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Contents
Newsletter
About the Author
About the Publisher
Copyright
If you would like to use material from the eBook (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at info@280steps.com
Acknowledgements
Introduction by Eddie Muller
Introduction: The Big Nowhere
1. Under the Sign of Hollywood
Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler
2. Outside Straight, Inside Flush
Horace McCoy and W.R. Burnett
3. The Postman Rings Twice, But the Iceman Walks Right In
Paul Cain and James M. Cain
4. Deadlines at Dawn
Cornell Woolrich
5. Courting Oblivion
Jim Thompson and David Goodis
6. In the Thieves’ Market
A.I. Bezzerides, Daniel Mainwaring, Jonathan Latimer, Leigh Brackett
7. Life Sentences
Edward Bunker
8. Prime Suspects
Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy
9. To Live and Die in Hollywood
Gerald Petievich
10. Force Majeure
James Crumley, James Lee Burke, Walter Mosley, Sarah Paretsky, Tony Hillerman, James Hall, Joseph Wambaugh, Donald Westlake
11. Smart Guys
Barry Gifford, Michael Connelly, Dennis Lehane, George P. Pelecanos
Filmography
Sources
About the Author
About the Publisher
Newsletter
Copyright
Thanks to the following: Mike Hart, John Williams and Philippe Garnier for pointing me in the right direction; Pete Ayrton for unknowingly suggesting the subject of Heartbreak and Vine; Mavis Haut for reading the book in manuscript; Emma Waghorn for her astute copy editing; A.I. Bezzerides, Edward Bunker, James Lee Burke, Michael Connelly, James Crumley, James Ellroy, Barry Gifford, James Hall, Dennis Lehane, Elmore Leonard. George Pelecanos, Gerald Petiewich, Joseph Wambaugh and Donald Westlake for kindly answering my questions: and to the many novelists-scriptwriters who, for lack of space, have gone unmentioned.
Heartbreak and Vine is dedicated to Caroline S. Haut, with whom I watched my first movie, lost in the light, Pasadena, California, 1949; and to the memory of poet and cultural critic Edward Dorn, 1929-1999.
Once I was invited to a screenwriter’s house in Los Angeles and I brought along, as a gift, a copy of my first novel. My host’s reaction, as he flipped through the pages, confounded me. His expression was a dumbfounded mixture of awe … and pity.
“Man, that’s a lot of words,” he said, clapping the book shut with a flourish that indicated it would probably never be reopened. With the tactlessness I’ve encountered only in Hollywood, he then said, “How much do they pay you for something like that?”
Of course, this guileless guy belonged to the new generation of screenwriters—those whose first (and frequently only) attempts at storytelling come in bare-bones script form, the words chosen merely as placeholders for the visuals, not to actually conjure the visuals. Unlike the writers who crafted America’s cinematic legacy—most of whom were journalists, playwrights, and novelists—successful screenwriters today by and large set out to be screenwriters, which might explain why you rarely hear anymore the kind of “ruined artist” horror stories that fill the pages of this book.
The screenwriter in my anecdote, of course, had earned more for a single cliché-ridden horror script than I’d made, in total, from writing seven books. Which explains in a nutshell the everlasting allure of Hollywood, both for writers and for those who think they are writers. In Heartbreak and Vine, Woody Haut chronicles the tempestuous and torturous way the movie business has traditionally fêted and fucked over its writers—in this specific case, creators of crime fiction.
Most of Haut’s “case studies” take place during an era when moviemaking was a factory business, one that routinely ground down overly sensitive artists. Novelists and playwrights generally fared the worst, while magazine and newspaper professionals thrived; graduates of the fourth estate (Ben Hecht, Jules Furthman, Herman Mankiewicz, Gene Fowler, Art Cohn, to name a few prolific examples) were familiar with deadline pressure and ambivalent reaction; they were thrilled, even bemused, by a gig that allowed them to write less words for more money.
Creators of crime fiction—and make no mistake, these were the first-generation creators of a now well-established form—occupied an intriguing niche, one that would become highly influential. Many came straight from the low-rent trenches of the pulps, adept at banging out twisted plots and vivid characters at a breakneck pace, often for as little as a penny a word. But in many cases—and here’s to you, Dashiell Hammett, Horace McCoy, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, W. R. Burnett, and David Goodis—they harbored serious literary ambitions, whether they’d admit it or not. The conflict between those ambitions and the lowest common denominator realities of the movie business drove many of these writers to drink and/or despair. Yet diligently, perhaps even unknowingly, they (and other writers they directly influenced) laid the groundwork for a new school of fiction. Call it Hard-boiled, call it Noir, call it whatever you want—its main tenet was that contemporary American life was, is, and always will be—a crime story.
