Fitzgerald was famously flummoxed by the American film industry, and he probably set a precedent for every fiction writer since. Fiction writers who truly understand Hollywood tend to keep quiet about it, maybe for fear that the money train will no longer stop by their house if they don’t. Novels about Hollywood, therefore, tend to seem like Science Fiction. Folks speak a kind of stilted film babble, and villains are often both venal and stupid. Writer who are otherwise quite capable of describing human beings going about their days are baffled by scenes that they probably know very well. Jane Smiley and Rick Moody come to mind as examples of great writers whom we want to ask, “Have you ever actually met a producer?” On some level, it might just be the envy of a dying art form for a very lively art, as though the novels themselves were jealous of the movies.
And yet I think there’s a simpler – and much more interesting – explanation. Paul Schrader, a man who should know, let the cat out of the bag when he admitted that film didn’t actually even need a screenplay, that it was a literary form that needed story but not necessarily words. When I read these sentences, I wondered why more people didn’t run out into the street and scream. Maybe no one pays much attention to Schrader anymore. Maybe fiction has embarked on the enterprise of pretending that film doesn’t exist. Writers who don’t need to write? It sounded like something that had been cooked up by a Stalinist self-help guru. And yet I knew in my heart that it was also quite true. The only thing worse than a film writer who knows his terribly low place in the pecking order is one who doesn’t, one who thinks screenwriting is a literary form.
Into this breech walks Todd Hasak-Lowy’s brilliant novel Captives, a story about a very successful screenwriter who has a high concept idea that nearly destroys his life. It’s a testament to the prescience of Hasak-Lowy’s vision that I read this novel with an increasing sense of moral anxiety. A writer of big budget thrillers, Daniel Bloom starts to get an idea for a movie about a man who takes responsibility for the sins of both corrupt governments and corporations. This man, a sniper, will kill off the men who are responsible for the greed and vast criminal enterprises that bedevil American culture. So far, so good. But as Daniel works through the idea in the manner that many screenwriters do – walking the dog, drinking coffee, calling his friends – the idea starts to become urgent and much more morally precise. No, the screenwriter thinks, this sniper won’t kill the men responsible, he will kill the people who are important to these men: their brothers, their wives, maybe even their children. And maybe not even people that are so important, but also cousins, nephews, in-laws. After all, isn’t their destruction diffuse? Shouldn’t their payback be terrifyingly spread-out, too.
As Daniel gets drawn deeper into his own story – building the structure as carefully as a man who hopes to suffer from Stockholm syndrome – he begins to wonder if what he’s doing can even be done. Not just whether it’s morally defensible to introduce this kind of narrative virus into the world, but also whether any studio will actually buy it. As he works out the actual “beats” of the story, his agent (an insanely wonderful character) and a bottom-line loving producer push him further into his own heart of narrative darkness. When a nearly insane Rabbi encourages him to retreat to Israel, Daniel embraces this solution the way another writer might seek inspiration at Canyon Ranch. Israel turns out to be a great idea: taxi drivers and barely-able-to-shave soldiers are the best development executives that he can find. They totally get the wilderness that he’s wandering into.
The essence of Hasak-Lowy’s accomplishment is this: he has animated an actual human being whose job on earth it is to write scripts. In my experience, people who think they understand screenwriters don’t. They are both the solidest of writers and the most vacuous As writers, they are often both ridiculously well-paid and derided. The auteur theory advanced a notion that the studios have understood from day one: writers are schmucks. Schrader was right that screenplays don’t require words, and the yet the words they do require have more to do with the world of commerce and reality than even the best selling novelist could hope to understand.
At the risk of hyperbole, I’ll say that I’ve never read anything truer about the essential dilemma of that kind of writer – that kind of person – except for perhaps the oral histories of early screenwriters that I used to gobble up when I was college. These are the men and women who invented the Twentieth Century, and yet, somewhere on their way up to the Academy Awards podium they are almost always effaced by the very thing that they have created. It is their destiny – and no one knows this better than screenwriter Daniel Bloom – to watch their creations disappear directly into the culture.