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What’s a Screenwriter to Do? By Thomas McKelvey Cleaver
In case you haven’t heard, Hollywood is in its longest commercial slump in several years. Theatrical grosses are down at least ten percent from last year, and the phenomenon is now in its 17th week. For those of us who reside in Okeefenokee West, the calendar section of the local fish wrap (and since the Chicago Tribune took over the Los Angeles Times a few years back, that description is getting more and more apt as time goes by-- fish wrap good only for wrapping the fish that come from Santa Monica Bay that they keep warning us aren’t fit for human consumption anymore) has been asking the question why? Answers include the fact that there are too many advertisements at the opening of a film, that prices are too high, that the overall cost of getting there is too much, etc., etc.
The reason that they keep dancing around-- the elephant in the living room-- is: who gives a flying fig about watching movies that are re-makes of television shows I didn’t like when they were on television to begin with, or adaptations of comic books I didn’t find memorable when they cost ten cents in my misspent youth? And to top it off, spending $40 bucks to go to the movies when you include in paying for parking, the cost of the over-priced popcorn, and TEN FREAKING DOLLARS A PERSON to see a movie-- and this is the cost for those of us who don’t have to pay for a babysitter to take care of the rugrats-- and it’s no wonder that DVDs now account for the majority of income for a movie. I used to go to the movies every Friday ten years ago-- if I go to two in a year now, I’m amazed.
The truth is, now that the studios are divisions of multinational corporations run by the accounting majors we all looked down our noses at back in college and want to make “product” that fits with the marketing plans used for Ex-Lax and Preparation H (and other “fun” products)-- and the filmmakers are all Ivy League grads living on mommy and daddy’s trust fund with all the life experience of your usual upper class twit-- it’s no wonder all they can do is re-make crappy television shows and comic books. Movies aren’t supposed to be widgets. Widgets are crap by definition.
I was particularly reminded of this in the past week by the passing last Wednesday of Ernest Lehman, one of the truly greatest screenwriters to ever sit down in front of a Remington. I had the great good fortune to meet Ernie once (he never let anyone call him “Mr. Lehman”). As a member of a film society that supports the operation of a restored Hollywood movie palace here, I have a constant fight with the board of directors to get them to recognize that screenwriters actually exist, since all of them are wannabe directors and believers in the “auteur” theory. A few years ago, they were going to show North by Northwest, and I offered to get the writer to come to the screening and talk about writing the movie afterward. Since Alfred Hitchcock was one of the first directors to be recognized as an “auteur,” I had good reason to do this, since that very great movie wouldn’t be close to one-tenth as great as it is had it not been written by Ernest Lehman. A call to the Writer’s Guild got my message forwarded on, and Ernie was interested in seeing the movie in a restored print in the kind of theater it was meant to be seen in (if you see it in a similar place, you’ll be ducking when the crop duster chases you through the corn field, which still exists outside Ojai, California).
For those of you thin on your Hollywood history, the story of how Ernest Lehman solved North by Northwest is a classic tale among writers here (or at least it is among writers whose idea of “old movies” doesn’t start with something made in 1995). Consider the ending: Cary Grant is hanging onto Eva Marie Saint’s hand as he hangs onto a ledge on Thomas Jefferson’s face on the Black Hills monument, Mt. Rushmore, as Martin Landau steps on his hand. A shot rings out, and the next thing that happens is Grant is pulling Saint into the upper bunk of a sleeping compartment on the train.
All the creation of Ernest Lehman, not Alfred Hitchcock.
As Ernie told the story, Hitch had told him to put the lovers on the monument and get them off. But that’s the final scene, and as Robert Towne once said, “the audience will forgive you everything in the first ten minutes of a movie and nothing in the last ten minutes.” There wasn’t time to go through all the effort it would take to get them off the monument. As Lehman explained it, “You know they survive-- they’re the stars. Give the audience the pieces and let them put them together.” There they are, hanging on the monument and the foot comes down on Grant’s hand. Cut to the authorities on the far hill. Leo G. Carroll, the government agent, nods and a shot rings out. Landau is killed, and of course Cary Grant pulled Eva Marie Saint to safety. You really didn’t need to see it all happen.
