I wish to God Hollywood would stop trying to be significant, because when art is significant, it is always a by-product and more or less unintentional on the part of the creator.
Chandler was clear about what the screenwriter’s job involved:
“The content of a motion picture is character and emotion and situation, and the combination of these things into drama.”
… The best scenes I ever wrote were practically monosyllabic. And the best short scene I ever wrote, by my own judgment, was one in which a girl said “uh huh” three times with three different intonations, and that’s all there was to it … The hell of good film writing is that the most important part is what is left out. It’s left out because the camera and the actors can do it better and quicker, above all quicker. But it had to be there in the beginning.
—Letter to Dale Warren—November 7, 1951
Overall, he had little time for his fellow scribes …
Hollywood is easy to hate, easy to sneer at, easy to lampoon. Some of the lampooning has been done by people who have never walked through a studio gate, some of the best sneering by egocentric geniuses who departed huffily—not forgetting to collect their last pay check—leaving nothing behind them but the exquisite aroma of their personalities and a botched job for the tired hacks to clear up.
—“Writers in Hollywood”—1945
Writers as a class I have found to be over-sensitive and spiritually undernourished. They have the egotism of actors and rarely the good looks or charm … That’s one thing I like about Hollywood. The writer is there revealed in his ultimate corruption. He asks no praise, because the praise comes to him in the form of a salary check. In Hollywood, the average writer is not young, not brave, and a bit over-dressed.
He did, however, have one thing to commend him to Chandler:
But he is darn good company.
—Letter to Lenore Offord—December 6, 1948
As for actors …
“There was a time when actors went in at the back door. Most of them still should.”
—Mavis Weld, movie star, in The Little Sister
“He’s the fellow for whom they coined the phrase, ‘as ignorant as an actor.’ ”
—The High Window
…and producers …
“Some are able and humane men and some are low grade individuals with the morals of a goat, the artistic integrity of a slot machine, and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur.”
—“Writers in Hollywood”
Some Hollywood big shot … some wizard of the slobbery kiss, and the pornographic dissolve.
—The Little Sister
In The Little Sister the producer Jules Oppenheimer gives Marlowe a lesson on the basics of the film industry. It starts with owning fifteen hundred theaters (which he just happens to do):
“The motion picture business is the only business in the world in which you can make all the mistakes in the world and still make money … You have to have the fifteen hundred theaters.”
“That makes it a little harder to get a start,” I said.
“When in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns in their fists.”
“The really good mystery picture has not yet been made, unless by Hitchcock, and that is a rather different kind of picture. The Maltese Falcon came closest.”
The reason is that the detective in the picture has to fall for some girl, whereas the real distinction of the detective’s personality is that, as a detective, he falls for nobody. He is the avenging justice, the bringer of order out of chaos, and to make his doing this part of a trite boy-meets-girl story is to make it silly. But in Hollywood you cannot make a picture which is not essentially a love story, that is to say, a story in which sex is paramount.
—Letter to Jean Bethel—April 20, 1947
But for all the frustration he had experienced by that time he could still admit in 1948 that the movies represented “the only original art the modern world has conceived” (Atlantic Monthly—March) and that a bad film does not mean that the medium itself is necessarily bad. “If Hollywood makes money out of poor pictures, it could make more money out of good ones.”
Some of the difficulty was symbolically expressed by Leo, one of the characters in the film: “Just don’t get too complicated, Eddie. When a guy gets complicated, he’s unhappy. And when he’s unhappy—his luck runs out.”
Houseman was contracted to produce a starring vehicle for Alan Ladd, Paramount’s current hot property. The only problem was that the war was still on and Ladd had a firm call‑up date from the army—a booking that overrode all other commitments. The film could not afford to go over its rather tight shooting schedule.
Houseman called Chandler …
Veronica Lake as Joyce Harwood in The Blue Dahlia. “Every guy’s seen you before—somewhere. The trick is to find you.” Photofest (illustrations credit 6.9)
Lake had been teamed with Ladd in the earlier The Glass Key and This Gun for Hire (both 1942). She was one of the few current leading ladies petite enough to play opposite the diminutive Ladd. (illustrations credit 6.10)
In less than two weeks I wrote an original story of 90 pages. All dictated and never looked at until finished. It was an experiment and for a guy subject from early childhood to plot-constipation, it was rather a revelation. Some of the stuff is good, some very much not.
—Letter to Charles Morton—January 15, 1945
He felt he had developed a useful modus operandi:
I don’t see why the method could not be adopted to novel-writing, at least by me. Improvise the story as well as you can, in as much detail or as little as the mood seems to suggest, write dialogue or leave it out, but cover the movement, the characters, and bring the thing to life …
Possibly—I’m not sure—the rejuvenation of the motion picture, if and when it comes, will have to be through some such process of writing directly for the screen and almost under the camera … its true business is to photograph dramatic movement from the simplest possible angles—those of the two eyes … Moving the camera has become a substitute for moving the action, and this is recession.
