—The Little Sister
“I don’t know what’s happened to the weather in our overcrowded city,” says Marlowe in “The Pencil.” “But it’s not the same weather I knew when I came to it.”
Omnipresent, it seems—like the dust on Marlowe’s desk—is the smog, the ironic result of California’s perpetual sunshine interacting with that twentieth-century by-product, automobile emissions.
The war has made it an individual city, and the climate has been ruined partly by this and partly by too much vegetation, too many lawns to be watered, and in a place that nature intended to be a semi-desert … Now it is humid, hot and sticky, and when the smog comes down into the bowl between the mountains which is L.A., it is damn near intolerable.
—Letter to Helga Greene—May 7, 1957
The weather was hot and sticky and the acid sting of the smog had crept as far west as Beverly Hills. From the top of Mulholland Drive you could see it leveled out all over the city like a ground mist and it made your eyes smart … Everything was the fault of the smog. If the canary wouldn’t sing, if the milkman was late, if the Pekinese had fleas, if an old coot in a starched collar had a heart attack on the way to church, that was the smog.
—The Long Goodbye
It was the metaphor for what was happening to his city and to him.
“I know what is the matter with my writing or not writing. I’ve lost any affinity for my background. Los Angeles is no longer my city,” he wrote to Jessica Tyndale and to Hamish Hamilton—
I have lost Los Angeles. It is no longer the place I knew so well and was almost the first to put on paper. I have that feeling, not very unusual, that I helped create the town and was then pushed out of it by the operators. I can hardly find my way around any longer.
I know damn well I sound like a bitter and disappointed man. I guess I am at that.
In The Long Goodbye Marlowe sums up his city: “When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it.” He looks out over “a city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn’t have one. I didn’t care.”
When the place of infinite possibilities becomes impossible, a man is entitled to be disappointed.
“I finished the drink and went to bed.”
Six
Hollywood
The Hollywood sign started life as an advertising gimmick. Built in 1923, it cost $21,000. The letters were fifty feet tall and thirty feet wide. The LAND was subsequently eliminated. (illustrations credit 6.1)
Anyone who doesn’t love Hollywood is either crazy or sober.
—Raymond Chandler
A preoccupation with words for their own sake is fatal to good film making. It’s not what films are for.
—Letter to Dale Warren—November 7, 1951
It is much more difficult to write screenplays than novels. But it does not, in my opinion, take the same quality of talent. It may take a more exacting use of the talent, a more beautiful job of cabinet work, a finer or more apt ear for the current jargon of a certain kind of people, but it is much more superficial all round.
—Letter to Hamish Hamilton—December 4, 1949
Being, like all those who have worked in Hollywood, somewhat of a connoisseur of the damp fart.
—Letter to Dale Warren, October 2, 1946
You can live a long time in Hollywood and never see the part they use in pictures.
—The Little Sister
The motion picture is a great industry, as well as a defeated art.
—“Writers in Hollywood,” Atlantic Monthly—November 1945
… the only art at which we of this generation have any possible chance to greatly excel.
—“Oscar Night in Hollywood,” Atlantic Monthly—1946
I suppose in some ways I was a bit of a stinker in Hollywood. I kept the money. No swimming pool, no stone marten coats for a floosie in an apartment, no charge account at Romanoff’s, no parties, no ranch with riding horses, none of the trimmings at all. As a result of which I have fewer friends but a lot more money.
—Letter to Dale Warren—September 15, 1949
Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood—and hates it. It ought to consider itself damn lucky. Without Hollywood it would be a mail-order city. Everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else.
—The Little Sister
For his first paid writing Chandler received precisely one cent per word from Black Mask. For his first long-term Hollywood screenwriting assignment he did rather better—$1,750 a week at Paramount. It was 1944 and he was fifty-six years old with four novels behind him that had now built a solid reputation.
Between 1944 and 1951 he worked on seven screenplays for Paramount, Warner Bros., MGM and Universal, but it was at Paramount that he had his most satisfactory relationship. In 1945 he was given a three-year contract calling for two scripts a year. He would receive $50,000 a year, whether or not he actually delivered the scripts. His agent, “Swanie” Swanson, also managed over the years to sell six of Chandler’s novels to be made into movies. All in all, Hollywood was good to Raymond Chandler—at least financially.
Chandler took it all—as he took most things—with the proverbial pinch of salt or dash of bitters …
If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.
—Letter to Charles Morton—December 12, 1945
In fact, the Paramount contract was the result of an earlier one-off job. In 1943 he had been hired to collaborate with writer/director Billy Wilder on the screenplay of Double Indemnity—an ironic piece of casting in the light of his views on its author, James M. Cain. Neither Wilder nor Chandler was an easy man to work with, and the neophyte Chandler found the chore “an agonizing experience and has probably shortened my life.” However, he admitted, “I learned from it as much about screen writing as I am capable of learning, which is not very much.” He also earned $750 a week for thirteen weeks.
