![]() ![]() ![]() Long unappreciated, writers for the screen big and small complain this time around that they are now not simply undervalued but underpaid too. Nearly 80 years after Chandler excoriated the industry, a new generation of scribes says that not much has changed and has taken to the picket lines to denounce the pileup of indignities. In barbed zinger after zinger, the man who gave us private investigator Philip Marlowe described Hollywood as a cauldron of “egos,” “credit stealing” and “self-promotion” where scribes were ruthlessly neglected, marginalized and stripped of respect toiling at the mercy of producers, some of whom, he wrote, had “the artistic integrity of slot machines and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur.” But showmen make nothing they exploit what someone else has made,” he wrote in an acerbic essay published in the Atlantic. In 1945, barely two years into Raymond Chandler’s career as a screenwriter, the man whose hard-boiled fiction did much to make film noir into an art form had already wearied of the town and its treatment of writers. ![]()
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