Reason Magazine - Staff

Liberating Late Night

info@reason.com (Steve Kurtz) — Sat, 01 Feb 2003 00:00:00 EST

Hollywood's Second Sex

info@reason.com (Steve Kurtz) — Fri, 01 Mar 2002 00:00:00 EST

Inside Outsiders

info@reason.com (Steve Kurtz) — Tue, 01 May 2001 00:00:00 EDT

Sex, Economics, and Other Legal Matters.

info@reason.com (Steve Kurtz) — Sun, 01 Apr 2001 00:00:00 EST

Richard A. Posner might be the most important and influential legal thinker alive. A professor at the University of Chicago Law School since 1969 and a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit since 1981, he is the author or co-author of more than two dozen books, including Economic Analysis of Law (1973), which helped pioneer the thriving field of law and economics. He has also written hundreds of articles and book reviews, as well as some 1,800 judicial opinions. While economics informs his thinking, Posner is hardly a one-trick pony: He has addressed topics as diverse as cloning, rhetoric, Kafka, citation style, AIDS, euthanasia, literary theory, advertising, and ancient Greece; it's almost easier to list subjects he hasn't discussed.

As widely esteemed as Posner is, he has also been widely attacked. Conservatives have questioned what they see as his moral relativism, as well as his skepticism that simple deductive legal analysis can lead to the "right" judicial ruling. The left objects to his attack on moral philosophy and his claim that there has been too much emphasis in the law on free-floating standards such as "fairness" and "social justice." And many on all sides have been troubled by his seemingly cold-blooded economic approach to human interaction, including examinations of rape, abortion, and the selling of babies.

While Posner had been a well-known and controversial figure in legal circles for three decades, in 1999 his notoriety spread further: He published a book about the Clinton impeachment, An Affair of State, that caused a stir, and he was named mediator in the Microsoft antitrust case (although the negotiations ultimately fell apart). Suddenly he was an A-list legal celebrity, profiled in newspapers and magazines across the nation.

I got to know Posner while attending the University of Chicago Law School, where I took his classes on the legislative process and law and literature. Whenever I'm passing through town, we meet for lunch. Considering how strongly worded his opinions can be, in person he is surprisingly soft-spoken, with a gentle good humor. His conversation, as might be expected, is wide-ranging: He may talk about the limits of federal jurisdiction at one moment and his love of the little-seen comedy 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag the next. And as busy as he must be, he is a host who never gives you the feeling that he's in a rush.

Oscar Wilde once said of George Bernard Shaw that "he hasn't an enemy in the world, and none of his friends like him." Posner is the opposite: Plenty of people strongly disagree with his writings, but he's such a genial, hardworking person that even his enemies can't help but admire him.

Reason: You came to the University of Chicago in the late 1960s. What were the turning points, occurring around that time, that shaped the emerging field of law and economics?

Richard A. Posner: I think the basic developments were earlier. They really go back to the '50s. As sophisticated economics became trained on antitrust issues, and as antitrust became an important field of law, lawyers began to notice that there was a body of economic work that had a lot to do with law. But the impact was mainly in the antitrust field and closely related fields like public utility and common-carrier regulation. Then Ronald Coase published his article on social cost in 1960, and about the same time Guido Calabresi published his first article on tort law. These were two articles applying economics to the common law as far as it had been to the antitrust domain. Now people began to realize that economics might have a broader scope. When I started teaching in 1968, I had actually been working on antitrust cases; I was an economics fan. I discovered there was this economics of tort law as well, and it began to seem that economics had a broad applicability to law.

Another thing that is important here is the general deregulation movement, which made microeconomics seem more important to public policy because of the criticisms of the regulatory schemes: regulation of airlines and other forms of transportation, financial institutions, communications, and so on. Criticisms were pitched on microeconomic grounds, so people became more familiar with concepts of marginal cost, monopoly, barriers to entry, and so on. So the antitrust economics, the expansion of economic thinking into other areas of law, and the deregulation movement made lawyers very sensitive to economic criticisms of law.

Reason: You were born in 1939 in New York City. Your father was a lawyer and your mother, you've said, was fairly left-wing.

Posner: Yeah, she was a public school teacher. She was very left-wing.

Reason: And you knew the Rosenberg kids when you were growing up.

Posner: Only slightly. But shortly after their parents were executed, their adoptive parents, whom my parents knew, brought these kids to my house. I don't know quite how the idea originated, but my mother asked me whether it would be all right to give these unfortunate children my electric train. And I said fine, because I had outgrown electric trains. I was already 13 or 14. I mention this because there was once an article about me -- this is really weird -- claiming that the reason I became conservative was a deep resentment that my mother had taken my electric trains and given them to these spies' children. (Laughter.)

Reason: When you came to Chicago, I suppose you had already known or heard of people like Ronald Coase, Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, and Aaron Director.

Posner: Aaron Director had retired. He was living near Stanford and had an office in the Stanford Law School. I recognized the name when I started teaching at Stanford in 1968, and I went into his office and introduced myself. I became very friendly with him. Then in that spring quarter, George Stigler visited Stanford, and through Aaron I became very friendly with George. Through Aaron Director I was put on a task force on antitrust policy for the president-elect, the infamous Nixon. The task force was headed by George Stigler, and Ronald Coase was one of the members. I met Milton shortly afterwards. That year I learned about the Chicago approach to antitrust.

Reason: In The Economics of Justice (1981), you described the common law as a tool to maximize aggregate social wealth. You said that is what judges sought to do through their decisions. Was this an original insight, and what attacks were made against it at the time?

Posner: It was pretty original. There are hints of it in Ronald Coase's article on social cost. He wasn't too clear about it, but the implication that I drew was that he thought the English judges had been trying to make an economically sensible law of nuisance. And Harold Demsetz, one of the Chicago economists now at UCLA, wrote something which hinted at this.

The idea was criticized on two basic grounds. One, that it doesn't fit the facts. There are too many anomalies, too many rules, too many outcomes in common law cases that can't be explained as efficiency-promoting. That is one criticism, and obviously there is some merit to it. Another criticism objects to the notion that judges would be concerned with economic efficiency rather than with more distinctively legal or moral concepts such as fairness. That sticks in the craw of many lawyers. By now, I think everyone agrees there is strong economic content in the common law, and the law generally, although how important it is can be questioned.

Reason: In Economic Analysis of Law [1973], you made large claims for economic analysis, not just regarding contracts or antitrust cases but also in criminal law, family law, racial discrimination, and federalism.

Posner: Yes, that's correct. Oddly, the area where the most resistance has been encountered is the criminal law. There is a really interesting body of economic writing about criminal law, about both deterrence and punishments -- the whole punishment structure. Also, about the doctrines of attempt and conspiracy. I think this is very interesting stuff that has made no real impression in the teaching of law. There was an economist in the United States Sentencing Commission, and there is definitely an economic flavor in the federal sentencing guidelines. But apart from that, the criminal bar and professoriate have not been receptive.

Feminists, in recent years, have picked up the law and economics ball and have run with it. It's a very interesting inversion of conventional positions, but a number of radical feminists now are strongly advocating the commodification of family relations. What they say is we want to commodify, to put a pecuniary value on, the work that women do outside the markets, because if it's not commodified, not monetized, it's not recognized in our society as productive work.

Reason: While you were attacked from the start for applying economics to all sorts of law, as a judge you have been attacked from the other side for not consistently using economics in your decisions. What do you think about that criticism?

Posner: There are two aspects of that. First, there are simply many legal issues to which economics doesn't speak. When you are talking about the teaching of law or scholarly writing about law, the focus tends to be on the big questions and large principles that inform a field of law. There, I think the economic approach is very fruitful. But in the actual day-to-day litigation process, many of the cases involve issues that are of a purely interpretive, purely factual character, dealing with the details of comprehensive statutes, and they just don't lend themselves to economic analysis. Many other cases do. I have written many tort, contract, antitrust, and labor cases where I thought an economic angle was valuable. But we're talking about 1,800 judicial opinions.

The second point is that the experience of being a judge is bound to moderate one's views. When you are dealing with large doctrinal policy issues in a rather abstract way, it's very easy to allow your general outlook on things to carry you to foreordained conclusions. But when you are actually forced to consider both sides of the case, often you realize there is more to be said on the other side of the case than you might have thought. So a lot of statutes that I would have ridiculed as preposterous interventionism in the economy, when looked at up close in the context of the specific case, make more sense. I have learned there is more to be said for some of these interventionist laws than I had initially thought.

Reason: You have described yourself as a pragmatist, and you've been described by others as an eclectic libertarian. Do you see yourself as a libertarian? I know you are a follower of John Stuart Mill in some ways.

Posner: Yes, I regard myself as a libertarian, in a sense that has virtually disappeared from the American public scene. It is basically the Millian sense, but without buying into all of Mill's views. Apart from the fact that he was writing almost 150 years ago, his thought isn't entirely consistent. He had a lot of specific views that seem very strange to me. But I think of myself as someone who believes that the government should intervene only where private activity is palpably harmful or where there are external benefits. For example, an educated population benefits the society as a whole. You benefit from the fact that other people are educated, just as you benefit from the fact that other people subscribe to the telephone service. Where there are external benefits, there is a case for government intervention.

The reason libertarianism doesn't have much support anymore in the U.S. is that liberals, as they describe themselves today, believe in freedom of personal behavior -- sexual behavior and so on -- but want to regulate markets, whereas the conservatives want markets to be free but seek to regulate people's personal behavior. The libertarian doesn't like either form of regulation, unless it meets pretty tight criteria: The target of government intervention has to be an activity that either imposes external costs or creates external benefits. That position, I think, has very little appeal.

Reason: Most legal pragmatists -- people like Richard Rorty -- are from the left. Yet you describe yourself as a pragmatist, and your views are generally considered right-wing.

