Larry McMurtry - Film Flam : Essays on Hollywood

By Larry McMurtry

Paradise

Boones Lick

Roads: Driving Americas Greatest Highways

Still Wild: Short Fiction of the American West 1950 to the Present

Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen

Duanes Depressed

Crazy Horse

Comanche Moon

Dead Mans Walk

The Late Child

Streets of Laredo

The Evening Star

Buffalo Girls

Some Can Whistle

Anything for Billy

Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood

Texasville

Lonesome Dove

The Desert Rose

Cadillac Jack

Somebodys Darling

Terms of Endearment

All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers

Moving On

The Last Picture Show

In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas

Leaving Cheyenne

Horseman, Pass By

By Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana

Pretty Boy Floyd

Zeke and Ned

The first seventeen essays appearing in this compilation were originally published in American Film; The Last Picture Show: A Last Word was originally published in The Colonial Times; Approaching Cheyenne and Movie-Tripping were originally published in New York magazine; and the final essay was published privately by the author in 1986.

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Copyright 1987 by Larry McMurtry

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First Touchstone Edition 2001

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The Library of Congress has cataloged
the Simon & Schuster edition as follows:

McMurtry, Larry
Film flam.

1. Moving-picturesUnited States. 2. Moving-picture playsHistory and criticism. 3. Moving-pictures authorship. 4. McMurtry, Larry. 5. ScreenwritersUnites StatesBiography. I. Title.
PN1993.5.U6M325 1987 791.430973 87-4667

ISBN 0-671-64308-8
0-7432-1624-5 (Pbk)

eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-2970-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-1624-1

For Mary Alice and Sadie, Dorothy and Jack, Diane, Randy, Robin and Dorriein other words, The Halls

Foreword

ONE REASON FOR NOT COLLECTING SUCH SCATTERED writings as thesesins of commission, all of themis that that which is left scattered need not be reread. I have always found revisiting my novels painful work, and the novels, after all, are the marriages and great loves of ones imagination. In comparison, the columns and articles which follow are quick tricks and one-night stands, the offspring of opportunity rather than passion. When I sat down to look them over I expected to find Siamese squirrels and two-headed calves.

Reading the pieces in galleys was a surprise, not because they were better than I had hoped or worse than I feared, but simply because I had forgotten most of them completely. The emotion one invests in a novel weights any rereading with memorythe memory, at least, of what one felt for, and hoped for, its characters. But these essays evoke no characters and involved no long or loving invention. They moved quickly from head to typewriter and from typewriter to mailbox, to return in their present form as from a blank in my past. Though obviously mine, they seem to be the work of someone I had scarcely meta self with a type-writer of his own, whose prototype is that other Borges whom the Borges we all know has described in a famous story.

My assessment of the weight on the hoof of this small, mixed herd, is, I hope, accurately suggested by the title I have given the collection. At least the pieces seem to enjoy a comfortable perspectivethat of the telephone booth screenwriter who has not caught any of the fevers that rage through the Hollywood flats and the Hollywood hills.

Absence of fever is in itself an uncommon quality in Hollywood booksand a rare quality in the moviemakers of this day and time. The industry has never been more malarial. The egos who slog through its swamps burn with fevers of self-praise, defensiveness, insecurity, and megalomania. Directors or producers who have big hits get so hot the capillaries in their brains promptly pop. Critics who have to judge the place by its products live in a state of denunciatory slow burn. As the ante for each picture goes up the old fever of excitement gives way to the constant low-grade fever of dread. What if we spend $30 million and it flops? An industry that seems to have concluded that its best hope is to dramatize the comic-strip literature of an earlier and more vigorous era is one whose fevers have finally destroyed its nerve. With rare exceptions the pictures coming out of Hollywood today are the last resorts of the gutless. In my opinion, a little film flam is all such an industry deserves.

Larry McMurtry

film flam

IF ONE WERE TO MAKE A MISERY GRAPH OF HOLLYWOOD, screenwriters would mark high on the curve. Above them one would have to put second-line producers, particularly those educated in the East (it may well be that all second-line producers were educated in the East), and possibly certain publicity people; just below them would come cinematographers, a group that has shown an increasing capacity for morbidity and neurosis since they stopped being plain cameramen. But, in terms of steady, workaday, year-in-year-out dolorousness, the writers have no near rivals. Their gloom may not be as acute as that of a director whose most recent picture has just flopped, but it is more consistent.

For decades, writers have drifted around Hollywood more or less like unloved wives. The people they work for would usually be just as glad to be rid of them, but cant quite think of a way to get by without their services. Hollywood memoirs are clotted with accounts of the abuses and injustices writers feel have been visited upon them; read collectively, these books give one the sense that, for everyone involved, the profession itself was a kind of unfortunate accidentone that somehow became a habit. In an ideal world, directors would script their own movies, and a number of the greatest directors have shown the ideal to be possible by doing just that.

Of the many crafts necessary to the making of motion pictures, that of the screenwriter is easily the most haphazard, the most impressionistic, and the most vulnerable. Screenwriting, so far, has no rationale, no theory, and is, at best, an indifferent, pedestrian craft-literature. Worse, it offers young craftsmen no easily accessible means of apprenticeship; instead of training an indigenous body of skilled craftsmen to write its screenplays, the movie industry has traditionally preferred to look outside itself, usually to novelists, for whatever writing it needs done.