It is doubtful or unthinkable that the general public knows the names of those people whose imagination is dedicated to giving birth to stories to feed movies, series and television programs.
His name goes by fast in the credits.
Even, in the past, someone with a resume as long and notable as Dalton Trumbo, stigmatized by witch hunters and witches, had to sign their scripts with fictitious names or those of other people.
There is no great cinema whose origin was bad scripts, but there are directors who were not up to the stories they narrated.
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Irreducible, moving Dalton Trumbo
Hollywood, series and television in the United States are on the verge of a heart attack due to the strike that the writers have mounted.
In the name, like almost all strikes, of something so human and transparent, even though it can be disguised, of what about mine?
In other words, the essential pasta.
Producers are supposed to be making mountains of money in the entertainment industry, with a huge clientele hooked on consuming images not just in depressed movie theaters, but in their own homes, on their phones, on their computers.
And those who invent these arguments logically seek to access a bigger piece of the pie.
They will get it.
The spectators demand that the machinery continue working, that it provide them with sacred leisure, entertainment.
And this is massive
Although the movies and series released in the United States (in other places as well) are going through an excessively long crisis, finding masterpieces or that thing called quality is a miracle.
But the drug continues to have an inexhaustible market, although the addictive substances come adulterated, repeat themes and characters with shamelessness and mediocrity.
The only thing that matters is that the market is supplied at all hours.
If you review the history of cinema, so memorable at times, you discover that great directors never signed on as screenwriters.
The idea and the plot had occurred to other people and it is not known if the directors rewrote, added or cut the text they had received, but it is clear that they made it their own, printed their recognizable and wonderful style, integrated it into their universe. .
It happens with the deepest diver of darkness, a certain Hitchcock.
With the poetic aroma and the epic that flood the cinema of John Ford.
The immense energy and solidity in all kinds of genres that characterize Howard Hawks.
Grace, intelligence, subtlety, elegance that pervade Lubitsch's cinema.
And there are extraordinary screenwriters who filmed their own stories and also did it in the company of other writers,
achieving a perfect tune.
This is the case of Billy Wilder and his successive partners Charles Brackett and IAL Diamond.
Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the mythological creator of
Eva naked,
also invented scripts alone or in the company of others.
Dalton Trumbo, in his usual office, his bathtub, with a cigarette and a coffee.
Hollywood also boasted that it had recruited some great writers to write movies.
The contracts had to be succulent for these magicians of the written word, glorious names like William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Chandler, among others.
What is not clear is if they respected their scripts, how much was left of them or if they were trained to adapt their writing to the cinema.
I don't know how long the writers' strike will last, although I imagine very little.
Hopefully it will serve to renew their talent, although the only thing that the business owners require of them is that they do not stop working repeating formulas of confirmed success.
Meanwhile, I'm going to reread for the fourth or fifth time the funny and caustic book
The Adventures of a Hollywood Screenwriter,
of the priceless William Goldman.
Also
Pat Hobby Stories,
in which Fitzgerald turned his failed experience in Hollywood into a tragicomedy.
Fitzgerald, always yearning for love (that's how someone titled his biography) was not only lyrical, hypersensitive, chronicler of the collapse.
He could also laugh at himself and make readers laugh at him.
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