You won’t be shocked to learn that writers have always been undervalued.

Maybe it’s because nearly everyone does write … to a certain extent.

In the age of the social media post, we’re just 8 Billion pseudo scribes thumb-blasting our way from respectable obscurity to digital court-jesterdom.

To quote my favorite no-collar Poet Charles Bukowski in his novel Factotum:

“Not everybody thought they could be a dentist or an automobile mechanic, but everybody knew they could be a writer.”

Goddamn right.

Goddamn wrong.

That’s part of the problem.

Every get-rich-quick sonofabitch, failed car salesman, and bored housewife—at some point in their miseries—decides they’re going to fix their many woes by slapping together some trite tome of thesaurus castoffs—usually in one of three milieux:

1. Tell-alls about terrible childhoods—like we all haven’t been forced to eat bugs and drink bleach. Oh, Mommy Dearest!
2. Watered-down Rowling/King/Patterson—can you say Harry Potter & The Haunted Uber?
3. P-p-poetry—I see rhyme’s back in vogue, Sam … now let’s away to the poetry slam!

Most writers who study the craft for decades aren’t very good.

Why? Because writing is hard.

And subjective.

And really flippin’ hard.

To illustrate my point, we’ll make an awkward segue into this declarative sentence: screenwriters face a unique set of threats unlike novelists or journalists, whose hurdles—while still relatively high—are far fewer in number.

The screenwriter has a seemingly never-ending line of vultures just waiting to denigrate the material, infuse it with some political sermon, steer it toward market trends, or just plain steal credit for work they haven’t done.

And that’s all before the audience has an opportunity to shit on it.

In addition to all the humans trying to suck you dry and make you disappear for pennies on the dollar—if you’re that financially fortunate—we now have the unscrupulous, greedy, and largely untalented purveyors of artificial intelligence hoovering every intellectual property on the internet for the purposes of regurgitation as “original concepts.”

To mis-regurgitate The Who … meet the new plagiarism, same as the old plagiarism.

Further complicating matters is a myth so pervasive it’s both accepted as fact, and is largely responsible for the diminishment screenwriters continue to face.

Every time you turn on an interview with an actor, director, producer, one of the stock questions invariably asked is: “How much of the movie was improvised?”

Why? Because moviegoers seem to think the actors make up their lines as they go.

It’s a question that elicits screams from me so long, loud, and vile I might just hafta up my dosage.

The movie business has been around for over a hundred years now. You’d think writers would have done a better job of communicating the point that we are as necessary to the filmmaking process as gaffers, grips, and craft services.

But, time and time again, we’re an afterthought.

Or a no-thought.

No one offers grips a dollar option to unload equipment.

Nobody would dream of asking set decorators to rearrange the furniture two dozen times for free.

And yet the creator of the concepts the entire project revolves around is often treated like an indentured servant.

I take that back—indentured servants get room and board.

Part of the problem is I think we scribes mostly didn’t realize how nefarious this misconception was.

Nor could we anticipate how eager some producers, directors, actors, and others in the business are to keep the lie alive.

Sure, there’s the occasional adlibbed line.

There are a handful of actors who can wing a bit here and there.

But it’s not the norm.

Even beloved Robin Williams, universally heralded as Mr. Improv, had most of his lines written for him.

Why?

Because all that effortless, natural, realer-than-real dialogue has to be carefully crafted.

It has to be written.

And revised.

And rewritten.

And thrown away.

And pulled out of the trash and revised again by a nameless, faceless—and often unpaid—writer.

Sorry to burst all those audience bubbles but actors don’t make the shit up as they go.

In fact, if I hear one more actor talk about how they rewrote the script on-the-fly during shooting, I’m going to scream.

Never mind.

I was already screaming.

Wait. Where was I?

Oh yeah, it’s we the writers who put words in their mouths.

We create the worlds. We create the characters.

We make the audience feel the feelings.

We make sure the gun goes off on page six.

We make sure the titties pop out on page seven.

We make sure the monster conveniently appears behind our main characters in the woods even though there’s no possible way he could have known where they’d be camping for the weekend.

Yes, movies are a collaborative effort.

Yes, directors and actors are integral to the process.

Yes, I’d like a warm-up of my coffee.

But so are we.

Integral.

To the process.

So why are writers [almost] always conveniently forgotten when lead actors, and directors, and executive-associate-supervising-development-creative-field-edit-consulting-segment-post producers get to bragging about what an amazing project they have?

Why are there so many producers!?

Focus, Gohs.

Focus Gohs sounds like an Adult Contemporary band.

Better yet, why do we allow the spurious auteur theory to exist?

I’m lookin at you, Godard.

Or Godard’s ghost.

Now, Godard’s Ghost sounds like a cool band name.

You know what I’m sick of hearing: “Who directed.”

I say who gives a shit?

I want to know who wrote it.

Everyone talks about what a great job the Cohen Brothers did with No Country For Old Men.

And they did.

It’s one of my favorite movies of all time.

Love the Cohens.

Seriously. Call me. We’ll do lunch. I make the world’s best wet burritos.

But they didn’t invent that story.

They didn’t come up with that dialogue.

Or the characters.

That’s pure Cormac McCarthy.

The thing they did do—in addition to overseeing amazing casting, cinematography, etc.—was to trim some of McCarthy’s novel back.

They took away.

They didn’t add.

There’s nothing in the movie that wasn’t in the novel.

Which is fine. Adapting movies from books can result in great films.

But, once again, I never heard anyone who discussed the movie say, “Man, that Cormac McCarthy sure can write.”

No.

All you hear is, “Boy, those Cohen Brothers sure are geniuses.”

Ultimately, I don’t think any one contributor should get the credit for a movie when there are so many dozens or hundreds of people working to make them a success.

And, yes, that includes producers and marketers.

[Seriously, do we need this many producers?]

What I’m concerned about is the concerted effort to lessen the very real importance of the lowly writer in his lonely writing room.

Am I a frustrated scribbler?

Ab-so-friggin-lutely.

Find me a long-time, fulltime writer who isn’t, and I’ll call the morgue to come pick up the corpse.

But I’m also chained, heart and soul, to the art and business of writing.

All I’m saying is, with all the threats to our craft, we who take this profession seriously need to do a better job of speaking up and pushing back …

Or those fancy fellows who get most of the money and all of the attention for our manifold efforts will continue to find ways to keep us undervalued, underpaid, and under the Gucci boot of a gilded machine which both relies upon and reviles us.