Initially Wilder found his new partner “peculiar, a sort of rather acid man” but later gave him credit for being “one of the greatest creative minds I’ve ever encountered.” “We would start scene by scene and we started with the dialogue … And he was very good at that, just very, very good.”
The Bronson Gate at Paramount—the most famous gate in Hollywood. Originally named United Studios when it was built in 1917, the studio was taken over in 1926 by Famous Players–Lasky and renamed Paramount. It’s now the only major studio operating in Hollywood. Chandler worked here on Double Indemnity and The Blue Dahlia between 1943 and 1946. Photofest (illustrations credit 6.2)
“He was a dilettante. He did not like the structure of a screenplay, wasn’t used to it. He was a mess but he could write a beautiful sentence. ‘There is nothing as empty as an empty swimming pool.’ That is a great line” (Conversations with Wilder—1999).
What had attracted Wilder in the first place was reading in The High Window the phrase “He had hair growing out of his ear long enough to catch a moth.” “How often do you read a description of a character [like that]?” Wilder asked. “Not many people write like that.” Nonetheless, he added in counterbalance, Chandler gave him “more trouble than any other writer I ever worked with” and he had no intention of working with him again.
Chandler chats with Fred MacMurray on the set of Double Indemnity. (illustrations credit 6.3)
1943. Chandler and Billy Wilder at Paramount during the writing of Double Indemnity. Bodleian Library, Oxford (illustrations credit 6.4)
Chandler’s critical assessment of the screenwriting trade in his 1945 Atlantic Monthly article particularly incensed him—
“What Hollywood did to Raymond Chandler. What did Raymond Chandler do to Hollywood? It reminds me of a curtain line in
Shanghai Gesture [Josef von Sternberg’s 1941 movie] where Mother Goddam finds out one of the whores in the brothel is her own daughter. A friend says, ‘God will forgive you.’ And Mother Goddam says, ‘But will I forgive God?’ That’s how I feel about sons of bitches like Chandler. Will Hollywood forgive Raymond Chandler?” (Billy Wilder in Hollywood—2004)
Chandler was in Wilder’s terms “a dilettante … I would take what he wrote, and structure it, and we would work on it … there was a lot of Hitler in Chandler” (Conversations with Wilder).
The script has some typical Chandler exchanges. Insurance salesman Walter Neff is attracted to Mrs. Dietrichson on his initial visit to her house. She tells him to come back tomorrow when her husband is home …
“I wonder if I know what you mean.” “I wonder if you wonder.” Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) and Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) start their deadly flirtation in Double Indemnity (1944). Photofest (illustrations credit 6.5)
NEFF: Will you be here too?
DIETRICHSON: I guess so. I usually am.
NEFF: Same chair, same perfume, same anklet?
DIETRICHSON: I wonder if I know what you mean?
NEFF: I wonder if you wonder.
Since he had been given the assignment because the book’s author was otherwise engaged (on another movie), Chandler couldn’t resist changing Cain’s original dialogue:
I don’t think any of the changes made were in conflict with your basic conception. In fact, you would have had to make them yourself. I do not doubt that some of them might have been made better, but they had to be made.
A curious matter I’d like to call to your attention … is your dialogue. Nothing could be more easy and natural and to the point on paper, and yet it doesn’t quite play. We tried it out by having a couple of actors do a scene right out of the book. It had a sort of remote effect that I was at a loss to understand. It came to me then that the effect of your written dialogue is only partly sound and sense. The rest of the effect is the appearance on the page. These unevenly shaped hunks of quick-moving speech hit the eye with a sort of explosive effect. You read the stuff in batches, not in individual speech and counterspeech. On the screen this is all lost and the essential mildness of the phrasing shows up as lacking in sharpness. They tell me that is the difference between photographic dialogue and written dialogue. For the screen everything has to be sharpened and pointed and wherever possible elided. But of course you know far more about it than I do.
—Letter to James M. Cain—March 20, 1944
So why, one wonders, was he telling him?
Even after he had been given parole from Hollywood, he would remain ambivalent about his own abilities in writing for the movies. In 1951 he writes to Dale Warren (November 7), “It’s not my cup of tea, but it could have been if I’d started it twenty years earlier.”
