Hollywood was built on the work of underappreciated writers. Just ask Chandler, Faulkner and Fitzgerald

In 1945, barely two years into Raymond Chandler’s career as a screenwriter, the man whose hard-boiled fiction did much to make film noir into an art form had already wearied of the town and its treatment of writers. Chandler might as well have been writing about today when he called Hollywood a place where degradations, such as the “incessant bone-scraping revisions imposed on the Hollywood writer by the process of the rule of decree,” were routine — and where a screenwriter’s billing “will be smaller than that of the most insignificant bit-player.” Groundbreaking detective novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler, shown in 1946. Parker helped write “A Star Is Born” in 1937, and many suspect she had a hand in Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life.” But she wrote scads of forgettable films and thought little of the art of the screenplay, once saying, “You don’t need any talent — the last thing you want is talent.” While these writers earned buckets of money, they got little regard. Emma Thompson is better known as an actress than a writer even though she won an Academy Award for screenwriting for her adaptation of “Sense and Sensibility.” She decried the culture in Hollywood that devalues writers, telling the Guardian there is a “merciless gag” in which scriptwriters are “the lowest of the low.” “Audiences don’t know somebody sits down and writes a picture; they think the actors make it up as they go along.” — Character of Joe Gillis in “Sunset Boulevard” The plight of the Hollywood writer is now part of the cultural fabric. Back in 1945 when a movie critic derisively asserted, “how dull a couple of run-of-the-mill $3,000-a-week writers can be.” Chandler took him to task, writing, “I hope this critic will not be startled to learn that 50 per cent of the screenwriters of Hollywood made less than $10,000 last year, and that he could count on his fingers the number that made a steady income anywhere near the figure he so contemptuously mentioned.” Since 1952, Hollywood writers have gone on strike eight times.