In focusing on the lives and careers of 29 writers emblematic of this school, Woody Haut provides an essential but often overlooked perspective on what’s now routinely referred to as “film noir.” He gives voice to the artists who forged the foundation of the genre (if indeed we can call it genre; these days I favor the term “noir ethos” when describing the themes and style that unite the literature and film of this particular school). Heartbreak and Vine should be required reading for any college course on Noir because it suggests, concisely and colorfully, that the filmographies of directors such as Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, John Farrow, Robert Aldrich, and many others, might be far less revered if the visions of Cornell Woolrich, Jonathan Latimer, Buzz Bezzerides, and William P. McGivern, et al hadn’t played a major part in forging their reputations.
Sharp and insightful portraits are offered of the usual suspects, genre stalwarts such as Hammett, Woolrich, Chandler, and Cain (both Paul and James M.), and Haut effectively reveals the parallels between the noir-stained lives of David Goodis and Jim Thompson and their nightmarish narratives. But for me the most valuable aspect of Heartbreak and Vine is the overdue credit paid to such under-appreciated authors as Latimer and Bezzerides, Leigh Brackett, Daniel Mainwaring, W. R. Burnett, and even H. N. Swanson—an agent, not a writer, but a figure no less critical in crime fiction’s ascension in American pop culture.
Haut smartly tracks his subjects like a detective, doing diligent legwork, adhering to the facts, never romantically or cynically stretching the truth to fit some pre-ordained thesis. He leaves those embarrassing trapdoors to the specious speculations of vainglorious academics, those who believe their personal theories more significant than reality. When Haut’s narrative catches up with contemporary writers such as Gerald Petievich and Michael Connelly, he wisely lets them speak for themselves. Distinctive personalities emerge, not an overarching treatise. In these passages Heartbreak and Vine charts fresh, vital terrain, as Eddie Bunker, Jim Crumley, Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy, Barry Gifford, Dennis Lehane and others discuss the evolution of the genre, what they’ve learned from the travails of their forbearers, and how they’ve managed—in at least a few happy cases—to survive pitfalls once deemed endemic to anyone writing for the “show business.”
Hollywood has always chosen to celebrate flash and bombast over persistence and craftsmanship, even though the former typically rides high on the shoulders of the latter. Which is one reason why directors, not writers, are the Kings of Hollywood. You’ll never see a Hollywood film with the screenwriter’s name following the possessory credit “A Film By.” That’s reserved, by the industry’s common law, exclusively for directors (Every ten years or so the Writers’ Guild takes a run at it, and the Directors’ Guild threatens a work stoppage to protect its cherished “A Film By” credit.)
A few years back James Ellroy invited me to be his guest at the Hollywood premiere of the film version of his classic 1987 novel, The Black Dahlia. James had high hopes for the picture. Based solely on the rushes he’d seen, he thought it might have captured the lurid temptations and bleak underbelly of Hollywood 1947, while hewing faithfully to his tersely wrought and deeply personal narrative.
Boy, were we in for a shock. The picture was a farcical abomination, a start-to-finish cinematic miscarriage. Afterward, presiding over a shell-shocked gathering of friends, mostly cops and writers, Ellroy remained gallantly upbeat. While we had indeed been subjected to “A Film By Brian DePalma,” Ellroy crowed that at least his 19-year-old novel was once again atop the New York Times bestseller list.
“Fuck ‘em all,” he toasted. “The book is mine. It will always be mine.”
Fortunately, every author you’re about to meet can say the same thing.
Eddie Muller, October 2013
For the past 75 years there has been an uneasy fit between the movie-made HOLLYWOOD! image and the actual Hollywood district. Indeed, at any level, ‘Hollywood’ is a difficult concept to come to grips with, elusive and elastic at the same time. First of all, there is maximum official disagreement about where Hollywood is even located. Each Los Angeles city and county agency has a service unit called ‘Hollywood’ yet no two share the same boundaries and only one is identical to the city limits of the short-lived city of Hollywood (1903-10).
Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear
As a dream-suburb of Los Angeles, Hollywood is as imaginary as it is real. Though its location is open to debate, its name, narrative-exploiting reality and function - the manufacturing of dreams and modern-day myths - is undeniable.
