Burn, Hollywood, burn! Four noirs reveal the horrors of the screenwriting trade

Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, ‘In a Lonely Place’ (1950).

By Paul Parcellin

You’ve probably heard that screenwriters get little respect in the big town, and by many accounts that’s true. They labor in isolation, punching out fresh ideas, pouring their deepest emotions onto their pages only to have their hearts broken. 

Their masterpieces are rewritten by faceless studio hacks who turn them into pale shadows of what they were.

Or at least, that’s how screenwriters tell it.

Samuel Goldwyn used to call his writers schmucks with typewriters. When he wanted refurbished versions of recent hits he’d tell them, “Give me the same thing, only different.”

Writers were, and still are, famously powerless in the picture biz. They’re one of the most essential and least appreciated cogs in the movie making machine. 

Each of the four movies below offers a powerful and fairly unvarnished view of the rough treatment the Hollywood studio system could dish out, and no doubt still can. 

The writers behind these films, the ones who actually pounded out the pages, not the ones on screen, obviously took glee in mauling the Hollywood establishment. They draw blood. It’s fun to watch: 

Bogart and Grahame, 'In a Lonely Place.'

‘In a Lonely Place’ (1950)

Director Nicholas Ray channels the Dorothy B. Hughes novel, starring Humphrey Bogart as Hollywood scribbler Dixon Steele, a tightly wound script jockey in a creative slump. Steele loathes the studio system and the egotistical no-minds who seem to thrive in it. 

One evening Steele hosts a young woman at his apartment whom he tasks with summarizing a novel for him, a piece of drivel the studio wants him to adapt. And why not? She thinks the book is swell, and Steele can’t bear to waste time poring over the dreck. The next day the girl turns up dead and Steele is a suspect. He was one of the last to see her alive, and it’s well known that he’s an angry and violent bugger. 

He meets Laurel Grey (Gloria Grahame), a neighbor who provides him with an alibi that keeps him out of the pokey for that murder rap, for the time being at least. A romance between them blossoms, but under these circumstances how long will it be until it dies on the vine?

This was the first film to roll off the production line of Bogart’s independent company, Santana Pictures Corporation, and with its downbeat ending the public stayed away. A pity. Bogart thought it was a failure. How wrong he was.

Gloria Swanson, William Holden, 'Sunset Boulevard.' 

‘Sunset Boulevard’ (1950)

The same year that Bogart’s Dixon Steele dodged police investigators, screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) has the opposite problem. He can’t get arrested in this town (L.A.). Producers aren’t interested in his latest stuff, a rehash of something that wasn’t very good to begin with. Worse still, repo men are after his car, and in Los Angeles losing your car is like getting your legs cut off. 

He blunders into the crumbling estate of former silent screen siren Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) and talks his way into rewriting a putrid script the lady penned. It’ll be a vehicle for her return to Hollywood immortality, she thinks. 

Gillis has a couple of B-pictures to his credit and is just about washed up in his short, anemic screen career. But he sees this odd turn of events as an opportunity to stay afloat financially for a while. Gillis thinks Norma is a soft touch, but it turns out she’s a lot more than the poor sap bargained for. 

The delusional prima donna browbeats hapless Gillis into becoming her full-time bunk mate, and it slowly dawns on him he ain’t the one pulling the strings in this puppet show. 

Norma finally gets the closeup she’s been craving, but not before Gillis takes an unscheduled dip in her swimming pool, a few bullet holes pumped into his torso. Turns out, the writing game is tougher than it looks.

John Turturro, Jon Polito, 'Barton Fink.'

‘Barton Fink’ (1991)

Broadway playwright Barton Fink (John Turturro) wants to create a new kind of theater, one aimed at “the common man.” Or so he thinks. 

His new hit, about regular folks, is the toast of the Great White Way. Trouble is, his patrons are the kinds of monied twits he despises. 

Fink, a thinly veiled caricature of socially aware playwright and screenwriter Clifford Odets, answers the call to come write for the pictures in Hollywood. It’s against every fiber of his bohemian being, but he rationalizes that he’ll pocket enough moolah to write scores more socially relevant plays. 

