It's a lengthy journey, from self-deprecation to self-assertion. Call it their Long March if you will, an equation that surely would have made the fathers of the movement explode into whiskey-laced laughter.
Jack Warner called them "schmucks with Underwoods," but as far as they were concerned, the joke was on him, for as long as Warner and Mayer and Zanuck were paying them what they were paying them, who were the real schmucks?
If Hollywood's first writers had no 'eyes on the prize,' it's because they felt they had secured it already. Stolen it, in fact. Hollywood was a world beyond their most larcenous dreams: pay checks the size of swimming pools for work they could do in three days. The New York newspaper racket, their first address, with its tight deadlines, abusive editors and lowlife sources, now existed only when they wrote it into a script.
It was plot twists and formulas that were on their minds, not respectability or immortality. The movies were not a form they took seriously; they were a cash grab, plain and simple. Their time in Hollywood was not a Long March but a Gold Rush.
Then came the war and the assertion that the world suffered enough. Hollywood's writers began to see themselves as yet another group that had endured too much. The union, hitherto half joke, began to grow in number. McCarthy monopolized TV, and it was they who were his biggest target. The studios fell, and an audience wise to their old tricks emerged. The cost of filmmaking rose, and they demanded, rightly, their fair share.
Last week, at the Oscars, they scored a big and, I suppose, inevitable, triumph: the screenwriting awards, traditionally two thirds of the way into the broadcast, were presented after - yes, after! - the Best Actor and Actress Awards - with photos of the writers accompanying each film clip no less, and a split screen, just like the actors and the directors have been getting for years, of all of their anxious faces as they anticipated the winners.
I could not help but think that despite their differences, a kinship still existed between screenwriters old and new, and that somewhere, Ben Hecht, the captain of the first guard, was encouraging them to cap the trumping of the real schmucks by doing what he had done, and using their Academy Awards for door stops.
