Write to Order
These three quotes, one from Raymond Chandler and two from PG Wodehouse, are about writing for the emergent film industry out in Hollywood, as so many novelists were called upon to do in the twenties and thirties. However, I think you could pretty easily substitute any kind of commercial writing for the Hollywood referenced here, replacing producers with clients and so forth. Chilling stuff. Enough to freeze the marrow i’the bone and make the quills stand up on the fretful porpentine, as the poet has it.
Chandler on this ‘showman’s paradise’: ‘To me the interesting point about Hollywood’s writers of talent is not how few or how many they are, but how little of worth their talent is allowed to achieve…It makes very little difference how a writer feels towards his producer as a man; the fact that the producer can change and destroy and disregard his work can only operate to diminish their work in its conception and to make it mechanical and indifferent in execution.'
Wodehouse on the film industry: [it was] ‘an era when only a man of exceptional ability and determination could keep from getting signed up by a studio in some capacity or other.’
Wodehouse on working for Sam Goldywn: ‘It’s odd how soon one comes to look on every minute as wasted that is given to earning one’s salary.’
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