Posner: There is a historical, accidental connection between pragmatism and leftism, personified by John Dewey. For Dewey the enemy was religion. He thought religion, and forms of scientific thought that are successors to religion and promise ultimate truth, interfered with social progress, because he associated social progress with experimentation. Experimentation implies that you don't know the answer; that is why you have the experiment. So Dewey and successors like Dick Rorty are fighting against a kind of Platonic heritage, the notion that there are ultimate truths that are knowable, and once we know them we have no reason to listen to other people. That perspective is very different from the sense that everything is in flux, implying experimentation.

The other association of pragmatism with the left is that philosophical pragmatism, with its skepticism about truth claims, has an uncomfortable resemblance to the thought of the postmodernists, who are invariably politically radical. People like Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida seem to want to challenge all kinds of structure and thought in society, and that seems radical and destabilizing. People who are drawn to that kind of intellectual anarchism, or who think that the important thing is knocking religion off its pedestal, are going to be left-wing.

My sense of pragmatism is not philosophical pragmatism but the ordinary-language meaning of the term. When people say Americans are pragmatists, they don't mean they are postmodernists with strong philosophical views about the correspondence theory of truth. They mean they are not interested in large theoretical questions; they are interested in practical solutions to current problems. That is the lay sense of pragmatism and also my sense. I don't want to get tangled in metaphysical questions. I didn't always feel this way, but today I don't want to argue that efficiency is the most important thing in the world and aggregate wealth is the only thing society should care about. I can defend an emphasis on efficiency in the law on practical grounds, which will create results most people like, but I'm not prepared to erect a metaphysics of efficiency that will prove that's the only thing we should be worrying about.

Reason: You've complained that academics and judges don't know enough about the outside world.

Posner: The outside world is not the world of philosophical speculation. It's the world of fact. The philosophical pragmatists -- people like Rorty or Stanley Fish or some of the "crits" who considered themselves to be postmodernists -- they don't have much interest in how things actually work. There is a texture of social and economic life. It's that level of factuality that I think is important and that lawyers and judges are deficient in.

Reason: Does this have anything to do with your new book, Public Intellectuals?

Posner: It has a little bit to do with it. I guess the worst form of public intellectual activity is where the intellectual is speculating in a factual void -- maybe because he is dealing with a field that is completely unrelated to his academic work. For example, in the Times last Sunday there was a funny article about Elaine Scarry, the English professor at Harvard, who writes about plane crashes. She has this notion of a kind of electromagnetic Bermuda Triangle in the North Atlantic that keeps knocking planes off. She actually did research, and it wasn't completely ridiculous. The Times pointed out that the experts had read her stuff and didn't consider it completely crazy, but they didn't agree with it. When you write outside your field -- although I should not really throw that particular stone -- there is the temptation to write about things without the kind of factual immersion that would be necessary for responsible engagement with the issue.

In my book I make fun of Lester Thurow, an economist at MIT, who says that in the year 3000 economists will look back to our day and say this was the Age of America. Three years ago, he thought it was the Age of Japan. So he is reckless in predicting the future.

I have added to my book a few pages on the ads of the Emergency Committee of Concerned Citizens about the election. On the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal today, there is a humorous article about the academics and the celebrities who sign these petitions. I think the ad first appeared three days after the election. It must have been done within 24 hours. It's a goofy document that asks for a revote, and University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, who signed it quickly, later back-pedaled. It's quite amusing. So when academics talk outside their field, or they make predictions, or they try to respond to something current on a journalistic time scale, they can get into trouble.

Reason: In your book on the Clinton impeachment, you criticize almost everyone except for the media.

Posner: The media at first were fiercely criticized for giving currency to unfounded rumors, of which the most dramatic was the dress. But in retrospect, it did not appear that they made serious errors or displayed prejudice. I thought they did pretty well.

Reason: But everyone else messed up. What should have happened? Should the Supreme Court have allowed the case? Should Clinton have admitted the truth?

Posner: I do think the Supreme Court should not have permitted the Jones case to go forward during his term of office. I think that would have been a hard opinion to write, but they should have realized that to allow the president to be hauled into court for a sex case would be very disruptive of the government and would really exacerbate partisan passions. They could easily have told Paula Jones to wait two years. Then the case would have been settled, as it was eventually. It was a serious mistake of the Supreme Court. There were, of course, many political blunders committed by both sides. I thought the intellectuals came off as hysterical and uninformed. It was quite a donnybrook. I don't think it had any bad consequences for the country, but it was a mess.

Reason: Speaking of donnybrooks, you were attacked in The New York Review of Books by New York University law professor Ronald Dworkin, and you responded in kind. I might add that, according to Fred R. Shapiro in The Journal of Legal Studies, you are the most frequently cited legal scholar, and Dworkin is number two. Do you have anything to add to this clash of the heavy hitters? He accused you of acting unethically as a sitting judge by injecting yourself into a partisan political debate with your book on the impeachment and by drawing conclusions about Clinton's guilt when he was open to future prosecution.

Posner: I usually don't respond to criticisms, and I wouldn't have responded to this one, but I didn't like being accused of an ethical violation. You can't really be impeached for something that minor, but you can be reprimanded by your court; that has happened to judges. So I thought I should respond, lest people think that I acknowledged it.

There was a letter later by an old guy who used to be a very prominent lawyer -- maybe he still is, though he must be ancient -- named John Frank, a lawyer in Arizona. In a letter to The New York Review of Books, he said he didn't think I had committed an ethical violation -- he had a learned discussion of the esoteric issue -- but he thought I had acted in bad taste. He may very well be right. I wouldn't take any umbrage at that, but the accusation that I had actually violated the code of judicial conduct....

Reason: You were, of course, attacked on both sides for the book.

Posner: This was funny: A high school classmate of mine is the parliamentarian of the House of Representatives, and he told me that Henry Hyde wanted to meet me. So the next time I was in Washington, I called up this fellow and he brought me over. Henry Hyde regaled me with a detailed critique of my book in which he picked out every criticism that I had made of the Republicans, which turned out to be quite numerous, and he rebutted them point by point. He was very pleasant about it; he's actually a very nice person. He seemed really sharp. I didn't agree with all his criticisms, but it was interesting that he took the time to prepare a rebuttal.

Reason: Was it tough to be the mediator in the Microsoft case? All of a sudden, you had the spotlight on you.

Posner: Yes, but I made clear at the outset that I would have no contact with the press, would not answer any questions, and wouldn't permit my staff to have any contact with the press. I thought that worked fine. The press didn't retaliate against me for not cooperating with them. What happened eventually, which was inevitable, was leaks by the parties. I didn't blame the press for their probing, but there were significant inaccuracies in the press reports, as you would expect, because they were depending on leaks.

Reason: In the 1980s, you wrote that the cost of limiting access to a work through copyright law has to be measured against the benefit the law provides -- the incentive to create the work in the first place. Have things changed much since then, in particular because of the Internet and the ease of making and distributing digital copies?

Posner: There is a basic problem I have not solved. I don't know if anyone has. It is just extraordinarily difficult to know what is the optimal amount of any given body of intellectual property. That is one problem.

The second problem is it's extremely difficult to gauge the effect of intellectual property law on the amount of intellectual property. We know that if there were no copyright or patent or trade secret laws, there would be less invention and there would be less intellectual creativity. It's hard to imagine industries like the film industry or the book industry or the pharmaceutical industry functioning efficiently without intellectual property protection. The problem is that if you expand intellectual property protections, you can actually get to a point where you have as little intellectual property produced as you would if there were no protection, because all intellectual property trades on and embodies earlier intellectual property.

Suppose there were perpetual copyright, and it was very broad. So if you're making a movie you may have to find Homer's heirs and negotiate a copyright license with them. If someone had a patent on the wheel, every time you built a truck you would have to get a license from the descendents of some caveman who thought up the wheel. If there is too much protection of intellectual property it's stifling, and if there is too little it also stifles creativity.

Something like the Internet comes along, and on the one hand it makes it easier to steal, but on the other hand, by expanding the market for intellectual property, it also increases the returns. So how you figure out what the right approach is is baffling. People who know more about it than I do -- like Larry Lessig of Harvard or Mark Lemley of Berkeley -- they have strong views on this. Maybe they're right. But I don't know enough about it to have an opinion.

Reason: Looking at antitrust cases, without discussing Microsoft specifically, don't they often simply give an advantage to weak competitors who wouldn't otherwise make it?

Posner: That certainly is a danger, no question about it. It's true about any legal right that you give to a business firm. They will deploy it if they think they can increase their profits.

Reason: What is an example of a good antitrust action?

Posner: The core of antitrust is forbidding cartels and their informal counterparts, the price-fixing conspiracies, and preventing mergers that either create a monopoly or that so concentrate a market that they facilitate price fixing in a form difficult to deal with directly. That is the core. In the controversial area, there are the alleged exclusionary practices: tie-ins, predatory pricing, bundling, vertical integration, exclusive dealing, full line forcing, price discrimination, predatory advertising -- all sorts of things, an endless list. Very controversial. There is unquestionably a sum of these shenanigans that is a proper concern of antitrust. It seems there are a lot of cases that don't make any sense at all. On the other hand, there are some cases where the defendant is a monopolist and, in rational self-interest, is engaging in a practice that could exclude equally or more efficient competitors.

Reason: What do you think of antidumping laws or predatory pricing laws?

Posner: I don't think antidumping laws really have anything to do with antitrust. A company that wants to fix prices in a market can do that only by limiting its output. If, rather than limit the output, it dumps its excess output in some other market at a very low price, it makes a little bit of money. But it's not trying to take over that second market; it's just trying to minimize its losses from the fact that it's curtailing its output. So it's not really a monopolistic practice.

There is a huge literature on predatory pricing now. There are some well-documented cases in which firms did engage in predatory pricing, and there is some theoretical basis for concern. On the other hand, it's very difficult to distinguish predatory pricing from simple price competition. The risk that a strict law on predatory pricing will discourage price competition and encourage collusion is very great. So you really have to tread delicately in that area.

Reason: As a pragmatist, how do you feel about the rule of law? Do you think it's an imaginary concept that people pull out to justify the result they prefer?

