “high-concept” franchises like the Mission: Impossible series, you don’t even need the kernel of original thought—the script is almost an afterthought. At the very least, the screenplay is interpreted by a dozen very different pairs of eyes, from the director’s to every actor who mangles a line, to the cinematographer and editor. If you want power over your art, screenwriting is the last medium to pursue.
Nevertheless, as it is for so many others in the movie business, an Academy Award is the premier accolade for a screenwriter. Perhaps to make up for the lowly status of writers in the pecking order, the Writers Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences seems to take great pride in making oddball choices in films it selects to vie for the best screenplay Oscar (individual branches of the Academy—Directors, Composers, Film Editors, etc.—nominate films for awards in their categories). Sometimes the directors go crazy and give David Lynch a nod, but for the most part, the Writers Branch has a habit of unearthing the strange bedfellow, nominating and awarding an established literary figure (George Bernard Shaw, John Irving), or tipping its hat to an edgy new presence like Quentin Tarantino. While the Academy as a whole often bestows crowd-pleasers like Rocky or Titanic with the best picture award, screenplay awards have gone to such daring fare as Network, L. A. Confidential, and The Piano.
Best Original Screenplay remains the only Oscar that Citizen Kane won, and the only Oscar that Orson Welles ever could claim as his own. Charlie Kaufman, perhaps the best screenwriter working in America today, has his for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He was also nominated the previous year for his masterwork, Adaptation, a movie whose conceit was that a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman created an imaginary twin brother Donald, and together they attempted to adapt an unfilmable book into a decent screenplay (both Charlie and the imaginary twin were nominated in real life). Pedro Almodóvar has his, too, for Talk To Her.
Because it rewards eccentricity, there is a certain hip factor to the best original screenplay Oscars. This category remains the one corner of the Academy where, year after year, some of the coolest films get nominations—and actually win. While Sideways might earn nods for best picture and best director, no one expects it to actually win those awards … but it did earn Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor statuettes for best adapted screenplay. In 1995, Christopher McQuarrie’s Byzantine Usual Suspects beat out the much more classically structured (and ham-fisted) Braveheart; and Preston Sturges—a comic genius and arguably one of our greatest directors—has three nominations for his writing, one of which (The Great McGinty) resulted in an Oscar.
But just as the Academy likes to award actors- turned-directors (Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood, Kevin Costner, Mel Gibson)—perhaps knowing these icons would never win an acting award—so, too, it awards actors who lower themselves to write. Billy Bob Thornton, a legitimately decent actor, owns a little gold man for writing Sling Blade, as do Matt Damon and Ben Affleck for Good Will Hunting; Emma Thompson has one for acting in Howard’s End and another for her adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. Certainly, it does the Writers Branch no harm to welcome these high-profile types into its inner circle; while one could accuse the members of kowtowing to the stars, there’s also a case to be made for crediting the passion of writers—whoever they are—in bringing to the screen a work that they’re especially tuned into. Affleck and Damon were barely on the rise when they won their screenplay award, as was Thornton; and Thompson simply adored Austen.
Despite that passion, only the most devoted film buffs seem to glom on to published screenplays. Plays, too, are seldom read, but often published in the hopes that they’ll be produced (moreover, while theater buffs outside large cities might never get to see the new Pulitzer-winning play, movies are accessible anywhere). And if you’ve ever cracked a copy of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai with the best intentions—as I’ve done—you’re likely eventually to set it down and cue the DVD instead. Robert Towne’s Chinatown, rightfully heralded as one of the greatest screenplays ever written and taught in the best scriptwriting classes, is one exception of a well-read script. It remains that writer’s only Oscar—he’d been nominated for Last Detail and Shampoo in addition to Chinatown, for three nominations in as many years; sadly, it may have damned him to a lifetime of comparison. (His most recent work was the risible Ask the Dust.)
The script for Chinatown reads like one of Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled thrillers, sparse and compelling; it still makes one shudder at its grasp of evil. But do we recoil from the wretched Noah Cross as we read him on the page, or because of what we remember of John Huston and how his acting in that role provoked such dread? Thing is, Chinatown is a classic because of its screenplay but also because of Roman Polanski’s vision, which gave the film its sense of foreboding, and its grim, cynical ending—which the director changed from Towne’s upbeat close. Then, too, there is Nicholson’s foolish leading man, John A. Alonzo’s washed-out cinematography, and Jerry Goldsmith’s moody score. Add to all of these a producer in Robert Evans, who brought these talents together and kept them from one another’s throats.
When Irving G. Thalberg was the boss of Universal Studios during the mid-1920s, he bluntly summed up the prevailing attitude toward those who toiled on screenplays: “The writer is the most important person in Hollywood. But we must never tell the sons of bitches.” Studios have always been desperate for good ideas, and the screenwriter is your source for this most important product. Ultimately, though, no screenplay—from Citizen Kane to Chinatown—can stand alone as a classic. Perhaps this is because film is both utterly collaborative and thoroughly permanent. Plays are momentary, changing with each production, and the faces, voices, and places in a book are visualized differently by each person who reads it. But a movie, once made, exists essentially forever. Just as no one can ever remake Chinatown without seeing Jack Nicholson, no one can go back to Towne’s original vision, even if someone were foolish enough to attempt a remake. It’s in our collective consciousness now.
Movies need screenwriters as much as they need actors and actress, producers and directors and editors. And while the writers are the ones who see the film first, in their heads, they are perhaps the ones who suffer most as they watch their vision mutate into the final product. The screenwriter might indeed be the most important son of a bitch in Hollywood, but he is not the only son of a bitch by far.