By Neil Root
(Published in Red Herrings magazine)
Hollywood can famously be very phoney. When F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to Thomas Wolfe in the late 1930’s giving his address as the Garden of Allah luxury Hollywood bungalow complex, Wolfe didn’t believe that such a place of that name existed. So how did the ultra-authentic, no-nonsense, rapier-acerbic Raymond Chandler cope there?
Between the years 1943 and 1950- with a break from 1947-1949 –Raymond Chandler worked intermittently on screenplays in Hollywood. Chandler’s motivation for working in Hollywood was no doubt purely financial, especially as he was struggling in his early novel-writing career to make ends meet. Of course it would also be Hollywood that would save him from commercial oblivion, with the release of Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe in 1946.
From then on Chandler was in demand as a screenwriter and script doctor, his special blend of noir in vogue and hugely influential on the film noir genre to this day. The late 1940s and early 50s was the classic film noir period in Hollywood. There were Out of the Past and Build My Gallows High, starring the young Robert Mitchum, and D.O.A. with Edward G. Robinson, who had of course been one of the first screen gangsters in Little Caesar from the book by W.S. Burnett in the early 1930’s. The noir style would also heavily influence more mainstream films such as Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter, also starring Mitchum. Elements of Chandler and Hammett were in all of these films, as well as the films made of their own books.
Chandler was later rather disingenuous about his time in Hollywood, writing articles for the Atlantic Monthly such as ‘Writers in Hollywood’ (1945) and ‘Oscar Night in Hollywood’ (1948) which were less than complimentary about the studio system and the low worth of the writer within it. Of course, Chandler was far from the first serious writer who had worked in Hollywood: P.G.Wodehouse, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West and William Faulkner, and hardboiled writers such as W.R. Burnett, Horace McCoy, Paul Cain and James. M. Cain Cornell Woolrich had all done stints there by the time Chandler hit Tinseltown looking like an English accountant, according to Billy Wilder. Of course, in the cases of Fitzgerald and West, great novels came out of their time there too-the unfinished The Last Tycoon, and The Day of the Locust respectively. The collaborative studio system was not conducive to literary mavericks with big egos. Having said this, Chandler can be seen to have been a moderate success there.
Chandler first went to Hollywood in 1943 to work for Paramount. The film director Billy Wilder had read The Big Sleep and admired it. A film version of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity was going to be produced, and because he was morally offended by the plot (a woman and her lover murder her husband for his double indemnity insurance policy), Wilder’s usual writing partner Charles Brackett would not work on it. Cue Chandler’s calling. The fact that Chandler hated Cain’s novels, once calling them ‘the offal of literature’ did not deter him and it shows just how much he needed the money to take on the project. Chandler and Wilder did not get on, as Wilder was famously driven and abrasive at times, while Chandler was often drinking, had his own working methods and did not take kindly to being ordered about. He even objected to Wilder wearing a hat inside, as it unsettled him, as if Wilder were about to leave the room. Still, the screenplay was written and the film proved a triumph on release.
In a 26th November 1948 letter to his New York agent Carl Brandt, Chandler wrote about a screenwriting job he had had at MGM. When he arrived, he realized that writers were not allowed couches in their offices, as this was considered too comfortable. Chandler had decided to improvise, and had gone and got a rug from his car and laid down on that.
When his producer came in and saw him, he “rushed to the phone and yelled down to the story editor that I was a horizontal writer and for Chrissake send up a couch.” The fact that Chandler had a name in publishing circles (albeit a small one) and had been hired specifically for his famous ability to write noir dialogue obviously gave him more clout than the average Hollywood writer had.
When Chandler was writing The Blue Dahlia (his original screenplay) in 1946 for Paramount, he worked with the producer and former Orson Welles collaborator John Houseman. As the late Ian Hamilton recounted in his wonderful book Writers In Hollywood, Chandler had to write it quickly, as the film’s young star Alan Ladd was going to be called up to the army. Houseman later recalled that Chandler had two limousines on constant call, to take scripts to the studio and run errands, as well as a team of nurses who gave Chandler vitamin injections as he was barely eating while drinking heavily, and secretaries to take dictation and type. Chandler was apparently drunk throughout the writing process, but completed the script on time, and the film was a big success.
Chandler’s last screenplay in Hollywood was Strangers on a Train, based on the Patricia Highsmith novel of the same name. Working on it in 1950 with co-writer Czenzi Ormonde at Warner Brothers, Chandler would say that he found the plot implausible, about two strangers meeting and agreeing to murder the other one’s enemy. However, again the film was very profitable.
Chandler will be forever connected with Hollywood because of the films made of his own books, his hand in at least three films considered classics, but mostly for his long-term influence on film noir of the period, which continues to have a marked influence on films today. For instance the Coen Brothers’ 1998 cult noir The Big Lebowski starring Jeff Bridges is a tribute to Raymond Chandler. The character of ‘The Dude’ is a postmodern take on Marlowe, lost and confused in Los Angeles and mixed up in all kinds of trouble, although with the added stimulus of drugs- which Marlowe never took by choice. Now more than sixty-five years since he last worked in Hollywood, his influence is still palpable, as it is on popular culture generally, and of course, cinema has been the great popular medium of the past six decades, along with television of course.
Chandler’s successes in Hollywood are intricately linked with his literary reputation. Arguably more people have seen Marlowe on film than read the books, and Chandler’s work adapting the books of others greatly increased the influence of his style. The film world gave Chandler his springboard into the big time, and it was after his first stint there that his book sales and reviews, and therefore his career, gained momentum. His main motivation for working in Hollywood in the beginning was financial, but whilst (like most literary writers) he was not ideal for the studio system, he recognized the benefits of it, although he was also brutally honest about the superficiality of the movie world. Chandler, Marlowe and Hollywood are deeply connected and cannot be easily separated.
CHANDLER’S HOLLYWOOD SCREENPLAYS
1944 Double Indemnity (with Billy Wilder for Paramount)
1944 And Now Tomorrow (with Frank Partos for Paramount)
1945 The Unseen (with Hager Wilde for Paramount)
1946 The Blue Dahlia (for Paramount)
1950 Strangers on a Train (with Czenzi Ormonde for Warner Brothers)
CHANDLER’S NOVELS AS FILMS IN HIS LIFETIME
1942 The Falcon Takes Over (RKO) (based on the plot of Farewell, My Lovely)
1945 Murder, My Sweet (RKO) (based on the plot of Farewell, My Lovely)
1946 The Big Sleep (Warner Brothers)
1947 The Brasher Doubloon (Twentieth-Century Fox) (based on The High Window)
1948 The Lady in the Lake (MGM)
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