Posner: I wouldn't say that. It depends on how you define the rule of law. If the rule of law means that law has to be a closed, logical system, mechanically administered with no discretion for judges, I think that's wrong. If the rule of law means that the judges are constrained by rules, so far as those rules are knowable, then when the rules aren't knowable, when judges have discretion for whatever reason -- the novelty of the issue, the confusion of the legislation, the vagueness of the constitutional provision -- then the rule of law requires that the judges act in a nonpartisan fashion, that they be reasonable and intelligent and nonpolitical. That's the best you can expect of them if it's a truly ambiguous case.

Reason: In 1990 you wrote a famous concurring opinion in a case involving nude dancing, arguing that it has limited protection under the First Amendment. Was this part of being a pragmatic judge? Part of your reasoning seems to be that it's just too much trouble to prevent all sorts of nude dancing. If it's not based on rights, what's the argument?

Posner: As a libertarian, I don't think nude dancing in private should be regulated. But as a judge, my reaction is somewhat different, which is that the problem of drawing lines is impossible. This nude dancing, although it has minimal artistic value, is on a continuum with entertainment and art in general, which often has a strong erotic cast. The only reason to think this nude dancing was in a different class was that its artistic aspirations were extremely modest. But that doesn't seem to me a good reason for distinguishing it from lyric opera.

Reason: Do you get time to see movies and TV?

Posner: My wife and I don't go to the theaters; that's too much of a bother. But we rent movies or buy movies. I like comedies. I don't like serious movies. I make an occasional exception, but I like comedies and my tastes are pretty catholic. I'm very enthusiastic for the Marx Brothers; I like Joe Pesci a lot; I like Meg Ryan; I like the Cary Grant-Katharine Hepburn movies.

Reason: What about TV?

Posner: I do channel flipping late at night, so I see little pieces of this and that. Occasionally, I'll see an old movie or sometimes the animal channel. Or I'll watch the cable news programs. I don't have a very good sense of the full television sphere. I have never seen a situation comedy.

Reason: But you understand, as a libertarian, that some people like Jerry Springer and some people like PBS.

Posner: I actually had a case involving one of these let-it-all-hang-out talk shows. It was Jerry Lopez. Have you ever heard of him? He disappeared. He had one of these programs where ordinary people reveal their private lives in the most immodest fashion. That struck me as really vulgar, but if that's what people want. ...It was all about 15-year-olds getting pregnant and being confronted by their mothers' lovers. Weird stuff, but the funny thing about it was they all seemed to be having a great time. The audience was really nosy, asking really personal questions -- very vulgar entertainment for someone of my generation. But people are free to do whatever they want. It doesn't seem to do any harm.

Reason: You've said that if people were forced to stop watching TV, it's not as if they would turn to reading philosophy.

Posner: Sweden has very, very bad TV. They have only a few channels, poor reception, government channels. It's only on a few hours at night, I think. It's really incomplete. So I asked a friend of mine, a Swedish economist, what Swedes do. Do they read more? He said no. They don't read more. What they do, in contrast to America, is more family socializing. They draw with each other. Family socializing, family conversation takes place, usually on an extremely low plane. Americans probably are better informed than they would be if they had no television, because then they would just be talking to each other.

Marxist Rebellion

info@reason.com (Steve Kurtz) — Wed, 01 Nov 2000 00:00:00 EST

It's the Story, Stupid

info@reason.com (Steve Kurtz) — Tue, 01 Aug 2000 00:00:00 EDT

Which Lie Did I Tell? More Adventures in the Screen Trade, by William Goldman, New York Pantheon Books, 485 pages, $26.95

Hollywood spends a lot of time trying to figure out The Formula--the way to tell a story guaranteed to entertain an audience. I don't know what the big deal is: The French playwright Eugene Scribe discovered it over 150 years ago. During an amazingly successful 50-year career, Scribe churned out 374 theatrical pieces, almost all of which followed the same storytelling rules. Basically, the hero should find himself in more and more difficult situations as the story unfolds. Near the end, there should be peripeteia (a reversal of fortune during which the hero hits his lowest point) followed by a scène à faire (the moment all the action has been leading up to, where the hero's luck changes and he triumphs over his enemy).

Unfortunately, this sort of formula fell into disrepute in the 20th century and these secrets were left to decay, with a few writers stumbling on them in each new generation. Top screenwriter William Goldman has discovered--and rediscovered--some of the rules of storytelling, and he spreads the gospel in his latest work, Which Lie Did I Tell? The book is wide-ranging but always returns to the main message, repeated on the last page: "After writing movies for thirty-five years I am more convinced than ever it's only about story." It's only about story: That slogan summarizes both the book's virtues and its one sizable flaw. While many of the best and most popular American films follow Goldman's precepts, he writes as if his narrow, big-budget Hollywood aesthetic is universal. This can cut out the high--a pause in the story for a moment of beauty, or a deeper look into a character--and the low--pure silliness, or an outrageous gag put in not because it fits but because it's fun. But the high-pressure, multimillion-dollar movie business is Goldman's milieu, and these hard-earned lessons have served him well there. They should probably serve others, too.

Of course, Goldman notes, there are two parts to getting a story on the screen. Writing well is only half the game. One must also get around the obstacles--fearful producers, power-mad directors, egotistical stars--who will either reject your script or change it beyond recognition. (Producers, directors, and stars, needless to say, have a different take on just who drags down quality, but this is a writer's book.) Therefore, Goldman spends as much time detailing phone calls and meetings and shoots as he does analyzing screenplays: If you want to succeed, you have to know about both.

But I'm getting ahead of myself (another well-worn writing trick--start in the middle and reveal the backstory as you go along). In 1983, Goldman put out a great book on his life and work in the movies, Adventures in the Screen Trade. Since then, publishing books on screenwriting has become an industry threatening to outgrow screenwriting itself. But one thing sets Goldman's book apart from most of the others: He has actually succeeded in the business, at the very highest level. For the past 35 years he's written a fair number of major Hollywood films, including The Hot Rock (1972), A Bridge Too Far (1977), The Princess Bride (1987), and Maverick (1994), as well as two Oscar winners, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and All the President's Men (1976). Sometimes those who can, teach.

The first book had two messages, both simple, instructive, and liberating. First, and most celebrated: Nobody Knows Anything. Everyone claims after the fact that they were sure of each hit's success and each flop's failure, but no one really knows beforehand what will work. Every film ever made had someone--usually a bunch of someones--who thought it would succeed. Yet most fail.

The second message was less remembered but equally important: Screenplays Are Structure. Good screenwriters have to discover the spine of the story and stick to it. There's nothing wrong with spending hours finding the mot juste to cap off some dialogue, or writing a 50-page biography of every secondary character, but if the basic structure of the story is unsound, the movie won't work.

The new book expands on those two maxims. In other words, it's a sequel. Incidentally, here's what Goldman has to say about sequels: They're for "whores." I think he's being a little hard on himself--sometimes you simply have more to say.

Which Lie Did I Tell? picks up, chronologically, where the earlier book left off. After having eight scripts made into movies during the '70s--an incredible track record in an industry that buys 30 scripts for every one it actually films--Goldman hit a cold spell from 1980 to 1985, selling no screenplays and not even getting any job offers. (He did manage to write five novels, not to mention Adventures in the Screen Trade--we should all have such cold spells.) Knowing that this can happen even to a two-time Oscar winner is as instructive as anything else in the book.

Goldman, as you might expect, slings a good story. His style is very readable. Slangy, a bit profane, and chatty, filled with sentence fragments. You know. Like this. He's willing to name names--if he thinks Spielberg or Lucas are doing something just for the money, he'll say so. The one topic where he's mum is how much he's paid. Perhaps he's reticent because if we knew the huge sums he gets, it would be harder for him to pull off his regular-guy persona.

The book is full of great tales on how a script was written and filmed--or not filmed. For instance, after his years in the wilderness, Goldman was called in to adapt the popular novel Memoirs of an Invisible Man for director Ivan Reitman and star Chevy Chase. In the mid-'80s, both were white hot. Unfortunately, Reitman wanted a farce, while Chase wanted a film about the loneliness of invisibility. When two powerful people butt heads, those below often feel it the most, and soon enough Goldman was off the stalled project. (Chase ultimately got his way, and the film was released in 1992, directed by John Carpenter. It was a flop.)

In 1990, Goldman adapted Misery from Stephen King's bestseller. The moment in the novel that knocked him out is when the protagonist has his feet lopped off. He wrote it into his script, but director Rob Reiner changed it so the hero "merely" has his ankles broken with a sledgehammer. Goldman screamed, but Reiner wouldn't budge. Misery became a hit, and the hobbling scene was the most memorable thing in it. Goldman now admits he was mistaken--his scene did in fact go too far. Why didn't he know it then? Easy: Nobody Knows Anything.

Even some things Goldman claims to know now are uncertain. For example, he believes his lion-hunting film, The Ghost and the Darkness (1996), was ruined when star Michael Douglas demanded his part be rewritten. Goldman thinks giving Douglas' character a painful past took away from his mystery and made him more of a whiner. It's impossible to say for sure, but it's hard to believe this relatively minor modification was enough by itself to change the film from hit to failure.

Which Lie Did I Tell? is not all war stories. It also deals with topics ranging from Goldman's favorite scenes in other people's movies to his comments on how well various news stories would adapt into movies to other writers' comments on an uncompleted screenplay by Goldman himself. Holding it all together are several lessons. For one, a writer had better believe in a story before committing to it, because it takes a lot of work to craft a good screenplay. Second, a writer must be willing to take harsh criticism from friends--if they won't tell you the truth, don't expect any mercy from people you're hoping will pay you. And above all, never forget that it all starts with the writer; directors and stars may get more credit, money, and fame, but nothing can happen until someone puts word to page.

As central as the writer is to the film, so is the story to the writer. But if the book has a significant lapse, it's that Goldman has been writing big-budget pieces for so long that his idea of a story is a Hollywood story. There should be no wasted motion, no matter how entertaining--every line, every action, has to fit into the larger structure. And there's no room for ambiguity--everything should make the lead look good, because, in Goldman's words, "Stars do not--repeat--do not play heroes--stars play gods." And while you certainly want good characters, their main purpose is to function well in an entertaining plot.