With the ability to turn anything - emotion, event, person, place or literary artefact - into a commodity, Hollywood can destroy as well as create. Those not meeting its primary criterion - profit, at any cost - are quickly replaced by the next in a long line of Tinseltown hopefuls.
Making up a substantial section of the entertainment industry, Hollywood is, above all, a corporate enterprise, and its presence looms large in the directory of conglomerates. An economic driving force, it underwrites production companies and employs casts of thousands, whether writers, directors, actors, camera operators, carpenters or caterers.
But it is the writers that concern this study - specifically novelists, particularly of the hardboiled variety, who have decided to become scriptwriters. Many of these writers would turn to that most subversive of Hollywood genres, film noir - subversive because anyone who writes noir film, or for that matter noir fiction, must question the culture, and so treads on dangerous ground. Up against the studios and the culture, few would escape unscathed.
Most successful writers of American hardboiled fiction, at one time or another, would try their hand at writing screenplays. Likewise, Hollywood has always been willing to invite noirists - Raymond Chandler, Horace McCoy, James M. Cain, Elmore Leonard or Donald Westlake - into their midst, co-opting their talent in the hope of enhancing studio profits. Some hardboilers have been able to adapt to the strictures of scriptwriting and the Hollywood lifestyle, while others have been destroyed by it.
For being a successful writer of noir fiction does not mean that one will be a successful writer of film noir. True, both activities are dependent on an ability to establish a convincing narrative and a willingness to investigate the culture. But the two forms depend on different factors. By looking at the careers of those writers who have engaged in both activities, some of these factors will become apparent.
In earlier days those best able to adapt to the industry’s demands often came from the deadline-oriented world of journalism (Ben Hecht, John Bright, James M. Cain, Niven Busch). Not surprisingly, creativity and literary ability were, in Hollywood, often less important than the ability to write quickly and to order (the sign in one writers’ building was said to have read: write faster). Writers also had to be adept at adapting the work of others. Significantly, the original film script-story, which has since become a Hollywood staple, was only to become a full-fledged commodity after World War II when low-budget B features reflected a more economical approach, and studios were in need of scripts written quickly and on the cheap. With the exception of work by Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy and Jim Thompson, recent film noir, from Robert Towne’s Chinatown to Scott Rosenberg’s Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead, is as likely to derive from original screenplays. Accordingly, many present-day scriptwriters have no experience of writing fiction, nor a background in journalism, but are film-school products whose only thought is to succeed in Hollywood’s competitive marketplace.
Though there have been numerous books on film noir, the careers of those who wrote the screenplays of such movies have rarely been investigated. Equally, even though hardboilers from Chandler to Ellroy have been a staple of postwar cinema, the relationship between writing noir fiction and film has been largely ignored. This is ironical, since hardboiled fiction has enjoyed a special relationship with film noir, a genre as dominated by dialogue as by camerawork and the signature of individual directors. All successful film noir has been the product of a particular chemistry between writers and directors, whether Polanski and Towne in Chinatown, Bezzerides and Aldrich in Kiss Me, Deadly, or Scorsese and Schrader in Taxi Driver.
Hollywood’s hostile treatment of screenwriters is legendary. Because they were in a position to disseminate ideas, screenwriters were distrusted, not allowed to control their product, and constantly fired by studios. Their status was damaged further during the 1960s with the rise of auteur criticism, a theory insisting that the director is responsible for the cinematic totality, including the script. Nevertheless, noir screenwriters have recently gained a more respectable position, some becoming, at least in the imagination of film aficionados, figures of romance. This is partly because writers, once in Hollywood, have often had to reject the world of literature and embrace the role of literary worker.
The cynical scriptwriter in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard might have been right when he said, ‘Audiences don’t know anyone writes a picture. They think actors make it up as they go along.’ But scripts, without which few Hollywood pictures would ever have been made, are essential to the film-making process.
These days, some suggest scriptwriters themselves are the real auteurs (Gerald Home in Class Struggle in Hollywood maintains that bankers have an equal right to the term auteur). In reality, movies remain the province of producers and directors, whose perspectives supersede that of the writer. As William Goldman puts it in Adventures in the Screen Trade, ‘In terms of authority, screenwriters rank somewhere between the man who guards the studio gate and the man who runs the studio (this week).’ Their demotion in the studio hierarchy, and, by contrast, promoting the position of the director, would become particularly noticeable in the late 1940s, coincident with the gradual erosion of the negotiating power of writers. Today, the screenwriter’s popular image is as someone cynical, money-oriented and melodramatic (Sunset Boulevard); a romantic hack (Wim Wenders’s Hammett) or comic naif (the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink).
