Reflections (Projections?) On Screens

Happily for me Salon just keeps on giving.

The review is for "What Happens Next: A History of American Screen Writing" by Marc Norman.
More interesting than the book itself are the reflections offered by Laura Miller. In particular:

Writers (of any sort) invoke deep suspicions in the rest of us and ought to be treated cruelly to keep them on their toes [witness, Sunset Boulevard]. Aside from a steady diet of Tuna sandwiches and milk and an indentured space in the darkened cell known as the "Gag Room" (seriously, read the essay) screenwriters were regarded as worse than hacks...

Norman attributes some of this animosity to the essential mystery of the writing process. To the tough, practical, working-class men who founded the movie industry, it looked suspiciously like loafing. "None of them were quite sure what a screenwriter did," he writes, "or even how he did it. Certainly he or she delivered an artifact, a screenplay, that worked or didn't, but where did it come from? ... Did it take them a year to write a screenplay, or only one day and then they waited a year to hand it in? There was no telling because nobody could see the work occur."

And here's something REALLY curious for those interested in literary connections to the cinematic:

Screenwriters have it worst of all because (and Norman really only grazes this point) writing is invisible and internal and movies are all about -- really only about -- what you can see. The movies need writers, and are intermittently struck with the desire to celebrate and enrich this one or that one, but can never entirely trust them, and vice versa. The movies and writing transpire in fundamentally different worlds. Norman winds up his book with a paean to the screenwriter's privilege in getting "to see the movie, first, entire, in their minds," but the whole point of a movie is that it's not in your mind -- it's right in front of your face, 15 feet high. Otherwise, it's a radio play, maybe. Or a novel.

A couple of points here--
There's a striking similarity between the suggestion of the screenwriter having access to the "movie in your mind" first and yesterday's recounting of JK Rowling as having a personal TV set in her head on which she could invent and rerun as many charming stories about Ron's socks or Hedwig's lineage. So, what gives? Writers aren't writing books in their minds but movies or tv shows. That's a pretty fascinating development in the conceptualisation of the creative work of the mind.

And another thing... This article makes the claim that screenwriters are in a bad way because they work with words but the medium for which they are creating "product"cares only about the visual. The suggestion being, what exactly? That telling and seeing are incompatible? That telling what you see is a fundamentally different thing from seeing what you see. Ok, fine. Then what?
What about this question of TRUST. Is this guy/gal doing the work I want them to? Or more importantly - are they even capable of knowing how to tell a story in images by using words? Don't trust a writer (a scriptwriter/ a cinematic writer) to capture something which can only be experienced firsthand. So then, are all these writers inherently suspicious because they take something and make something else from it? The answer is probably, probably. Certainly I'm feeling more suspicious than normal but I suspect that has rather more to do with the narrative lines of James Ellroy. And so, I offer this all too perfect moment at the closing of Miller's article:

from film critic David Thomson:

"a writer is like a divorce lawyer or a private eye: when you want them you have to have them; but later you despise them."

I love the obsessive quality in this characterisation...
And, we ask for them to hurt us. Ouch! That's some cold hard truth.