Now there's good Hollywood and there's bad Hollywood, and Goldman wants good Hollywood, but I'm not sure there's room in his aesthetic for anything else. Goldman himself differentiates between Hollywood and independent films by saying the former "reassures" while the latter "unsettles." That's not necessarily wrong, but another difference may be more important: In a Hollywood movie, everything is there to serve the story. Independent films, on the other hand, often stop to explore a character or a moment without it needing to mean anything bigger.

There's nothing wrong with either ethos. When the interlocking parts of a Hollywood film fall into place in ways you didn't see coming, the movie sings. And when an independent film takes some time out from the demands of the plot, you can have beauty. But done poorly, the Hollywood film can seem mechanical, the independent film boring.

But Goldman doesn't even seem aware that a Hollywood filmmaker could go for anything other than what he prescribes. This is odd, since he started working in Hollywood in a period, the late '60s and early '70s, when many mainstream films were loosely structured, even experimental. It wasn't unusual then to start with interesting characters and let their natural interaction be the plot. Blockbusters like Star Wars (1977) changed how Hollywood does business, but Goldman, who feels such movies are cartoonish, would nevertheless limit films to basic and formulaic rules of his own.

How many times in a Hollywood film do we see something that seems like an interesting character touch only for it to become a mechanical plot point? If you're introduced to a character performing magic tricks for kids in the park, you may think it's a nice grace note, but by the third act, you can bet she's gonna use her talents to get out of a scrape. Even ideas that were once exciting or fun become clichés. If the cops have the bad guy's house surrounded and they're about to make a bust, check your watch. If it's only an hour into the film, either it's the wrong place or the bad guy has already gone and the house is booby-trapped. Or if the film is almost over, and a villain (but not the chief villain) has the hero at gunpoint, out of nowhere a shot will suddenly ring out. The hero's friend or girlfriend (whom we're supposed to have forgotten about) just saved the day. Often, the villain will obligingly fall out of frame so we can see this character, still aiming the smoking gun.

Goldman recognizes the hazard of predictability. As he puts it, a good story should be both satisfying and surprising. (Maybe all art should.) But what Goldman doesn't see is that putting in something beautiful or fun, without a larger purpose, can work. Films such as Pulp Fiction (1994), Trainspotting (1995), and Being John Malkovich (1999) break plenty of rules--characters aren't conventionally sympathetic, plot twists aren't "properly" prepared for--but they have such constant invention and lively dialogue that they're better than all but a handful of Hollywood products. On the other hand, countless action films have followed the template of Die Hard (1988) and have mostly been bad copies of a good formula.

While no one knows for sure what works, they know from experience that leading viewers down blind alleys, or losing story momentum, usually doesn't. But sometimes the rules can be broken and something new and exciting can emerge. If Goldman had discussed these anomalies--whether he likes them or not--he'd have presented a wider view of what screenplays can be about.

Still, the book is a worthy successor to Adventures in the Screen Trade. Ultimately, it does come down to story. It's just that any given formula can get you only so far. Eugene Scribe had a formula and wrote more hits than virtually any other playwright in history. Yet it is other writers who knew Scribe's style but used it to delve deep into the human soul, like Ibsen, or turned it on its head to mock conventional notions, like Shaw, who are remembered --and performed--today.

That Indie Jones

info@reason.com (Steve Kurtz) — Tue, 01 Feb 2000 00:00:00 EST

Gross Out

info@reason.com (Steve Kurtz) — Fri, 01 Oct 1999 00:00:00 EDT

Hollywood Cynic

info@reason.com (Steve Kurtz) — Tue, 01 Jun 1999 00:00:00 EDT

On Sunset Boulevard, The Life and Times of Billy Wilder, by Ed Sikov, Hyperion, 675 pages, $35.00

When discussing the success of immigrants, the phrase "only in America" often comes to mind. It takes on an added urgency in the case of filmmaker Billy Wilder since, in some ways, his was a choice between America and annihilation.

That stark reality energizes Wilder's immensely entertaining and influential body of work. His appreciation for the glittering surface of pre-Nazi European society and what lay just underneath it--poverty, prejudice, and mass death--helped shape a worldview that created some of the most caustic portraits of humanity ever to come out of Hollywood. As significant, his hand-to-mouth living experiences, first as a Jew in the remains of the Austro-Hungarian empire and later as an immigrant in the American movie business, taught him the need to deliver, to please an audience. Such experiences--and immense talent, of course--helped create arguably the most distinguished career a Hollywood writer-director has ever had.

Ed Sikov's book, On Sunset Boulevard, The Life And Times of Billy Wilder, tells a classic Hollywood tale of rags to riches--and of self-invention. Sikov has unearthed many new facts and dutifully sets the record straight on the false tales Wilder spread about himself. It turns out, for instance, the young journalist Wilder didn't interview Sigmund Freud, Richard Strauss, Arthur Schnitzler, and Alfred Adler all in the same day; nor did he live in the ladies' room at the Chateau Marmont in his early Hollywood life.

But Wilder's true life story, it turns out, is as interesting as anything he might have made up. Wilder was born in 1906 in Poland. Though that society was openly anti-Semitic--after World War I, Wilder's father requested Austrian citizenship but was summarily denied for being a "Polish Jew"--young Billy was a go-getter and before the age of 20 was making a living in Vienna as a journalist. His writing was lively and caustic, a style that would serve him well throughout most of his lengthy career. Working as a guide for Paul Whiteman's jazz band, he traveled to Berlin, the center of German filmmaking, and insinuated himself into the industry, writing numerous screenplays and treatments. By the early '30s, he was one of the top screenwriters in Germany.

But Wilder could read the writing on the wall. He left Germany in 1933, first for Paris, then for New York, and, finally, for Los Angeles. There, director Joe May, another German refugee, helped Wilder get a temporary gig at Columbia. But times were hard, especially for a man whose English was mostly limited to phrases he'd learned from jazz records. When his job ended, immigration law required Wilder to leave the country and enter on a new visa. He went south of the border to Mexicali, and (according to Wilder, anyway--no one can verify this) though he hadn't the proper papers, the American consul asked him what he did. Wilder replied, "I write movies." The official was intrigued, stamped Billy's papers and told him to "write some good ones." (Wilder thanked this unknown man when he received an honorary Oscar in 1988.)

Now a resident alien, Wilder still had trouble getting work until he was teamed with Charles Brackett, a quiet, conservative man 14 years his senior. Though they were temperamental opposites, their styles meshed and they were soon Hollywood's hottest writing team, creating such treats as Midnight (1939), Ninotchka (1939), and Ball of Fire (1941). But now Wilder, unhappy with the lack of respect he and his scripts got, wanted to direct. Writers directing was, at the time, a new and unpleasant idea for the front office. Studios were factories turning out a product; writer and director were separate jobs, not steps on a ladder. But, following a trail blazed by Preston Sturges a few years earlier, Paramount allowed Wilder to direct The Major and the Minor in 1942.

The film was a hit, and Wilder never looked back. In time he'd receive a total of 20 Academy Award nominations, winning six. In 1944 came Double Indemnity, one of the earliest and best films noir. In 1945, The Lost Weekend, about the horrors of alcoholism, won the Best Picture Oscar. Five years later, Wilder made the film he's most celebrated for today, Sunset Blvd. Then, perhaps feeling he didn't need to share his fame, Wilder left Brackett.

Wilder did solid work with various writers through the 1950s until, starting with Love In The Afternoon (1957), he found his second great collaborator, I.A.L. Diamond. In 1959, Wilder made his greatest comedy, Some Like It Hot, and in 1960 released his most honored film, The Apartment, for which he won three Oscars (writing, directing, producing). In 1963 he made Irma La Douce, his biggest grosser.

Wilder's career was at its height. Twelve of the first 18 films he'd directed were hits, and only two had been outright flops. But cracks were starting to show. Critics attacked him for what they considered his cynical protagonists' "unearned" redemption. John Simon said Wilder's work was "cynicism cynically sug-arcoated" so as to have "no therapeutic, moral, or artistic validity." Pauline Kael said Wilder "pulls out laughs the way a catheter draws urine." Stanley Kauffmann accused him of having the "second-stage sentimentality of the professional cynic." Dwight Macdonald wrote, "Although Mr. Wilder is considered a very cynical fellow in Hollywood, he seems to me not cynical enough; he uses bitter chocolate for his icing, but underneath is the stale old cake." Most notably, Andrew Sarris, in a ranking of American directors, consigned Wilder to the "Less Than Meets the Eye" category, saying he's "too cynical to believe even his own cynicism."

If some critics felt he didn't go far enough, by 1964, the moviegoing public thought he had gone too far. That's when he made Kiss Me, Stupid, an ugly comedy in which Ray Walston plays a struggling songwriter who pimps Kim Novak, who's pretending to be his wife, to Dean Martin (playing a somewhat more lascivious version of himself) to further his career. Even today the film leaves a bad taste. It was morally condemned nationwide and flopped miserably as well.

Wilder had lost touch with his audience. He would direct six more movies, none of them significant hits, most of them flops. Once on the cutting edge, Wilder suddenly seemed old-fashioned and slow-paced. Not that he stopped doing good work: The Fortune Cookie (1966) is one of his better comedies, and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), though ruthlessly edited down from his original intentions, has attracted a cult following since its original failure. But by his last film, Buddy Buddy (1981), the timing is off, the great wit is mostly gone, and the sex jokes sound like an old man snickering. The film failed, and Hollywood was done with him.

Since then, however, Wilder's critical reputation has done nothing but rise. Andrew Sarris has publicly recanted his position and proclaimed Wilder a master. Leonard Maltin's film guide gives eight of Wilder's 25 films a perfect four stars, and another seven get three and a half. Not unlike Orson Welles in the last decades of his life, Wilder, now in his 90s, has collected one lifetime achievement award after another, even as no studio would let him make another movie.