Set in the early 1940s, the dawn of American film noir, Fink arrives in Los Angeles like a fish rocketed out of its aquarium and plopped into the middle of the desert. He meets a gaggle of characters who disappoint and frighten him, much like the New York contingent did. 

There’s the blowhard, pushy studio chief (Michael Lerner), the respected author who’s churning out tripe for the movie mill (John Mahoney), and back-slapping, rotund insurance salesman Charlie Meadows (John Goodman) who is staying next door to Fink at a gothic horror show of a hotel in downtown Los Angeles.

Assigned to write a wrestling picture, Fink’s adventure in the screen trade soon goes horribly wrong. He becomes enmeshed in a genuine noir nightmare — fitting for this time and location. 

Did I mention that this is a Coen brothers' film? The surreal irony, their trademark, bleeds off of the screen as we witness Fink’s descent into the netherworld. They don’t call this town “Hell A” for nothing.

Tim Robbins, Vincent D'Onofrio, 'The Player.'

‘The Player’ (1992)

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Robert Altman’s poisonous valentine to Hollywood, which came out at the peak of spec script fever. 

Studio executive Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) is receiving threatening mail from an anonymous screenwriter who claims Mill snubbed him. The movie exec is rattled and tries to track down the one who’s sending him the nasty stuff. The problem is, out of the dozens of writers he’s ghosted, which one is harassing him? 

Mill’s investigation leads to screenwriter David Kahane (Vincent D’Onofrio), who certainly does despise Mill, but is he the one threatening to do away with him? Mill’s luck keeps getting worse. The buzz around town is that a new executive at the studio, Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher), is going push Mill out.

Meanwhile, the cops show up and start asking the beset executive some difficult questions about himself and Kahane. And things don’t end up so good for Kahane, either. 

As the song says, “There’s no business like show business,” and that’s probably a good thing.  

Believe it or not, Jan. 5 is National Screenwriters Day. Its purpose is to honor the writers behind the stories, dialogue and characters in films and TV. You might consider taking a screenwriter to lunch on that day. He or she could probably use some nourishment and a shoulder to cry on.

‘Scarlet Street’ at 80: Flirtations with a femme fatale can often lead to trouble — and sometimes murder

At her service. Joan Bennett, Edward G. Robinson, 'Scarlet Street' (1945). 

By Paul Parcellin

Contains spoilers

When “Scarlet Street” premiered 80 years ago this month it was not uniformly praised by critics, and several cities outright banned it due to its dark content. The film hinted at such taboo topics as sex out of wedlock and prostitution, and featured a capital crime that went unpunished in the conventional sense. 

New York, Milwaukee, and Atlanta thought it too controversial and forbade local screenings. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times called it “a sluggish and manufactured tale,” while Time magazine called the plot “clichéd,” adding that the story focuses on “dimwitted, unethical, stock characters.” 

Times have changed and so has the critical response to the film. In later years Cinema Journal called it “a dense, well-structured film noir,” and the Chicago Reader included the film in its list of the best American films not included on the AFI Top 100. TCM Noir Alley host Eddie Muller includes “Scarlet Street” among his top 25 favorite films noir.

Looking back on it eight decades after its release, “Scarlet Street” is relatively tame compared with contemporary fare, yet it’s understandable that its gritty themes of vice and corruption must have been a shock to the American public in 1945. 

Fortunately, preservationists rescued it from public domain purgatory. Kino Lorber’s 2024 release in 4K UHD and Blu-ray is sharp and clear and the sound is crisp. It’s a pleasure to view it as it was meant to be seen upon its release so many years ago.

“Scarlet Street” (1945)

Mild mannered Chris Cross (Edward G. Robinson), a cashier with a flair for art, is unhappily married to shrewish Adele (Rosalind Ivan), who keeps him on a short tether. His life changes one night when he rescues a damsel in distress, Kitty March (Joan Bennett), who’s being accosted on a dark Greenwich Village street. 

Coincidentally, earlier that evening Chris glimpsed his boss’s blonde paramour and wondered aloud what it would be like to be loved by a young beautiful woman (love is probably the last thing on the blonde bombshell’s mind). Then fate seemed to drop Kitty, the woman of his dreams, at his feet.