Lehman and Hitchcock argued and fussed for two weeks before Ernie went off and wrote that. Hitchcock was at his wit’s end to solve the problem. The solution of believing in the audience worked (since nothing else had). And all the morons who think directors and actors just make this stuff up hold this up as an example of what an auteur Hitchcock was.
Ernie Lehman spent an entire career in the Writer’s Guild, fighting for the recognition that-- as he put it-- “a movie begins and ends with a script that’s worth all the effort it takes to become a movie.”
That’s the problem with all the “product” masquerading as a movie nowadays. The script isn’t worth the cost of the film stock, let alone anything else.
Ernest Lehman wasn’t just known for North by Northwest. He made his bones with The Sweet Smell of Success, which fifty years later only becomes more relevant in its look at the culture of celebrity and the panther sweat that comes from wanting to “make the big score.” If you haven’t seen it, go rent it. Turns out, Tony Curtis really was a good actor once. The movie was a perfect demonstration of “write what you know,” since Lehman had been Sidney Falco as a young man in New York.
Among his other memorable scripts, Ernie wrote Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and The Sound of Music, both of which he produced. All of his movies are as good today as they were when they were first released. Do you think we’ll be saying that about this summer’s crop of crap in 2025?
I also recently took a second look at the documentary, George Stevens: a Filmmaker’s Journey. An important point was made by his son in describing his father: “All my father’s scripts were autobiographical.” Again, you need to know movie history to understand that Shane was the result of Stevens’ battle with that great hypocrite Cecil B. DeMille in 1950, in the midst of McCarthyism-- a battle for the soul of the Director’s Guild in the face of an attempted right wing coup. A Place in the Sun came from Stevens’ experience in World War II and his identification with the veterans of that war and their hopes for a better future.
All of this helped me make sense of some writing I’ve done over the past three months. Believe it or not, I actually discovered a paying screenwriting gig on Craigslist. A young actor was looking for a writer to turn an idea he had into a script he could produce and get noticed in. He asked for a “resume.” In my e-mail, I said “Look me up in the IMDb.” Surprise, surprise, it turned out that-- as a kid-- he had been a fan of The Terror Within, so he contacted me. As a young black actor in L.A., what he wanted to do was break out of the pack. He knew better than to ask for a script to star in-- his story had a supporting character who would be “memorable” if written right. We connected and made a deal.
After I wrote an outline, I ended up sitting here in front of the computer having panic attacks when I realized that using the agreed-upon outline would result in a script that the D-girl assigned to review it wouldn’t even read to page five. It took all that time to figure out I should start in the middle of the action, which worked. In the end, the story became a tale of personal redemption, and a lot deeper than it had begun. With the 20/20 vision of hindsight, it is glaringly obvious to me now that a major reason I couldn’t write at the time was because I was involved in an intervention for a good friend, an intervention that also involved a certain level of redemption on my own part, that I would participate in the event.
Writers write what they know, even if what is on the page has nothing to do directly with what is being “written about.” If you can hook into that, whatever you write will be good.
The latest word I have from my “employer” is that he is showing the script to actors he knows who can play the lead roles-- who see the script as their own way of moving up the food chain as he wants to do-- and things may happen. In the meantime, the pay met the bills for a couple of important months.
So, back to the original question, what’s a writer to do? Nowadays, a system that would allow an Ernest Lehman or a George Stevens to create their masterpieces no longer exists. Nowadays, if you want to write something that might have some mighty slim chance of being good 50 years from now the way Shane and The Sweet Smell of Success are, you need to look not at the studios, but at such alternatives as a young actor with the sense to commission a script where he can be seen but not star in, and be willing to be as entrepreneurial as he is.
But don’t expect to live the kind of life that Ernie Lehman or George Stevens lived while they made those great movies. Your satisfaction will need to be “inner.”
Thomas McKelvey Cleaver has been (and still is) a freelance journalist; he was a staff writer and editor at several publications prior to accidentally becoming a screenwriter 20 years ago. In addition to writing 15 produced movies, he has been a development executive in independent film, and a story editor and supervising producer for three cable TV series. His credits include the cult horror hit The Terror Within (though his only connection with TW II is a credit "based on characters created by..." which he was forced to take). He is currently in development on a World War II script optioned by Greenwich Films, and has recently completed an adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer. Reach Thomas at tom@absolutewrite.com.
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