—Letters to Charles W. Morton—January/March 1945
John Houseman (1902–1988). Stage, film, radio and TV producer, best known for his collaboration with Orson Welles on The War of the Worlds. Later he became an Oscar-winning actor. “We once wrote a picture called The Blue Dahlia, remember? It may not have been the best but at least we tried. And the circumstances were a bit difficult …” Photofest (illustrations credit 6.11)
Chandler in 1945 working on The Blue Dahlia, his only original screenplay. Photofest (illustrations credit 6.12)
However, the pressures of time and the speed of director George Marshall’s shooting soon produced a crisis. Marshall was shooting the pages of the script faster than Chandler was writing them. “Any day now an expensive crew would be standing around looking at each other with the taxi meter running.”
Houseman recalled the way the problem was solved—a story in its way as dramatic as anything in the film. Chandler came to him and said that the only way he could complete the task in time was to write while he was drunk. Even then (1945) he had a serious drinking problem, and he knew he was endangering his health with what he was proposing. Nonetheless, it was a straw Houseman reluctantly snatched at and for the next several weeks there was round-the-clock limo transportation standing by, six secretaries working in shifts to take Chandler’s dictation, and a doctor on call to give him glucose injections in lieu of solid food.
Amazingly, it worked. The film was finished with six days to spare. Alan Ladd went off to the army. And Paramount Studios not only didn’t go bankrupt—which had been a genuine risk—but made $2,750,000, a lot of money in those days. In due course, Chandler was nominated for his second Academy Award. Again he did not win, and one might speculate that his outspoken criticism of Hollywood, its manners and mores, might have been a contributing factor.
D
espite his success, Chandler continued to find fault with the studio process.
It is ludicrous to suggest that any writer in Hollywood, however obstreperous, has a “free hand” with a script; he may have a free hand with the first draft but after that they start moving in on him. Also what happens on the set is beyond the writer’s control. In this case I threatened to walk off the picture, not yet finished, unless they stopped the director putting in fresh dialogue out of his own head …
—Letter to James Sandoe—October 2, 1947
But his concerns about studio practice were dwarfed by the diktat of an even mightier power—the U.S. Navy. Well into the shooting, they questioned Chandler’s intended solution to the story …
What the Navy Department did to the story was a little thing like making me change the murderer and hence make a routine whodunit out of a fairly original idea. What I wrote was the story of a man who killed (executed would be a better word) his pal’s wife under the stress of a great and legitimate anger, then blanked out and forgot all about it; then with perfect honesty did his best to help the pal get out of a jam, then found himself in a set of circumstances which brought about partial recall. The poor guy remembered enough to make it clear who the murderer was to others but never realized it himself. He just did and said things he couldn’t have done or said unless he was the killer; but he never knew he did them or said them and never interpreted them.
—Letter to James Sandoe—June 17, 1946
The Navy, however, had a war it was still fighting, and it was not about to have an injured service man depicted as a killer, however well-intentioned. Chandler had no option but to twist the remaining plot to make the janitor the murderer—a version of the old cliché … “The butler did it.”
Apart from that, Chandler was wrong to be overly critical of The Blue Dahlia. Nonetheless, he was. He was particularly disturbed by the female lead, Veronica Lake (“Miss Moronica Lake”):
The only times she’s good is when she keeps her mouth shut and looks mysterious. The moment she tries to behave as if she had a brain she falls flat on her face. The scenes we had to cut out because she loused them up! And there are three godawful close shots of her looking perturbed that make me want to throw my lunch over the fence.
—Letter to James Sandoe—May 20, 1946
Ladd and Lake may not have had the chemistry Bogart and Bacall would have in The Big Sleep that same year, but they did have some typical Chandler dialogue …
JOYCE: I suppose you’ve seen me before?
JOHNNY: Have I?
JOYCE: Probably. I used to work in a dance hall down on Main Street.
JOHNNY: Yes, I’ve seen you before alright. But not in any dance hall and not in any Main Street.
JOYCE: Where, then?
JOHNNY: Every guy’s seen you before—somewhere. The trick is to find you. And when he does, it’s usually too late.
Later, in whimsical mood, Chandler would envision …
a remake of King of Kings with Alan Ladd as Christ, Cecil B. deMille as God and Betty Hutton as the Virgin Mary. But I bet Bill Bendix steals the picture as Mary Magdalene.
—Letter to H. N. Swanson—October 15, 1948
Part of the problem, it must be said, was Chandler’s own attitude toward those he worked with …
The only employer I ever had that I got along with was Paramount Studios and there as a matter of course one began each day by telling everybody to go to hell. They even seemed to like that.
The picture business can be a little trying at times, but I don’t suppose working at General Motors is all sheer delight.
