Let me tell you, quite honestly, the usual experience of a writer who comes to Hollywood for the first time, not my own experience, but that of practically every man and woman with whom I have talked. The writer will be pleasantly and kindly received and a meeting will be arranged with the head of the studio. This gentleman will hand him a play or a novel and he will be asked to read it over, take a few days to think out a novel treatment of it, and hold himself ready to be called to a story conference.
After a day, or two, or three, or a week, or a month or something like that, for the studios are busy places and the executives’ time is valued far above rubies, the author is sent for and enters the presence. He is naturally ready with a carefully thought out method of treatment for the play or story he has been asked to study and eager to make a good first impression. Before he can tell his story, however, the executive will carelessly remark: “Did I tell you the ideas we had for this story?” The author will naturally reply that nobody has told him anything at all since his arrival except that “California is the most wonderful place in the world, and you don’t really mean to tell me that New York is still there.” Then the executive will inform him that “they” have some ideas of treatment of that story and perhaps he had better mention them. It has been decided not to have the scenes laid in China—“there have been too damned many of those Chink operas lately”—and anyway New York background is sure fire; the girl mustn’t be engaged to be married to the Unitarian missionary, she’s got to be the mistress of a side show barker, and earning her living as a high diver. “Will Hays can talk as much as he wants to but everybody knows what’s a proper costume for a high diver.”
Aside from that, and a happy ending, nobody wants to make any real changes in the story. The author, a bit bewildered but still anxious to make good here, makes the first concession that results in absolutely killing any hope of his knowledge and experience being of any value, as by now his creative power has been entirely pushed aside; he has joined the ranks of “picture writers” in five minutes.
Armed with the above-mentioned instructions, the author retires to his office, very probably the first office he ever had in his life, and starts to work. The studio is always generous in the time allowed, generous in fact in every way in their treatment of writers, and nobody rushes our hero who, in the course of time, say, three weeks, during which he has drawn a salary of from four hundred to six or seven times four hundred dollars each week, turns in his completed story.