Letter from Chandler to James M. Cain after the successful release of Double Indemnity. Courtesy Craig Temmey (illustrations credit 6.6)
Cain’s reply … (illustrations credit 6.7)
Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) in the death chamber, watched by Edward G. Robinson. An ending that Wilder shot, then discarded. Photofest (illustrations credit 6.8)
But in 1944 he is still the kid taking the clock apart and peering at the works:
Like every writer, or almost every writer who goes to Hollywood, I was convinced in the beginning that there must be some discoverable method of working in pictures which would not be completely stultifying to whatever creative talent one might happen to possess. But like others before me I discovered that this was a dream. It’s nobody’s fault; it’s part of the structure of the industry. Too many people have too much to say about a writer’s work. It ceases to be his own. And after a while he ceases to care about it. He has brief enthusiasms, but they are destroyed before they can flower. People who can’t write tell him how to write … The wise screen writer is he who wears his second-best suit, artistically speaking, and doesn’t take things too much to heart. He should have a touch of cynicism, but only a touch. The complete cynic is as useless to Hollywood as he is to himself. He should do the best he can without straining at it. He should be scrupulously honest about his work, but he should not expect scrupulous honesty in return. He won’t get it. And when he has had enough, he should say goodbye with a smile, because for all he knows he may want to go back.
These were recollections in tranquility told to Hamish Hamilton in 1950. Along the way he had not always felt so tolerant …
Long before the invitation came, he would write to George Harmon Coxe (April 9, 1939):
Personally I think Hollywood is poison to any writer, the graveyard to talent. I have always thought so. But perhaps I have lived too close to it … New writers do not appear to replace the ones who go to Hollywood and either stay there or learn how not to write there and never get over it.
Hammett, for instance,
was one of the many guys who couldn’t take Hollywood without trying to push God out of the high seat.
Having tried it for himself …
Better men than I have gone to grease in Hollywood.
Three years in Hollywood leaves its mark. My kind of writing takes a certain quality of high spirits and impudence. I’m a tired character, a battered pulp writer, an out of work hack.
—Letter to Hamish Hamilton—October 6, 1946
The screenplay as it exists is the result of a bitter and prolonged struggle between the writer (or writers) and the people whose aim it is to exploit his talent without giving it the freedom to be a talent.
—Letter to Charles Morton—December 18, 1944
The writing of a screenplay is drudgery, partly because it is a difficult form and intrinsically unsatisfying, and partly because ninety-nine people know more about how it should be done than the one who does it … no screenwriter knows what he is doing. It takes somebody who is not a screenwriter to tell him what he is doing.
To write effectively for the screen you have to understand the grim obstacles and the mechanical processes which intervene between the script and the final negative … You go in with dreams, and you come out with the Parent-Teachers’ Association.
“Good original screenplays are almost as rare in Hollywood as virgins.”
—Letter to Erle Stanley Gardner—January 29, 1946
When writing the screenplay of Playback—for which he was paid $100,000 and which was never produced—and which he then turned into the novel of the same name—
Anyone would think I was building a pyramid … Now I have to polish it, as they say. Which means leave out half and make what is left hammier. This is a very delicate art and about as fascinating as scraping teeth.
—To Hamish Hamilton—October 27, 1947
Certainly it was hard work, but it was the only work.
The basic art of motion pictures is the screenplay; it is fundamental, without it there is nothing.
But even with it, the problems remained epic …
I am not interested in why the Hollywood system exists … I am interested only in the fact that as a result of it there is no such thing as an art of the screenplay, and there never will be as long as the system lasts, for it is the essence of this system that it seeks to exploit a talent without permitting it the right to be a talent. It cannot be done, you can only destroy the talent, which is exactly what happens—when there is any talent to destroy …
—“Writers in Hollywood”
The overall picture, as the boys say, is of a degraded community whose idealism even is largely fake.
—Letter to Alfred Knopf—January 12, 1946
Why was there no “art of the screenplay”?
The reason is at least partly that there exists no available body of technical theory and practice by which it can be learned. There is no available library of screenplay literature, because the screenplays belong to the studios, and they will only show them within their guarded walls … In fact, no part of the vast body of technical knowled
ge which Hollywood contains is systematically and as a matter of course made available to the new writer in a studio. They tell him to look at pictures—which is to learn architecture by staring at a house.
—“Writers in Hollywood”—1945
Most writers in Hollywood are employees … As an individual I refuse to be an employee, but of course I am only an individual.
—“Critical Notes”—1947
As an individual he was appalled by the back-of-the-hand treatment most writers received when it came to the finished film. His or her name would be “the last and least to be mentioned” in any promotional material …
This neglect is of no consequence to me personally; to any writer of books a Hollywood by-line is trivial.
—“Writers in Hollywood”
“Big production, no story, as they say around the movie lots.”
—The Long Goodbye
I wish I could write the Hollywood novel that has never been written, but it takes a more photographic memory than I have. The whole scene is too complex …
—Letter to Edward Weeks—February 27, 1957