Schmucks with Underwoods : Conversations with America's Classic Screenwriters

Rating:
Summary: insightful and brilliant
Review: Anything written by Max Wilk is bound to be genius. His breath of understanding as a dramatist and historian and rampant consumer of pop and otherwise fine culture has made him an incredible resource for people who want to learn more about their craft, the context that their craft has been created in and the meaning of life in general. I can't say enough about this author, or this book. Buy it and you won't be sorry.

Rating:
Summary: insightful and brilliant
Review: Anything written by Max Wilk is bound to be genius. His breath of understanding as a dramatist and historian and rampant consumer of pop and otherwise fine culture has made him an incredible resource for people who want to learn more about their craft, the context that their craft has been created in and the meaning of life in general. I can't say enough about this author, or this book. Buy it and you won't be sorry.

Rating:
Summary: Tales of Yore...
Review: Back in 1974, Wilk started work on this book, interviewing some of the big names in screenwriting from roughly the '30s-'50s while they were still alive. He talked to writers like Sidney Buchman, Edward Chodorov, R.C. Sherriff, Benn Levy, John Collier, Billy Wilder, Donald Ogden Sewart, Albert and Frances Hackett, Harold Bloom, and profiled others like Arthur Caesar, Ben Hecht, Preston Sturges, and Harry Kurnitz. These gathered dust on his shelves for over 25 years until he revisited them, added interviews with Edmund Hartmann and Evan Hunter, and tied them all together in this attempt to document screenwriting life under the studio system.

The results are a bit of a jumble, but well worth reading to gain a perspective on the history of the craft. For example, Chapter 2 provides an excellent overview of how, in the silent era, title writers could make or break a movie. Not only did they have to convey the action, setting, dialogue, and tone of a film, but they sometimes had to do so after the fact, making sure their lines would match the lip movements of the filmed characters! The examples Wilk gives of title-writer ingenuity are breathtaking, and one of the most desired was Ralph Spence, who, in 1925, could command $10,000 per film.

As sound came into the industry, writers faced even more bizarre challenges. For example it wasn't unusual for a writer be given a script full of description, including camera shots, with big blank spaces for him to simply "fill in" the dialogue. This evolved into a practice of pairing writers into teams, where one would be responsible for plotting and action, and the other for dialogue. Sometimes, writing teams produced brilliant work even though the partners couldn't stand each other. One such team was William Lipmann and Horace McCoy, who couldn't get a day's work individually, but were in heavy demand as a team. However their animosity grew to the point where one would work from 9am-5pm and leave, then the other would come in and pick up the script from there and work from 9pm-5am!
Just in case you think Hollywood is strange now, back then, the studio system produced a plethora of writing assignments that are difficult to imagine today. For example, sometimes a writer would be told to have a script ready in three weeks for particular group of three stars and a director. No plot, no idea, often not even a genre. Or even worse, just two stars and a title conjured up by a studio head. 1-2-3... write! Of course, many things are just as they always were. Consider the following from Benn Levy speaking of writing in the '30s, "Most scripts were written with fear and trepidation... Every line, every page, scrutinized... Every motivation questioned. All those arbitrary rules..."

This is a fine book to dip into, littered with anecdotes (like how Ben Hecht wrote Scarface in nine days for $1,000 a day), behind-the-scenes gossip (like how the Epstein brothers were discovered ghostwriting Living on Velvet for Jerry Wald and were hired by the studio), and advice from those who came (and excelled) before.

(This review originally appeared in Creative Screenwriting magazine)

Rating:
Summary: Tales of Yore...
Review: Back in 1974, Wilk started work on this book, interviewing some of the big names in screenwriting from roughly the `30s-'50s while they were still alive. He talked to writers like Sidney Buchman, Edward Chodorov, R.C. Sherriff, Benn Levy, John Collier, Billy Wilder, Donald Ogden Sewart, Albert and Frances Hackett, Harold Bloom, and profiled others like Arthur Caesar, Ben Hecht, Preston Sturges, and Harry Kurnitz. These gathered dust on his shelves for over 25 years until he revisited them, added interviews with Edmund Hartmann and Evan Hunter, and tied them all together in this attempt to document screenwriting life under the studio system.

