Playing the Game

As an aspiring screenwriter, I greatly enjoyed your articles on the movie “The Player” and on the pathetic state of the screenwriter in modern Hollywood (“Don’t Kill Me, I’m Only the Screenwriter,” April 5).

While screenwriters can be viewed simply as the perennial losers in the never-ending power struggle with stars, directors and producers, the recent decline in their position has not occurred in a vacuum. The explosion of the foreign market for Hollywood films, as well as the TV-driven debasement of the American spirit, has meant that sex, violence and having the right names attached to a project have clearly become the most important elements of a successful film deal.

Well-crafted plots and intelligent dialogue are seen as peripheral to a large percentage of movie audiences (domestic as well as foreign), and issues that can’t be resolved with a .357 magnum are considered, well, tame. Writers of original screenplays thus really aren’t that important, as they stand for the things--logical consistency, emotional honesty, the integrity of artistic vision--that Hollywood apparently feels it can do without in this awful age.

Moreover, the second-class status of the screenwriter today ultimately reflects the age-old subjugation of the creative individual to institutionalized fear, greed and power. Salman Rushdie lives under a worldwide death sentence for his writings, and the Bush Administration claims he is just a writer plugging a book.

In this environment, working screenwriters should consider themselves fortunate if their biggest worry is whether they’ll get credit for their scripts. Perhaps we should all be more concerned about the increasingly worrisome danger of a return to the days of the blacklist.

Finally, I suspect that few readers missed the irony in the fact that although you devoted a long piece to the star of “The Player,” Tim Robbins, you virtually ignored the writer of the book and the screenplay, Michael Tolkin. Plus ca change, plus ca meme.

JAMES P. GRIFFITH

Santa Barbara

A Calendar feature on Tolkin and his work on “The Player” and the earlier film “The Rapture” appeared on Sept. 29, 1991.