Lies and misunderstandings

Kitty, whom we easily infer is a streetwalker, mistakenly thinks Chris is a prosperous artist. Flushed with the excitement of meeting an attractive woman, he does nothing to dispel her false image of him. In one exchange she hints to starry-eyed Chris that she’s a lady of the night, but he doesn’t get it. He guesses she’s an actress, which she is, but not in the traditional sense. 

Later, Kitty’s pimp boyfriend Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea at his smarmiest) hears opportunity knocking and convinces her to take the sucker for all he’s worth, and she does so while keeping Chris teasingly at arm’s length. 

Dan Duryea, Joan Bennett. Kitty and Johnny Prince.

“Scarlet Street” is a study of the ways people delude themselves, embracing comfortable lies that warm them and offer false hope in their hours of despair.

Misunderstandings abound. Chris mistakenly believes that Kitty might love him, as she strings him along and bleeds him for cash. Johnny is her one true love, Kitty thinks, even when he slaps her around. He lives off of her earnings and calls himself a man of leisure, and sporting a jaunty straw boater he dresses the part. 

Flawed first impressions

Johnny and Kitty, out of delusional thinking or plain stupidity, believe that they’ve hit the jackpot with Chris as their patsy. The misconception starts when Kitty and Chris first meet. He’s just been feted by his employer and happens to be gussied up in a tuxedo. That’s enough to convince her that he’s in the chips.

Even Adele is delusional in her idealization of her deceased husband, Patch-eye Higgins (Charles Kemper), a police detective who took an ill-fated dip in the Hudson. She torments Chris with her worshipful praise of the dead hubby while castigating the nebbish painter for his shortcomings. Higgins’s portrait hangs over the mantlepiece as a reminder to Chris of the low esteem in which his wife holds him.

Chris in exile. A bathroom Rembrandt.

“Scarlet Street” could be taken as a dark comedy. The same wrong-headed ideas and miscommunications in the hands of, say, Preston Sturges or Ernst Lubitsch, would be uproarious. Here, they are bathed in pathos, even when director Fritz Lang tosses in an occasional chuckle or a sudden upbeat shift in the plot.

In an unexpected turn of events, Chris’s paintings are well received by the art establishment, but only after Johnny schemes to make art-world big shots think that Kitty painted them. The selfless Chris is pleased, not angry, that his paintings are finally being seen, even if Kitty is given credit for them. But he admits that gallery owners wouldn’t be interested if they knew he painted them. 

Awarding undue credit

But a beautiful young woman can grab the art world's attention, especially when a respected critic takes a romantic interest in her. Kitty is capable of sleeping her way to the top, but artistic talent is another matter. In the film's pessimistic but probably largely true vision of the art game, we get a hint of the way art stars are made, and how almost inevitably their work ends up in the hands of the undeserving. 

The film is based on the French story “La Chienne” (literally The Bitch) by Georges de La Fouchardière. Director Jean Renoir adapted the novel to the screen in “La Chienne” (1931), which presents the female lead, Lulu (Janie Marèse), explicitly as a prostitute, something American production codes at the time would prohibit. 

Chris's portrait of Kitty.

This is Lang’s second go-around with this cast. In “The Woman in the Window” (1944), Robinson, Bennett and Duryea play roles similar to those in “Scarlet Street.” The story is much the same, too, with manipulative Alice Reed (Bennett) upending the life of Prof. Richard Wanley (Robinson) and crooked ex-cop Heidt (Duryea) making a tragic situation worse. 

Both films feature painted portraits of femmes fatale, each inaccessible behind plate glass storefront windows. In both films Robinson is tempted toward adultery and his flirtations result in shattered lives. 

Greatly different endings

Adapted from J. H. Wallis's 1942 novel “Once Off Guard,” “The Woman in the Window” has a twist at the end that gives the film an upbeat conclusion, unlike “Scarlet Street,” which comes in for a hard landing, leaving Chris humiliated and psychologically broken. 

“Scarlet Street” might seem like an uncompromised do-over of “The Woman in the Window,” yet Lang maintained that the film’s upbeat coda was his choice, not something forced on him. So be it, but clearly, “Scarlet Street” has the better ending. 

Dec. 28 marks the 80th anniversary of the “Scarlet Street” theatrical premiere.