The truth lies in between these perceptions. Yet however one regards the process, screenwriting remains an art that many novelists are unable to execute, and that many producers and directors are unable to appreciate. At the same time, some turn to the form only because they cannot abide the artistic and financial insecurity associated with the life of a novelist. Robert Towne may be a formidable screenwriter, but he is not a formidable novelist. In fact, he is not a novelist at all. Likewise, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, whatever their worth as novelists, were not great screenwriters. No wonder Ernest Hemingway and, for many years, James Ellroy, would have nothing to do with Hollywood. In the hierarchy of writers, the novelist is considered the superior creature, but that quickly changes when he or she begins to work in an industry that caters to the lowest common denominator.
Though some (Nathaniel West, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald) produced little if anything in the way of fiction while working in Hollywood, others, like W.R. Burnett and James M. Cain, were able to produce their best fiction while working there. On the other hand, Chandler’s career as a novelist was by and large over by the time he began working on Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, a film that marked the beginning of his tenure in Tinseltown.
The image of screenwriters as grovelling hacks willing to sell themselves at any price was always a convenient one for Hollywood to perpetuate. But in 1939, prior to the formation of the Writers Guild, studios were hiring junior writers for $85 a week or less and also had them write scripts on speculation. Such was the degree of penny-pinching regarding salaries that Republic once fired their writers on Thanksgiving, only to rehire them the following Monday, thus avoiding holiday pay. Later, studios would take advantage of industrial action to clear their decks of unwanted scripts and reduce the wages of their writers. As John Gregory Dunne points out in Monster, screenwriters have measured their success in financial terms because they have no power, nor means to measure themselves and their writing skills.
Some , like Fitzgerald, Faulkner, West and John O’Hara looked to Hollywood during low points in their careers as novelists, while the careers of others reached their nadir only when they decided to seek work in Hollywood. Yet writers went all the same. Some sought fame; others sought money. Some sought fame and money. Some went out of curiosity, or to tame the great beast languishing in the land of philistines. For Hollywood - in contrast to New York, a city of playwrights, novelists and high culture - represented plebeian tastes. East-coast writers may have thumbed their noses at screenwriters, but most, at some point, would join their ranks. For ‘doing Hollywood’ was de rigeur for novelists, particularly during the 1930s. As Pauline Kael puts it in Raising Kane and Other Essays, ‘expatriates without leaving the country… adapted each other’s out-of-date plays and novels, and rewrote each other’s scripts… and within a few years were rewriting the rewrites of their own or somebody else’s rewrites’.
These days, when much of Tinseltown proper is a semi-slum, and the famous Hollywood sign is guarded by state-of-the-art motion detectors, infrared cameras on computer disk and city park rangers who use loudspeakers to warn away trespassers, writers are likely to be freelancers who, as in Bruce Wagner’s novel Force Majeure, spend their time hustling to get someone even to read their scripts, let alone to produce them.
So competitive has screenwriting become that not only do university film departments offer screenwriting courses but expensive, weekend courses also beckon aspiring writers to hone their skills. A scriptwriter need not have a novel under his or her belt, though there might be an unpublished one lurking under his or her bed. Likewise, few writers are tied to studio payrolls. This is partly to keep writers on a short leash, and partly because, compared to earlier eras, fewer Hollywood films are being made — 477 films were made in 1940, but, with the growing popularity of TV, the number dropped to 154 in 1960, rising again with the advent of the video age in the early 1990s. With Hollywood not quite so desperate for stories and original material, Tinseltown remains a fool’s paradise, in which the market dictates taste, and monetary reward has become greater than ever.
The chapters that follow recount the careers of an assortment of noirists. Some succeeded as screenwriters, some failed, and some were merely run-of-the-mill. Though ‘doing Hollywood’ is no longer obligatory, the attraction remains. Meanwhile, writers continue to arrive in Hollywood with great expectations only to find that working in the industry will eventually take its toll. As Goldman puts it, ‘[If] you are the kind of weird person who has a need to bring something into being, and all you do with your life is turn out screenplays, I may covet your bank account, but I wouldn’t give two bits for your soul’. No matter how much the film industry has changed, it still represents a specific aspect of transnational corporate power, part American Dream and part American Nightmare. As A.P. Giannini of the Bank of America, one of the industry’s prime founders, prophetically observed during the early days of Hollywood, ‘Those who control the cinema can control the thought of the world.’ Writers should be forewarned; engage with Hollywood at your peril.