The trick in a director's biography is establishing a balance between discussing the life and discussing the films. Sikov, to his credit, keeps the story moving but stops long enough to critique the movies, which, after all, are why we're interested. His analysis is generally insightful, and he catches things that most critics get wrong. Consider, for example, this telling moment in Stalag 17 (1953). As hardbitten William Holden is about to escape from a German prisoner camp, he tells his fellow POWs, "If I ever run into you bums on the street corner, let's just pretend we never met before." He ducks down through a trap door but then comes back up, smiles, waves, and ducks back down. In Sarris' original attack on Wilder, he called the moment out of character and a "sentimental waste motion." But Sikov, I think, gets it right when he sees the wave instead as a "sarcastic salute, a final screw you."

On Sunset Boulevard also helps ex-plains the origins of Wilder's worldview, where people are only looking out for themselves and sincerity is for suckers (at least until the final reel). Most significant was his outsider status: As a Polish Jew in Austria and Germany, and then a non-English-speaker in America, Wilder was hardly born a member of Hollywood's inner circle. Through hard work and talent, though, he moved from outsider to the ultimate insider, a top-of-the-line Hollywood director. Perhaps this made him feel a bit of an impostor, a feeling he exploited in his art. The theme of imposture certainly runs rampant in his work, playing a central role in The Major and the Minor, Five Graves to Cairo (1943), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Some Like It Hot, Fedora (1978), and many others.

Related to Wilder's outsider status is his most famous trait, cynicism. Growing up in a harsh world, he had to develop a hustler's knack for survival. It figures that when he started making films, he'd create a gallery of protagonists who were hard-shelled, tough-talking, world-weary, and more than a bit misanthropic. And it also figures that some times--as in Kiss Me, Stupid or Ace in the Hole (1951), in which Kirk Douglas plays a reporter who exploits the tragedy of a man stuck in a cave--Wilder would go too far and turn off audiences.

Of course, whatever the reasons for his sensibility, Wilder's films are still being enjoyed because he had immense skill and was lucky enough to get to a place where he could utilize it. He started directing to protect his scripts, an excellent reason when you're as good a writer as he was. His greatest talent, even more important than his way with snappy dialogue, was that he knew how to tell a story. This is why his directorial technique is never flashy--he wants you to become so involved that you forget you're watching a movie. (It's also why he sometimes attacked art house favorites such as Bergman, Godard, and Antonioni; he felt they couldn't tell a story and used artiness to cover up this failing.) He believed in hooking the audience at the outset and never letting them go.

That's evident even in his Hollywood directorial debut, The Major and the Minor, in which Ginger Rogers disguises herself as a 12-year-old to get half-fare on a train and for the rest of the film must keep up the charade for higher and higher stakes. The plot grips Rogers in its vise, and the audience as well.

The same might be said about Wilder's biography as it's laid out in On Sunset Boulevard. In detailing Wilder's exodus from an old world to a new one of possibilities, and his rise from obscurity to accomplishment, Sikov has scripted not only a Hollywood scenario but a quintessentially American one as well.

Disney's World

info@reason.com (Steve Kurtz) — Wed, 01 Jul 1998 00:00:00 EDT

The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life, by Steven Watts, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 453 pages, $30.00

Early on in my junior high years, during lunch period, a friend brought up how much he'd enjoyed the latest Disney movie--I think it was The World's Greatest Athlete. The rest of us paused and looked at each other. We weren't sure if it was cool to like Disney any more--or to admit to it, anyway. Yeah, we'd loved the animated films, watched Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color on Sundays, and begged our parents to go to Disneyland when we were kids. But weren't we too old for this?

No one thought of Paramount or Universal productions this way, but Disney had carved out a niche. The name meant something: loved by kids, trusted by parents, and embarrassing to teenagers. How exactly did Disney go from an unknown name to a studio to a conglomerate to something approaching a way of life, both celebrated and derided?

Steven Watts's The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life tries to explain this transformation. Walt Disney's life was a fascinating journey--would that the book were equally fascinating. Unfortunately, Watts, a professor of history at the University of Missouri, has chosen a poor format. He'll sum up in a few pages the progress Disney made over, say, a decade and then spend the next few chapters going over and over the ramifications. In discussing Disney's numerous projects, he'll dutifully, ploddingly report what the critics said, both for and against, only occasionally enlivening the proceedings with his own point of view.

Nonetheless, an extraordinary story can be pieced together from Watts's stop-and-go narrative. Walt Disney was born in Chicago on December 5, 1901. From 1905 to 1910, he was raised on a farm in Marceline, Missouri. While Walt spent his adult life in big cities, he would still rhapsodize over his "little home town, Marceline." His father, Elias, was a strict, religious, sometimes violent man with socialist leanings. (He believed in tough love--he wouldn't even fertilize the crops, feelings his vegetables would weaken if they had it too easy.) Walt's success was an odd combination, both affirming the traditional values of his childhood and rebelling against the discipline and austerity of his Midwestern upbringing.

Young Walt had a talent for drawing, earning money doing illustrations for newspapers and advertisements. Leaving home in 1919, he found work at a commercial art studio in Kansas City. After being laid off, he started his own shop in 1920 with a new friend and lifelong colleague, Ub Iwerks. It went under in a month. Always hustling, Walt soon found a job at the Kansas City Film Ad Co., his first direct employment in animation. Fascinated by the process, he created humorous cartoons in his spare time and, in May 1922, struck out on his own again, starting Laugh-O-Gram Films. This time the venture lasted more than a year before going bankrupt. In July 1923, Walt left Kansas City for Hollywood.

Disney was a talented animator but an even better salesman, great at smooth-talking people into investing in his future. With implacable resolve, he built up his Los Angeles studio. Not once, but twice, when his animation shop was on the verge of great success, his staff was raided and Walt himself offered a cushy job if he'd merely cede artistic control. Both times he preferred to start over. In fact, Mickey Mouse was born out of desperation after Disney had lost the rights to his then-popular Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. (That no one today wears Oswald Ears is testament to how much the sharpers underestimated Walt.)

With Steamboat Willie (1928), the first sound cartoon, Mickey Mouse became a star and Disney famous. Throughout the late '20s and '30s, his studio regularly turned out Mickey Mouse cartoons, introducing a formidable stable of players--Minnie Mouse, Goofy, Pluto, and, almost outstripping Mickey himself in popularity, Donald Duck. Alongside these shorts Disney produced the Silly Symphony series, which were less character-based and featured more free-ranging storylines and artistic styles.

Experimenting as always, Walt attempted something that at the time seemed pure folly: feature-length animation. It was tremendously expensive and years in the making, but Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) became a huge hit. (Walt's enthralling three-hour performance acting out the story for his staff is still a legend at the studio.) Emboldened, Disney followed it with four other classics of the genre, Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941), and Bambi (1942).

This was Disney's golden age--a time of financial success, true, but one of even greater artistic success. The critics called him a genius, and his peers showered him with Academy Awards. (He won all eight Oscars given for short cartoons in the 1930s.) The work has held up. The Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony series have been rivaled in wit only by the famed Warner Bros. output; for pure aesthetic quality, they remain without peer. The
five features are still beloved--perhaps matched by some later work, but never surpassed. And they continue to pack a punch: A bizarre sequence like "Pink Elephants on Parade" from Dumbo is stranger and stronger than almost anything the actual surrealists ever did; probably more kids have been scared witless by Lampwick's metamorphosis into a jackass in Pinocchio than by Dracula and Frankenstein combined.

In the 1940s, Disney went downhill. There was a four-month animators' strike in 1941, quite acrimonious, though featuring some of the most creative picket signs ever. The walkout was over nonstandardized salaries and bonus structures, lengthy trainee probation periods, and a perceived lack of recognition. Walt resisted the strikers' demands, feeling he'd always played fair with his people. What he didn't realize is that a boss can get away with somewhat arbitrary management in a small shop, but as a company grows the tensions can become unbearable. Most employees actually sided with Walt, yet the bitter strike forever changed the close relationship he'd had with his animators.

Then came the war years, when the Disney studio practically enlisted, churning out training, education, and propaganda films, often mixing live action with animation. Not only were they lesser works artistically, they weren't particularly remunerative. After World War II, Disney seemed to have lost his way. Short films, his bread and butter, were no longer in great demand. Perhaps uncertain of what to expect in a postwar audience, and fearful of the great emotional and financial commitment required to develop full-length stories, he produced a series of animated features, including Make Mine Music (1946), Fun and Fancy Free (1947), and Melody Time (1948), in revue form. They provided some great moments but offered nothing to match his earlier classics.

Starting in the 1950s, however, Disney had something Americans aren't supposed to have: a second act. Perhaps it was a consequence of restlessness--he had conquered animation and may have been eager for new challenges--but during this period he turned his creative attention from Disney as cartoon maker to Disney as corporation, expanding with great success in several directions. In fact, not until this era were the Disney operations on truly solid financial footing.

Disney returned to full-length stories in animation, creating such charming works as Cinderella (1950), Peter Pan (1953), Lady and the Tramp (1955), and 101 Dalmations (1961). More important, he started making popular live-action movies: nature films, such as The Living Desert (1953) and The Vanishing Prairie (1954); adventure, including Treasure Island (1950), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1954), and Swiss Family Robinson (1960); and a steady diet of dramas (1957's Old Yeller), comedies (1961's The Absent-Minded Professor), and musicals (1964's Mary Poppins). Equally significant was Disney's move into a new form, television. Not only was the weekly prime-time show a hit, making Uncle Walt a celebrity, but the daily Mickey Mouse Club became a phenomenon, and a Davy Crockett series started a national craze.

Biggest of all, of course, was Disneyland, a leap into the unknown which advisers thought foolhardy. The gleaming 160 acres in Anaheim revolutionized the concept of the amusement park, and the operation was successful beyond all projections. Walt was planning Disneyworld--a chance to do Disneyland right, with all the room he needed--when he died suddenly on December 15, 1966.

Disney had been a high roller, yet the tremendous prosperity of his last 15 years or so was solidly built on earlier successes. He turned out superior work for more than 30 years, and a generation had grown from children into adults associating his name with outstanding, accessible entertainment. Thus he was perfectly positioned to turn Disney into a trusted trademark for family fun in new media. Combining a commitment to quality with a willingness to adapt, he was able to broaden his commercial vision while making few missteps.

