Juan Villoro
The only genre that is still handwritten is the medical prescription. Although it lacks literary value, it represents a work of authorship since it depends on the signature and the authority behind it. Among its many merits, Medicine has managed to keep the text as manual work, and pharmacists have developed the skills of epigraphers to decipher calligraphies.
While the legion of Hippocrates keeps the handwritten tradition alive, the display industry yearns for a posthuman variant of handwriting.
Each year at the Oscars, it is pointed out that no story comes about by accident, and a shot of a hand feverishly tapping on an old typewriter appears. This alludes to an archaic work that is perceived as heroic during a few seconds of prime time. After a round of applause, never worthy of the standing ovation Hollywood lives for, the statuette is given to a troubled-looking person no one knows. Although celebrated authors such as George Bernard Shaw or Tom Stoppard have received the Oscars, most remain anonymous.
Without these invisible beings, there would be no movies, but the movie business depends on ignoring them, squeezing them out, and discarding them. Faulkner, Sartre, Scott Fitzgerald, and Cabrera Infante were mistreated as screenwriters. It is not by chance that there are splendid novels about the ordeal of writing for the screen, such as Budd Schulberg’s The Disenchanted or Alberto Barrera Tyszka’s Rating.
I once commented that being a screenwriter is like being an anthropophagist’s cook. You prepare different versions of a stew until you discover that the dish is you: you are there to be devoured.
Authors rarely establish a creative partnership with a director, except in exceptional cases, such as Jean-Claude Carrière with Luis Buñuel or Harold Pinter with Joseph Losey. It is, therefore, a sacrificial job that is arrived at because other variants of food writing are even worse.
What is dramatic is that the more scripts are needed, the less power their creators have. During the pandemic, streaming platforms grew exponentially. In the film industry, the screenwriter can aspire to receive a percentage of the box office. Series changed this equation and do not pay for the number of views. The creator does not own the product if the series is reproduced in another territory.
In British television, some scriptwriters can work alone, but the international standard requires collaboration as a team to accelerate productivity. The writers’ room collectivizes (or industrializes) writing. The danger is that GPT-3 chat is already positioned to replace secondary writers, and no legislation prevents it. The next screen special effect will be the robot scriptwriter.
This has prompted the major U.S. screenwriters’ strike of the last fifteen years. Fortunately, the actors, who generate the money, have decided to support the anonymous beings who write their lines for them.
In Barton Fink, the Coen brothers made a satire of old Hollywood in which a ruthless tycoon dominated the studios. Over the years, the industry refined its control mechanisms and created a profession to manage the creativity of others: the executive producer, whose fundamental characteristic is to have written nothing. This virginity gives him power because it presents him as a neutral judge (when, in fact, he is only innocuous). The most surprising thing about The Sopranos, The Wire, and Breaking Bad is that they have been able to overcome the limited vision of the executive producers who tried to prevent their development.
I discussed the subject with Guillermo Arriaga, awarded at Cannes for best screenplay and author of the brilliant trilogy directed by González Iñárritu. For years, he has been concentrating on the novel but has not lost his taste for writing for the screen. However, every time he tries, he runs into an executive producer who lacks the arguments but not the power to say: “It doesn’t beat me”. If AI has not supplanted this craft, it is because it has not proven to depend on reasoning.
The stories watched by millions of viewers are written by invisible people who depend on intermediaries who hardly qualify as people.
The screenwriters’ strike is, at its core, a struggle between the human and the posthuman condition.
This was published in Spanish by Reforma on July 28, 2023
Further Reading: