Life at the Edge of a Cliff

An advantage of being a writer is that writing requires no heavy lifting and no special physical agility. You don’t even have to be pretty.

If you can drag yourself to a typewriter or a word processor, you can write, providing, you have talent in the first place.

Homely people, one-legged people and people who have never done a lick of physical work in their lives write columns, books and screenplays.

It follows, therefore, that age ought not to be a barrier either.

The older one gets, the better one ought to get, unless he or she is afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease or has led such a dissolute life that the brain has turned to mush.

Older writers can bring to bear on their work a sheen of experience for which there is no substitute, a polish that no book can teach.

Age offers a sweetness to the story as pure as a morning in spring.

I say that today in celebration of older writers, by whose weathered skills everyone benefits.

And I say that also in defense of older writers, who increasingly find doors slammed in their faces in the television industry, not because they lack the wit to create, but because this is the era of The Hot Young Writer.

L.A. is a show biz town, and when one element of that business suffers, many feel the pain.

I became aware of this a few months ago with the suicide of a comedy writer named Bill Larkin. He left a note that said, “I no longer serve any function. There is no reason for me to exist.”

I wrote about Bill, who was an alert 68 and whose credits numbered in the hundreds, and speculated on the uneasy union of laughter and tears.

Later I heard from a boyhood friend of Larkin’s who laid the writer’s suicide at the door of his profession.

“Bill was spiritually, emotionally and professionally wounded,” the friend wrote, “when he was shut out from continuing his lifelong trade.”

The reason he was shut out, according to the friend, was because of age discrimination in the very industry Larkin once graced with style.

“I talked with Bill by phone recently,” the letter continued, “and asked if he had any projects going. He replied, ‘My agent said he couldn’t take me into any meetings because I’m too old.’ ”

Too old? What, I began to wonder, was too old for a writer?

Too old, I have since learned, is having too much experience. Too old is having writing credits that extend beyond eight years ago. Too old is not having graduated from a film school within the last three years.

It’s known in the business as the Reverse Hollywood Shuffle, where experience equates with decrepitude, students deny their teachers and credits earned in honor are concealed in despair.

“Writers who won Emmys 20 years ago don’t list them because it dates them,” Mort Thaw said to me the other day. Thaw is a militant enemy of ageism for the Writers Guild of America.

“Older writers form partnerships with young writers just to get network meetings,” he said. “One man takes his son into meetings with him. The son doesn’t write, he’s just young. He’s a prop. But the network executive talks to him.”

No one knows for sure when age discrimination became a problem for television writers. Maybe a dozen years ago, Mort thinks.

No one knows for sure why it’s a problem. Maybe because network executives are getting younger and are intimidated by father or mother figures.

A sweeping Writers Guild study leaves little doubt, however, that the problem indeed exists. The older a writer gets, the less frequently he works.

A scale that accompanies the study shows clearly there is no golden age for writers in television. He starts downhill at 40.

“By the time you turn 60,” a writer said, “your career is in the toilet.”

“It’s a new blacklist,” Thaw said. “Older writers won’t give their age for fear of persecution.” He thought about that for a moment, then added, “I was told once by an employment agency not to say I was a Jew because I wouldn’t be hired. Now I can’t say my age.”

Thaw is over 50 and dyes his mustache. Others dye their hair, get face lifts, wear wigs, dress ludicrously modish and affect those mannerisms they feel are characteristic of the Hot Young Writers who are the industry’s newest icons.

Youth is only a cosmic half-step behind old age. “The cliff’s edge,” as writer Larry Forrester put it two years ago, “is nearer than we think.”

Forrester, through whose professional generosity many began their careers, died at the cliff’s edge six months later, brilliant, broke and unable to get work. He was 63.