So what does Watts make of all this? He separates the "golden age" from the later work of the 1950s. So far, so good. But when he gets to particulars, the commentary tends to be facile in the extreme. For example, Watts thinks the early cartoons, with the persistent Mickey Mouse and the feisty Donald Duck, expressed Walt's "sentimental populism"--the average citizen overcoming adversity--a theme that went over well during the Great Depression. Could be. But the theme of the little guy taking on the bully hardly needs to be shaped by a Midwestern childhood. Nor does it require a 1930s audience. One of Disney's favorites, for instance, was Charlie Chaplin, whose quasi-Victorian "little fellow" was popular 15 years before the Depression.

Watts analyzes the feature-length movies along similar lines: "With marked populist overtones, [Pinocchio] chronicled a quest for stability, self-definition, and humanity within a threatening social environment." He's referring to Pinocchio, but would it matter if he meant Snow White or Cinderella or Jungle Book or Hercules? This sort of analysis could apply to any number of coming-of-age stories. It doesn't distinguish Disney from the competition. The audience was responding to something more.

That something was Disney's command of the medium. Walt was a masterful storyteller--probably his greatest talent. He hired the best available people--and since there was a depression, he was able to get them cheap (that's how the times affected his work). He eagerly took advantage of the latest technology. With such attributes, he would likely have been a success in any era.

Animation is a unique form, and Walt, a hands-on boss, was able to get something none of the other great artist/perfectionists of Hollywood (Chaplin, Von Stroheim, Astaire) could ever achieve--complete artistic control. Not a square inch appeared on the screen unless Walt wanted it that way. And unlike live-action auteurs, almost no effect was beyond his reach. Disney was an innovator in animation, doing new things with sound, color, and even duration. And whether you think of him as a farm boy made good or a heartless captain of industry, there's no denying the greatness of the work during the golden age, or that he was the man most responsible for the final product. His primary concern was always quality, not profits (his money people often needed to bring him back down to earth).

Walt expressly disavowed political intent in the 1930s, but historian Watts can't accept this. Maybe there is a point of view in his cartoons, but they're a pretty varied bunch. The Disney studio turned out 15 to 18 shorts a year, and the main commonalities were fine draftsmanship, clever gags, and enjoyable scores. You can read what you want into wild physical comedy, well-synchronized music, and characters beating the odds, but Disney could have borrowed much of this from other movies of the time.

The "vision" of a Midwestern Protestant turns out to be not all that different from the "vision" of a handful of Eastern European Jews. When messages do come across (especially in the features), it's because the tales Disney adapted were meant to be cautionary and instructive to children, and when Walt told a story he knew he had to tell it like he meant it. But even when Walt wanted to teach, entertainment came first.

Watts sees the Disney of the '50s shifting toward "libertarian populism." Don't get too excited. It's hard to pin down exactly what Watts means by this term. He mostly seems to use libertarianism in a negative sense. This new populism still has the same old positive belief in individual autonomy and the power of small producers, perhaps now with a new faith in technological innovation. But on the down side, Watts says, "it encouraged a suspicion of big bureaucratic institutions, be they governmental or financial, public or private." This, Watts contends, was Disney's reaction to the Cold War. During the Eisenhower years, Disney offered a "narrower, more defensive rendition" of the "older, optimistic, inclusive populism of the Depression era."

In fact, I think this is Watts's reaction to the Cold War, something he can sink his teeth into. Here, Watts starts to really go off the rails. To be sure, Disney changed in the '50s. And yes, his newer work was often corny (Disney proudly admitted this) and sometimes bland. It didn't reach the heights of his earlier work, but it was still children's entertainment of a higher quality than most.

In some ways, this new world of Disney was Walt's greatest creation--a multibillion-dollar organization built around beloved children's characters, with enormously valuable copyrights, hit movies, and parks that are bigger tourist destinations than most countries. This creation was by no means an historical inevitability: Once again, it was mostly due to one man's dreams.

Watts, however, sees a chance to tie it all to the McCarthy era and the Cold War and simply goes overboard, too often ignoring the financial and artistic achievement to concentrate on overheated, even absurd analyses: Lady and the Tramp and 101 Dalmations become symbolic of "the disruption of modern domestic life," while the light comedy The Parent Trap (1961) "explore[s] explicitly and seriously the threat to the Cold War American Family." The Disney nature films are "an unspoken rejection of the hovering Communist specter of artificial government direction and centralized planning." Watts gives us pages and pages of this stuff. Disney films are worth investigating from a sociocultural perspective, but that doesn't mean every investigation is worthwhile.

Reading The Magic Kingdom, one is ultimately struck by the imagination and energy of Disney as both filmmaker and businessman. His productive life is one of the most intriguing of this century. Watts's scholarly research (there are 57 pages of notes) has turned up enough information for several books. Unfortunately, he tells his story in a way Walt wouldn't have let get past a first draft.

Stand-Up Guy

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) info@reason.com (Steve Kurtz) — Sat, 01 Nov 1997 00:00:00 EST

Comedian Drew Carey has become a full-fledged media sensation: His self-titled television show, which airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. EST on ABC, is beginning its third season ensconced in the Nielsen top 20 (and locked in a ratings war with NBC's Third Rock from the Sun); his cable specials, most recently HBO's The Mr. Vegas All Night Party, command huge audiences; and his book Dirty Jokes and Beer: Stories of the Unrefined (for which he reportedly received a $3 million advance) hit stores in September.

Carey's appeal stems in large part from his Everyman status. The Washington Post once described him, not inaccurately, as "a tubby dork in a crew cut and thick-rimmed glasses...[who is] lovably and goofily awkward....Part of Carey's charm is that he manages to seem out of place in every setting." In his sitcom, which shares certain blue-collar affinities with shows such as Roseanne and Grace Under Fire, his character is an assistant personnel manager at a Cleveland department store. He is the consummate working stiff, besieged on all sides by
an indifferent employer, hostile co-workers, aimless friends, and a strong sense of his own inadequacy and lack of success. From this potentially grim reality, Carey squeezes immense humor (and precious little sentimentality).

Carey's appreciation for the exasperations of everyday life is matched by a delightful sense of the absurd (his show sometimes features elaborate dance numbers) and an eagerness to strip away all sorts of pretensions and self-serving myths. Consider his take on the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas and its ubiquitous slogan, "Save the Planet": "[That's] the most pandering corporate slogan I've ever heard," he writes. "`Save the Planet.' You can't get away from it. It's on every sign, every chip, every matchbook: `Save the Planet.' Like you can really save the planet from people in the first place, and if you wanted to, you could do it by drinking and gambling at the Hard Rock. `Hey, not only am I getting shit-faced drunk and picking up cute chicks, I'm saving the planet.'...Every time I play craps there, when I roll the dice I yell, `Save the Planet!' Then, win or lose, I loudly announce, `I don't care if I win or not, I just want the planet to be safe,' while I count my hundred dollar chips."

Although Carey openly disdains Hollywood activism--he winces at the mention of people such as Alec Baldwin and Barbra Streisand--there is a proto-political message in much of his humor. As the Hard Rock example suggests, Carey believes that people are far more resistant to soothing, feel-good rhetoric than its practitioners may fully grasp. In an age of ubiquitous and self-serving spin, that is no small point.

Senior Editor Nick Gillespie and writer Steve Kurtz talked with Carey over lunch at the original Bob's Big Boy (his choice) in Burbank, California. Here's a condensed version

of their wide-ranging conversation.

Reason: Much of your humor pokes fun at liberal Hollywood sensibilities. What kind of response does that provoke from your peers?

Drew Carey: People look at me like a drunk uncle: "Oh, that Drew!" Everybody in Hollywood loves symbolic gestures. Have you been to the Hard Rock Casino in Vegas? There's nothing save-the-planetish about it. Hollywood people are filled with guilt: white guilt, liberal guilt, money guilt. They feel bad that they're so rich, they feel they don't work that much for all that money--and they don't, for the amount of money they make. There's no way I can justify my salary level, but I'm learning to live with it.

I've got to say that I don't see myself as some sort of political type like Alec Baldwin or Barbra Streisand. I don't want to come across like that. I'd be embarrassed if that was the way I came across. I should watch what I say about Streisand: She could call a congressman, not have my garbage picked up anymore, change my zoning laws, totally screw me over.

When I did Comic Relief, I did it to be on the show; it's a badge of honor as a comedian to do that show. Comic Relief does a lot of good, but homeless people really bug the hell out of me. They're smelly, they're always asking me for money. I mean, I like to help out, but I also do this in my act where I say, "I don't know how much money we raised to help the homeless tonight, but the food backstage was great." And it was: all gourmet-catered, all the drinks were free, not a homeless guy in sight. Everyone in Hollywood comes to these things and then says, "Look how we cured homelessness." They feel guilty if they party and there's not a good reason for it. If you had the same show with all the best comedians and no charity involved, they'd be like, "Uh-oh, can't do that." They want to make themselves look good--a lot of it is about feeding egos. My publicist always calls me with charity appearance requests, and I turn them down now. I told her I'm not doing any more charity where I show up and say, "Hi, I'm Drew Carey for the American Cancer Society."

Reason: So you're in favor of cancer?

Carey: No (laughs). I'm in favor of not inflating your ego, of only doing good deeds to pump yourself up. Which is about as anti-Hollywood, as anti-
celebrity as you can get.

Still, I wish there were more organizations like [Comic Relief]. Then the government wouldn't step in all over the place. Then you could decide for yourself to help the homeless or not help the homeless.

Reason: What's your basic attitude toward government?

Carey: The less the better. As far as your personal goals are and what you actually want to do with your life, it should never have to do with the government. You should never depend on the government for your retirement, your financial security, for anything. If you do, you're screwed.

Reason: But you were in the Marines reserve, weren't you?--

Carey: That's all the government should be: Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines (laughs). P.J. O'Rourke once said the government has passed enough laws--it should just stop. It oversteps its bounds so often. Giving it a little bit of power is like getting a little bit pregnant, or thinking that a little bit of sex will do you for a long time--it just doesn't work that way.