The results are a bit of a jumble, but well worth reading to gain a perspective on the history of the craft. For example, Chapter 2 provides an excellent overview of how, in the silent era, title writers could make or break a movie. Not only did they have to convey the action, setting, dialogue, and tone of a film, but they sometimes had to do so after the fact, making sure their lines would match the lip movements of the filmed characters! The examples Wilk gives of title-writer ingenuity are breathtaking, and one of the most desired was Ralph Spence, who, in 1925, could command $10,000 per film.

As sound came into the industry, writers faced even more bizarre challenges. For example it wasn't unusual for a writer be given a script full of description, including camera shots, with big blank spaces for him to simply "fill in" the dialogue. This evolved into a practice of pairing writers into teams, where one would be responsible for plotting and action, and the other for dialogue. Sometimes, writing teams produced brilliant work even though the partners couldn't stand each other. One such team was William Lipmann and Horace McCoy, who couldn't get a day's work individually, but were in heavy demand as a team. However their animosity grew to the point where one would work from 9am-5pm and leave, then the other would come in and pick up the script from there and work from 9pm-5am!
Just in case you think Hollywood is strange now, back then, the studio system produced a plethora of writing assignments that are difficult to imagine today. For example, sometimes a writer would be told to have a script ready in three weeks for particular group of three stars and a director. No plot, no idea, often not even a genre. Or even worse, just two stars and a title conjured up by a studio head. 1-2-3... write! Of course, many things are just as they always were. Consider the following from Benn Levy speaking of writing in the `30s, "Most scripts were written with fear and trepidation... Every line, every page, scrutinized... Every motivation questioned. All those arbitrary rules..."

This is a fine book to dip into, littered with anecdotes (like how Ben Hecht wrote Scarface in nine days for $1,000 a day), behind-the-scenes gossip (like how the Epstein brothers were discovered ghostwriting Living on Velvet for Jerry Wald and were hired by the studio), and advice from those who came (and excelled) before.

(This review originally appeared in Creative Screenwriting magazine)

Rating:
Summary: Especially recommended for aspiring script writers of today
Review: Schmucks With Underwoods: Conversations With Hollywood's Classic Screenwriters by Max Wilk is an enjoyable anthology offering rare glimpses into the lives, works, and perspectives of great screenwriters of Hollywood ranging over the last three decades, from legends like N. Behrman and John Cromwell, to Howard Koch and Dorothy Parker. A few black-and-white photographs are interspersed among the uniquely insightful text, in this recommended leisure reading which is especially recommended for aspiring script writers of today and dedicated fans of the great movie industry of Hollywood's yesteryears.

Rating:
Summary: Visit to a Splendid Past
Review: This volume is a reader's delight. It brings a plethora of stimulating, evocative and amusing anecdotes and reminiscences from the great age of cinema screenwriting, with intimate glimpses of such immortals as Billy Wilder, Ben Hecht and Edward Chodorov. Anyone interested in the contribution of writers to the art of motion pictures will love this book.

Rating:
Summary: "Classic" screenwriters with no mention of Frances Marion??
Review: When I received this book I eagerly turned to the index and was amazed to discover no mention of Frances Marion, one of the greatest - if not THE greatest - writers/scenarists in pre-WW II Hollywood, male or female. How can anyone write a book about screenwriters without mentioning Frances Marion??

As I work my way through this book I begin to wonder if anyone bothered to edit it. On page 38, my jaw dropped when I saw that V-J Day was actually in 1946, not 1945! And, while some of the "conversations" are very interesting (e.g., Arthur Caesar, Sidney Buchman) some are mere nonsensical snippets that had me wondering why they were included.