By James Aitchison

Great films begin with great scripts.  As Hollywood director Mervyn LeRoy once pointed out, “You can do nothing unless you have it on paper first.”

Yet screenwriters suffered more frustrations and a lower status than many other toilers in Hollywood.  Sometimes three or more writers were assigned to write the same movie, with a Hollywood mogul acting as script editor.  Some scripts were thrown together in days.  Very often they were rewrites of earlier flicks.

Some contract writers earned $75 a week, others $2,500.

Scripts were frequently written for specific stars.  Teams of writers would be tasked to conceive stories for Cary Grant or Gregory Peck.  For Gary Cooper, they were instructed to keep dialogue short, so that whatever he said seemed important …

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In silent movies, writers were tasked to write the captions between scenes.  But the advent of sound created “The Great Talkies Panic of 1929-31”.  Suddenly the real art of screenwriting began.  Writers had to produce cinematic stories with spoken dialogue, usually in a three-act structure.  By 1931, 354 full-time writers worked in Hollywood, while another 435 worked part-time.  Nowadays, script development costs have surged to more than $500,000,000 a year, the bulk of which is the cost of options for books and rewrites on films that will never be made.

In truth, screenplays in themselves are not works of art.  They are invitations to others to collaborate on a work of art.  Orson Welles, however, whose Citizen Kane is regarded as the penultimate Hollywood movie, argued: “Writers should have the first and last word in film-making”.  Another classic director and screenwriter Ben Hecht agreed: “Ninety per cent of the success of a movie (or its failure) lay in the writing of its script.  Mostly directors ruined perfectly good stories.”

Oscar-winning screenwriter Dudley Nichols said: “One is not a screen writer until one writes as a camera.”  He stressed that writers had to understand the camera thoroughly, its possibilities and limitations.  “I believe it is the writer who has matured the film medium more than anyone else in Hollywood.”  Nichols enjoyed top pay in old Hollywood, solo credits and remained free to work with any studio of his choice.  He worked on fourteen movies with the venerable director John Ford including Stagecoach. 

So, what lies at the heart of screenwriting?  The great Robert McKee, whose Story Classes play to packed audiences in film capitals across the world, is adamant: “Story is about originality, not duplication.  Originality is the confluence of content and form — distinctive choices of subject plus a unique shaping of the telling.”  Content — the setting, characters, ideas —must influence form — the selection and arrangement of events.  McKee argues that as you play with a story’s shape, its intellectual and emotional spirit evolves.  But he warns: “Weak stories … degenerate into multimillion-dollar razzle-dazzle … Society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories.”

In his seminal book Story, McKee sets the ground rules: “Who are these characters?  What do they want?  Why do they want it?  How do they go about getting it?  What stops them?  What are the consequences?”  Find those answers, he says, and craft them into a story.

“Well-executed, literate screenplays lie at the heart of any good movie,” stated the legendary Nunally Johnson, a 40-year Hollywood veteran who considered himself “a businessman’s writer”.  He worked with Darryl F. Zanuck on movies such as The Grapes of Wrath, and later became his own director and producer.  He used to say that the screenwriter’s craft was the equivalent of a good cabinetmaker.  How did Johnson perceive the director’s role?  “The director deserves little more credit than, say, the engineer who brings the Twentieth Century Limited from Chicago to New York.  There’s very little he can do except stay on the track and come into New York.  He didn’t create the track.  He has no choice about which way he was going.”  Johnson’s opinion carries heft: his screenwriting credits include The Desert Fox, The Three Faces of Eve, My Cousin Rachel, and The Dirty Dozen.

Despite the indifference (and interference) of the old studio system, screenwriting excelled in many movies.  Not that the great Hollywood moguls had the time or desire to read the books they wanted to turn into movies.  Sam Goldwyn famously said, “I read part of it all the way through,” while Jack Warner groaned, “I would rather take a fifty-mile hike than crawl through a book.” 

Warner famously called screenwriters “schmucks with Underwoods”; “why should I pay a writer $1,000 a week,” he protested, “when I can get four for that price?” 

If Hollywood respected anything, it was fame and “class”.  For that reason, the big studios loved to bring in “serious” writers.  Authors such as Robert Sherwood, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Gore Vidal and Clifford Odets, along with Broadway playwrights Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, Moss Hart, Lillian Hellman and Maxwell Anderson were all lured to Hollywood with the promise of big bucks.

Some famous authors resisted Hollywood’s siren call.  H. G. Wells said he could not write “on order”, while George Bernard Shaw lamented, “There is only one difference between Mr. Goldwyn and me.  Where he is after art, I am after money.”

Novelist Somerset Maugham tried scriptwriting for Hollywood and left town quickly, in his own words, “with horror, mitigated only by fifteen thousand dollars.”

MGM brought the great British writer P. G. Wodehouse to Hollywood.  He served a year, adding dialogue to other people’s scenarios, and earning $2,000 a week.  “I cannot see what they engaged me for,” he admitted.  “They had the greatest difficulty finding anything for me to do.” 

Author Aldous Huxley adapted Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in 1939.  (In Hollywood, Austen’s book was known as “Pee and Pee”.)  Later he described his Hollywood colleagues as “all quite mad” and regretted selling his literary gifts to a crowd of “swindlers, vulgarians and mountebanks.”  He described a Shakespeare sitting in bungalow number 1, turning in his script, which was then sent to an Ibsen in bungalow 2 for revision, and so on.

F. Scott Fitzgerald believed his time in Hollywood would be a doddle.  It merely increased his alcoholic tendencies.

Playwright S. N. Behrman admitted, “Without Hollywood I would have died of malnutrition long ago.”

Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures, once confronted his highly cultured screenwriter Clifford Odets.  “I may not be college-educated,” Cohn barked, “but I know in Biblical times nobody said ‘yes, siree’ and ‘no, siree’.”  Puzzled, Odets asked Cohn where those words appeared in his script.  Sure enough, the dialogue read: “Yes, sire,” and “No, sire.”  Hollywood lore abounds with such encounters.

Casey Robinson believes he was first to have the idea of making a film out of the play Everybody Comes to Rick’s.  He persuaded Hal Wallis at Warner Bros. to buy it, but then learned Wallis had assigned the screenwriting to Julius and Philip Epstein.  Later, Howard Koch said he added the political storyline.  Julius Epstein, however, said Koch’s stuff was not used in the final movie. 

The real trouble began when star Humphrey Bogart did not like the script when he first saw it.  Hal Wallis was desperate, ordering rewrites.  Co-star Ingrid Bergman recalled, “Every day we were shooting off the cuff.  Every day they were handing out the dialogue and we were trying to make some sense of it.  No one knew how the picture was going to end…”  Even director Michael Curtiz didn’t know!  

According to Casey Robinson, he was called in to sort out the love interest.  “Frankly, I never read the script.  The Epstein boys wrote the police stuff and the comedy … I wrote the love story.”  Julius Epstein refuted all these claims.  “Casablanca is one of my least favourite pictures.  I’m tired of talking about it after 30 years.  It’s a completely phony picture.  Nobody had ever been to Casablanca.  The whole thing was shot in the backlot.  There were never such things as letters of transit around which the entire plot resolved … The movie is completely phony.”

Yet it became one of the most iconic Hollywood movies of all time, and its screenplay featured some of the most quoted lines in movie history: “Here’s looking at you, kid” … “We’ll always have Paris” … “This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship” … and of course, “Play it, Sam…” 

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Aspiring to be a screenwriter?  Read lots and lots of movie scripts, available from many sources online.  Also, Robert McKee’s book is an ideal tutorial.  Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee is published by Regan Books/HarperCollins.