Reason: Is that the case with TV content ratings?

Carey: I'm not against ratings per se. I think more information is always good. But I certainly don't think the government has to step in and set guidelines for how shows should be rated.

Reason: Former Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.), one of the main forces behind ratings, said that if TV people didn't "clean up its act," the government would have to do it for them.

Carey: He's a bowtied prick. What right does he have to tell me what I can and cannot watch? Change the channel if you don't like what's on TV! The government is really into "protecting" people. The FCC says you can't broadcast certain words and certain pictures. It says it's protecting citizens. But I'm sitting in my home with DirecTV and can watch whatever I want. I can afford the best pornography--laser-disc porn! The government's not protecting me from anything.

All the government's doing is discriminating against poor people. It thinks poor people are like cows, that poor people can't think straight: If we let them hear dirty words or see dirty pictures, there's going to be madness! If you're poor and all you can afford is a 12-inch black-and-
white TV and can't pay for cable--you're so protected! You'd probably be happier if you could see some pornography, a pair of titties, once in a while on free TV. But a pair of titties on free TV? The government figures if you saw that, you'd just explode!

Reason: You devote a chapter of your book to ABC's own network censor, filled with examples of what was and wasn't approved for your show. The focus on particular words is both pathetic and hilarious: In one case, he asked you to change dwarf to little person; in another, he asked you to substitute hooker or prostitute for whore; in a third, he passed on butt wipe but OK'd butt weasel.

Carey: People who have read the book have said that's their favorite chapter. You just don't normally get that sort of inside look at the process.

Reason: Do you ever catch the censor cursing?

Carey: Yes, yes: "What the fuck's going on? You can't say that!"

Reason: Would the use of blue language make your television show better?

Carey: There'd be more stuff to joke about, and it would make the show funnier. As it is, there are certain parts of life you can discuss and certain parts you can't. If my character stubs his toe really bad, he can't say, "Aw fuck, I stubbed my toe!" He has to say, "Ooch, ooch, ooch."

Reason: Why is cursing funnier?

Carey: It's not always. But comedy's all about exaggeration. To do that sometimes you need the strongest words you can use. In the book, I tell this joke about a man and a woman who meet in a bar. They're both divorced because their spouses thought they were too kinky. So they go back to the woman's place and she goes to her bedroom and puts
on black leather boots, a miniskirt, comes out with a riding crop and some handcuffs. The guy's putting on his coat and heading out the door. "Hey, where you going? I thought we were going to get kinky," she says. "Hey," he says, "I fucked your dog, I shit in your purse. I'm outta here!" That just isn't funny if you say, "I had sex with your dog and defecated in your purse."

Reason: What do you think about comedians like Bill Cosby who crusade against dirty comics?

Carey: He has a market and I have a market. I don't care if my jokes are appropriate for a kid.

Reason: While you're Cleveland's favorite son, you write longingly of your years living in Las Vegas, a city which many people see as the embodiment of vice and excess, of everything that's wrong with America. What do you like about Vegas?

Carey: Vegas is everything that's right with America. You can do whatever you want, 24 hours a day. They've effectively legalized everything there. You don't have to gamble if you don't want to. There's tons of churches in Vegas, too: You'll see a church right next to a casino. But a lot of people like gambling, so they make money off it. Nobody forces you to put money in a machine and pull the handle. But the fact is they allow it. Nevada's one of the most conservative states in the Union, but you can do what you want in Vegas and nobody judges you.

And they've got great schools in Vegas (laughs).

Reason: So why do so many people dump on Vegas?

Carey: I think a lot of people are afraid of freedom. They want their lives to be controlled, to be put into a box: "Be here at 9, leave at 5, we'll take care of you." People like that cradle-
to-grave concept because it says you don't have to think too much, you don't have to worry too much, because someone else is looking out for you. But that also means you can't do as much as you want. You have to do what someone else says is right, what someone else thinks you should do. Why should someone else put a limit on how much fun I can have, how much I can accomplish?

Reason: You write about the 1970s--something else people heap scorn on--in a similar vein.

Carey: Again, a lot of people don't like people having fun. And the '70s were all about doing as much debauchery and having as much fun as you possibly could: Fuck anybody you wanted, do any drug you wanted to.

Reason: I take it you favor drug legalization?

Carey: Yeah. But every time you bring that up, people always ask, "Oh, you think they should sell heroin and crack in stores?" Sure: Smoke crack, die, get out of my way. As long as I don't have to pay for it (laughs). There's always the argument that not everyone is as responsible as you are, that we have to protect everyone from people who would smoke crack and not be responsible. Like we're doing now, right? Liquor prohibition led to the rise of organized crime in America, and drug prohibition has led to the rise of the gang problems we have now.

Reason: Prohibition also leads to another topic: the Kennedys. In an earlier draft of your book, you had an entire chapter devoted to that brood. What is it that you hate about them?

Carey: There were a lot of questions about language in the book. I said, "Look, give me some of the bad language, and I'll take out the whole Kennedy chapter." Plus, the publisher wasn't sure it would pass the lawyers. I read in USA Today that a Kennedy has never lost an election in Massachusetts. I wrote about what it would take for a Kennedy to lose one: They bust into a bank, pistol whip the manager, fuck the teller up the ass, take turns posing for pictures. And nobody would say a thing: "Those Kennedy's are great, aren't they? I can't believe a Kennedy fucked me up the ass!" They can get away with anything.

Reason: Your comic persona and TV show successfully blend a working-man shtick and a willingness to play with dramatic conventions and audience expectations. What's the appeal of those things?

Carey: I try not to lose touch with [working people]. I go back to Cleveland a lot. I love the normalcy of Cleveland. There's regular people there. I like [the TV show] King of the Hill because it's about normal people. I don't miss the economic insecurity, the living paycheck to paycheck. Twice when I was living in Vegas, I almost lost my rent money playing blackjack, got down to my last two dollars.

I'm glad I don't have to deal with that anymore. But I don't want to lose touch with things like eating in Bob's Big Boy. I feel comfortable here.

The show is very easy to relate to [in that way]. I wanted to do a show based on what my life would be like if I had never become a comedian. I would have had some bullshit degree, some general job, going nowhere. People laugh to forget their troubles, and to forget their troubles they like to look at people who aren't doing better than they are. Nothing's funny about someone who's successful. People who are happy and adjusted just aren't funny. Even when people are rich and successful on TV shows, there's always some trouble--you have to poke holes in them, throw them out of a job, put a pie in the face.

Like I said, all comedy is based on exaggeration, big or small, whatever you can get away with. In a promotional bit for the show, Mimi [a character from the show] and I are walking down a dirt road with fishing poles, like Andy and Opie on The Andy Griffith Show. The original script was that she would push me in the water and I'd be floundering like I couldn't swim. When we did the filming, I said, "Wouldn't it be funnier if I just floated like I was dead?" And it's funnier that way because it went the extra mile.

What also helps our show is that we never take ourselves seriously. Here's a show that can wink at itself. Everyone involved knows we're just a sitcom. You'll never see a "very special episode" of the show. The episode featuring Speedy the Crippled Dog is the most we're going to do.

Reason: Your book is different from most celebrity tomes. It's not simply an autobiography or a reprinting of your stand-up routines, although it has some of both. You've got a half-dozen short stories, a section on how the network censor operates, an entire chapter devoted to penis jokes, and then some. How did the book's form come about?

Carey: I didn't want to do what every other celebrity does. I couldn't imagine sitting down and writing my thoughts on the universe. Who cares? Really, who gives a shit what a comic thinks about life in general?

I only wanted to do short stories. I loved the old stories in National Lampoon, like the original story the movie Vacation was based on. I used to laugh at them until I cried. I like short stories, and I don't think I'm good enough to write a novel (laughs). The publisher was hoping to get Drew on beer, Drew on dating, that sort of thing. I wanted to do the stories, and I wanted to do a chapter on how ABC's standards and practices works. So I gave the publisher some of the other stuff to make them happy. The important thing is that it's all meant to be funny.

Reason: You cast aspersions on celebrities who unveil dark secrets, but you also mention that you were molested as a boy and that you tried to commit suicide during your Vegas years.

Carey: The reason I mentioned that stuff is that I wanted to tell people that you can get over it, that you don't have to be embarrassed by it. I mean, I'm very well-adjusted in real life. Well, pretty well. Most parts, anyway. You could ask my girlfriends (laughs).

What I don't like are celebrities who use it as their crutch all the time, who use it as a calling card: "Hi, I'm fill-in-the-blank and I was molested." Shut up already, man. It's one thing to mention it and move on. I have two pages on being molested when I was 9 in the book, and The Globe had this big story: "Drew Carey Bombshell!" They didn't mention one thing about the chapter called "101 Big Dick Jokes."

Reason: You have the only hit show on ABC in recent memory, but you've also been quick to point out that network shows are nowhere near as big as they used to be. Why is that?

Carey: DirecTV, maybe. The network shows are fine; it's just that there's so many other things to watch. We'll never see national shows with 45 shares again. Before, you never had a choice. You had to watch M*A*S*H, or whatever was on the three big networks. Now, if I don't come across a regional sports show or a history special I want to watch, maybe I'll watch M*A*S*H, or whatever's the best of what's broadcast. I don't even watch the local affiliates here in Los Angeles anymore. When I first got DirecTV, the installer told me I needed an antenna to pick up the local broadcast channels. I had him put one in, but I never turn them on.

Reason: How are the networks responding?

Carey: They can't assume everyone is going to watch the new "fall season," that people will tune into something right when it goes on the air. My show was like that. You have to get used to it; some people still don't [like the show], which is fine with me. We had kind of a slow growth in audience. The TV season is a year-long thing now, and the networks are starting to look at it that way, thanks to cable, satellites, and competition.

Reason: A lot of people in your position must hate the competition. Since viewers have more options, they're tougher to hold onto.