Los Angeles … a city where pretty faces are as common as runs in dollar stockings.
It was the artificiality that particularly grated on his cynical psyche:
Malibu. More movie stars. More pink and blue bathtubs. More tufted beds. More Chanel No. 5. More Lincoln Continentals and Cadillacs. More wind-blown hair and sunglasses and pseudo-refined voices and waterfront morals.
—The Little Sister
The bar [of the mythical Ritz-Beverly Hotel] was pretty empty. Three booths down a couple of sharpies were selling each other pieces of Twentieth Century–Fox, using double-arm gestures instead of money. They had a telephone on the table between them and every two or three minutes they would play the match game to see who called Zanuck with a hot idea. They were young, dark, eager and full of vitality. They put as much muscular activity into a telephone conversation as I would put into carrying a fat man up four flights of stairs.
—The Long Goodbye
Today those dark, eager young men would be competing to see who had the smallest cell phone.
“What I like about this place is everything runs true to type. The cop on the gate, the shine on the door, the cigarette and check girls, the fat greasy Jew with the tall stately bored showgirl, the well-dressed, drunk and horribly rude director cursing the barman, the silent guy with the gun, the night club owner with the soft gray hair and the B-picture mannerisms, and now you—the dark torcher with the negligent sneer, the husky voice, the hard-boiled vocabulary.”
“And what about the wise-cracking snooper with the last year’s gags and the come-hither smile?”
—Marlowe and Linda Conquest in The High Window
Morny’s nightclub was like a high-budget musical:
a lot of light and glitter, a lot of scenery, a lot of clothes, a lot of sound, an all-star cast, and a plot with all the originality and drive of a split fingernail.
—The High Window
In Hollywood everybody and everything—whether it knows it or not—acts like it was in a Hollywood movie. In The Big Sleep, small-time gangster Joe Brody’s voice was
the elaborately casual voice of the tough guy in pictures. Pictures have made them all like that.
Now, Voyager (1942) was famous for Paul Henreid’s trick of lighting two cigarettes and passing one to Bette Davis:
“May I have a cigarette?”
“The old cigarette stall,” I said. I got a couple out and put them in my mouth and lit them. I leaned across and tucked one between her ruby lips.
“Nothing’s cornier than that,” she said. “Except maybe butterfly kisses.”
“Sex is a wonderful thing,” I said. “When you don’t want to answer questions.”
—The Little Sister
He glanced at his fingernails one by one, holding them up against the light and studying them with care, as Hollywood has taught it should be done.
—The Big Sleep
The only thing the matter with him for a movie newshawk was that he wasn’t drunk.
—“Bay City Blues”
“Why do we need the moon when we have the stars?” But first let’s have a cigarette … Paul Henreid lights up Bette Davis in Warner Bros.’ 1942 Now, Voyager. Photofest (illustrations credit 6.13)
She looked smart, but not Hollywood-smart.
—“Mandarin’s Jade”
The balcony was high and the scene down below had a patterned look, like an overhead camera shot.
—“Nevada Gas”
A dark-haired waiter who looked like a road company Herbert Marshall.
—Playback
“Early Lillian Gish,” Morny said. “Very early Lillian Gish … Don’t feed me the ham. I’ve been in pictures. I’m a connoisseur of ham.”
—The High Window
A voice that sounded like Orson Welles with his mouth full of crackers.
—The Little Sister
I knew he would call right back. They always do when they think they’re tough. They haven’t used their exit line.
—The Little Sister
He brought the gun up hard and straight, like the wicked foreman of the Lazy Q.
—The Little Sister
I took hold of the outstretched arm and spun him around. “What’s the matter, Jack? Don’t they make the aisles wide enough for your personality?”
He shook his arm loose and got tough. “Don’t get fancy, buster. I
might loosen your jaw for you.”
“Ha, ha,” I said. “You might play center field for the Yankees and hit a home run with a breadstick.”
He doubled a meaty fist.
“Darling, think of your manicure,” I told him.
He controlled his emotions. “Nuts to you, wise guy,” he sneered. “Some other time, when I have less on my mind.”
“Could there be less?”
“G’wan, beat it,” he snarled. “One more crack and you’ll need new bridgework.”
I grinned at him. “Call me up, Jack. But with better dialogue.”
His expression changed. He laughed. “You in pictures, chum?”
“Only the kind they pin up in the post office.”
“See you in the mug book,” he said, and walked away still grinning.
—The Long Goodbye
“Hollywood Boulevard, my foot. A lot of bit players out of work and fish-faced blondes trying to shake a hangover out of their teeth.”
—“Bay City Blues”
Schwab’s Pharmacy on Sunset and Crescent Heights. Despite the publicity, Lana Turner was not discovered there on a bar stool, but the landmark drugstore-cum-boutique was much frequented by the Hollywood crowd. Photofest (illustrations credit 6.14)