Carey: Some people don't like competition because it makes them work harder, better. I'm competitive at everything. When I play poker, I don't like losing the pot. The first Monopoly game I played with my brothers, I hated losing so much, I just had to beat them. I love beating people (laughs). But it's a natural driving force, a way of testing yourself, of measuring how you're doing. It's insane to [hate competition]. How can people not know that competition makes everything better?

Reason: You've got the book out. The show's starting its third season. What's next on your plate?

Carey: I'll tell you what's going to be the most depressing day in my life: when my book gets thrown in the discount bin with a "50 Percent Off" sticker on it. This year, I'm going to try an experiment with my creative process. When the show's in production, we work for three weeks at a time and then take a week off. When I'm working, I'm going to avoid all media. No newspapers, no magazines, no movies, no radio, no TV. I'm just going to do creative work. During the week off, I'll catch up. When I read a headline like "Mideast Talks Stalled by Bombing," I wonder what the hell I could possibly miss: Talk about the '70s! They just keep that headline handy; they probably even just use the same photo.

The Rewrite Stuff

info@reason.com (Steve Kurtz) — Sun, 01 Jun 1997 00:00:00 EDT

Monster: Living Off the Big Screen, by John Gregory Dunne, New York: Random House, 203 pages, $21.00

Forget everything you know about Hollywood and think of it as a black box. In one end goes the talent, out the other come hundreds of movies that add up to one of America's most successful products, dominating competition worldwide. Hollywood must have a phenomenal system to do this--and to do it so well for so long.

Or does it? John Gregory Dunne's Monster rips open the black box, recounting in detail the eight years he and his wife, Joan Didion, worked on Up Close & Personal, a 1996 drama starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer.

After reading of the production's tortuous history, and the 27 drafts of the script they completed, one might be excused for wondering how any films get made at all. The business seems to be full of pitfalls where a potential production can fall apart at any second (as most eventually do), where demands on writers are hopelessly vague and even contradictory, where petty recriminations abound, and where you never get fired, you just stop getting calls.

Dunne has written an entertaining and insightful book, though perhaps not up to the 1983 classic of the genre, the wider-ranging Adventures in the Screen Trade, by William Goldman. Monster is a quick, fun read--at 203 pages, 33 lines of text a page, it moves. But it isn't simply another recasting of the long-standing conceit of the Lowly Writer being treated cruelly by Hollywood philistines. The scales fell from Dunne's eyes a long time ago, and he narrates with equanimity, even a sense of detached amusement.

Dunne can well afford such an attitude. The pecking order of screenwriters runs something like this: There's a charmed circle of a few hundred people who are in demand and are handsomely rewarded for their efforts (some making six figures a week for important rewrites). The next group--about five to 10 times larger--consists of writers who may be struggling, but are making a living. Finally come the vast horde of scribes having little or no success, fighting to break in (or in some cases return) to showbiz.

Dunne and Didion are members of the charmed circle. What's more, they are successful writers of fiction and nonfiction and celebrated members of the New York intelligentsia. They don't need Hollywood. Throughout the book (when not jetting off to Tuscany or St. Tropez), they're working on or turning down other projects, both in print and film. Indeed, Dunne apparently had no more commitment to the project, at first, than the desire to protect his Writer's Guild medical insurance. More than once they walk away from Up Close & Personal, only to have Disney beg them to return. Such leverage allows them to give as good as they get: Monster is spotted with faxes they sent when they felt pushed too far, running from peevish to nasty.

Still, why all the drafts? Why so much wasted time? Why does Hollywood allow--indeed, even demand--such seeming inefficiency?

First, it should be noted that this is nothing new. In the days of the studio system, producers thought nothing of ordering multiple drafts from different writers. It might be a little worse today for reasons discussed below, but numerous rewrites, revisions on the fly, and cut-and-paste final versions are an old story. (Many seemingly well-crafted and thought-out movie classics--Casablanca and The Wizard of Oz, for example--were the result of this system.)

Second, today's major studio films are tremendously expensive. Just 10 years ago, a $30 million budget was huge--today, an average film costs more. In fact, if you include promotional expenses, the average budget for a major-studio film comes in at almost $60 million, and big productions can easily go over $100 million. It's true that, with a bigger global market and video revenues rivaling theatrical grosses, hits can make more money than ever. But the flops are ruinous. Therefore, it's worth investing hundreds of thousands, even millions, in the development process, even if the film never gets made; once production starts, you've got a multi-million-dollar juggernaut on your hands.

Third, uncertainty is central to life at the studios. One flop and heads will roll. There's probably no industry of comparable size with such a high turnover rate. And as the maxim goes, "There's no limit to the number of people who will stay away from a bad movie." As long as nothing gets made, no one gets blamed. Remember, most films never show a profit--better to keep developing until you're happy, which could be never. Hence, development executives are always looking to please the audience. The revisions they wanted from Dunne tended to make the script more conventional--Up Close & Personal, they said, should be different, but not too different: less ambiguity, happier ending, more sympathetic and accessible lead characters. The producers also wanted to attract brand names--top directors and especially stars--to cover themselves. All this finickiness can lead to many drafts.

Fourth, in the old studio system, everyone was under contract. Ultimately, the front office was in control, and that was that. Now, the top people act as independent contractors, with their cooperation coming at the cost of allowing them a say.

Up Close & Personal started as a movie based on Golden Girl, a biography of the late newscaster Jessica Savitch. But the true story (cocaine addiction, abortions, lesbian episodes, untimely death) wasn't considered audience-friendly, especially in the tightly run, Jeffrey Katzenberg Disney of the late 1980s. So it took several drafts to find a suitable replacement for the Savitch story. Eventually, a producer, Scott Rudin, signed on and demanded many rewrites, more than Dunne ever expected--and he got them, since he's a guy who gets movies made. (In perhaps the book's most telling moment, Rudin explains that the plot is really about "two movie stars.") Then a director came aboard, Jon Avnet (best known for Fried Green Tomatoes). He had his own take, including a new angle dealing with his animus toward tabloid journalism. This required a number of new drafts.

Next, the stars, Redford and Pfeiffer, were attracted. Both wanted to protect themselves and their characters, and demanded more rewrites. Finally, production was set, it was crunch time, and the obligatory numerous last-minute changes were needed, even after filming had started.

So that's how you get 27 drafts from Didion and Dunne, and a few more from two other writers who were on the project for a while.

But what of the writer, who bears the brunt of all this? Well, since the writers are getting paid, there are worse brunts to bear. But why doesn't the writer, who seems an indispensable part of the process, have more control? Some of this may be due to historical happenstance: Hollywood wasn't started by writers (who were of limited importance in the silent era). Mostly, however, it's because once production starts and the real money is being spent, writers recede into the background while the others take over in this strongly visual medium.

Directors control the look, the tempo, the feel of a film. Stars are perhaps even more significant, since, in the right parts, they're what the audience pays to see. Compare this to the power the writer has on the stage, where words live and the script is practically inviolable; or television, where more text is needed and less time can be taken in preparation, so writers with "producer" titles essentially run the medium.

So much for the business end of things.

How does the system affect the art? This is not easily answered. It's always dangerous to say how good or bad the art of any era is except in retrospect. Sometimes a Vast Wasteland turns into a Golden Age. (Otis Ferguson, a generally perceptive critic, wrote in The New Republic, "The film year has been about the leanest in seven"--in 1939, a year generally considered to be a high watermark for Hollywood.)

Film is a collaborative medium where the writer draws up the blueprint that a huge crew must then build. Or to overwork a different metaphor, the script may start out as the writer's baby, but it has to be adopted by the director, the actors, the cinematographer, the sound technicians, the composer, the editor, the costume designer, and many others for it to reach a successful maturity. Yet historically, the best Hollywood movies have often come about when someone had a vision and the control to see it through. This someone was frequently the director (Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch, Alfred Hitchcock), but could also be the producer (Irving Thalberg, Samuel Goldwyn, David O. Selznick), or the star (Buster Keaton, Fred Astaire, W.C. Fields).

There's no reason to doubt this still applies. Of course, everyone thinks they have "vision." Joan Didion herself has written ironically about stars and directors with "vision" who treat writers as the relatively minor people who merely put the words down on paper. So can development help? Sure. It can keep the story focused and prevent "visionaries" from bankrupting the studio with self-indulgence. And writers, as much as this hurts to admit, can fall in love with their words and may sometimes need a nudge to look at their script with more objectivity.

But the development process can also take the personality out of a film, turning it into formula. And Hollywood has a blockbuster mentality. There's a preference for the big, event movie: As Joe Roth, the current head of Disney films, has said, he'd rather make one $75 million picture than three $25 million films.

The urge to go for a home run is partly the result of economics (it costs roughly the same amount to promote and distribute any movie; big names and big stories, which are expensive, have bigger potential audiences here and overseas). Nevertheless, this has led to a bifurcation: Many of the more "serious" films come from independent sources, while the majors swing for the fence. This isn't necessarily a bad thing for the viewer, since there's still plenty of choice. (And thanks to technological advances, the average person--with a VCR--has a wider selection of movies at a cheaper cost than ever before.)

It's true such "serious" films might cut deeper than average Hollywood fare, but there's something to be said for major studio output. Taken as a whole, Hollywood still produces a fairly diverse amount of entertainment across any number of genres. And perhaps I'm the philistine, but many "art" films make me appreciate the zip and even vulgarity that Hollywood is able to provide.

Seventy years ago, screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz sent a famous telegram from Hollywood to then-journalist Ben Hecht: "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around." Well, it got around, and nowadays more writers want to create the perfect three-act screenplay than the Great American Novel. Playwright John Guare has a blurb on the back of Monster--the book is a "perfect antidote for anyone delusional enough" to want a write a screenplay. I don't think it'll have that effect. As Dunne notes at the end of the book, through the eight years they worked on the film, he and Joan had a good time. And as maddening and absurd as the system seems, a lot of the excitement--and money--of working in the movies still comes through.

If Hollywood goes through some lean years, it's probably due for a shakeout in middle management, and the line may finally hold on the salaries of talent. But until then, though the system could use some reform, as long as it's not truly broken, and the people on top are making so much money and having so much fun, no one's going to fix it any time soon.