Nothing goes off without a good script ... Josh Brolinas in the Coen brothers' film version of No Country for Old Men
Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men must have been a tricky tale to adapt for the screen: a man finds $2m in the desert and then hides like hell from men who really want it back. Archetypal western cinema - until you realise McCarthy's bounty-hunter sounds like a Beckett monologist and carries an air gun used to butcher cattle. There are also goons with Uzis, a few car chases and enough shoot-outs to keep the National Rifle Association happy for a decade.
It could have become kitsch, but the Coen brothers got it right in their recent adaptation, which will be coming to England in January: McCarthy's blood-splattered nihilism, the Biblical canter of his story-telling, even his characters' alligator-booted irony. See it and you may never go to Texas again. If you were ever going in the first place.
Quite a lot of this power has to do with the script that the Coen brothers boiled down from McCarthy's already lean prose. It tells the camera what to do, the characters what to say, and makes a ridiculous situation frighteningly believable, and tense. This ought to be on studio heads' minds as they go to the bargaining table for the fourth week of the Writers Guild of America's strike.
Sure, the old saw is writers don't have the power in Hollywood - and they don't - but where would the pictures be without them? Now we know. More than two dozen shows have had to stop production in the US, from 24 to The Office, since the strike began on November 5 over writers' demands for a higher proportion of DVD revenue, among other things. All of our night-time talk shows have ceased. If it continues into next month the strike is going to cost the Los Angeles economy $21m a day. That's a lot of lattes.
Some of this is down to contract dispute, and some has to do with new media, but a lot of it seems to be part of an increasing desire of our entertainment industry to deny its writerly roots. We listen to songs on the radio, but without songwriters they'd be pretty boring; we watch news on the television, but without writers it grinds to a standstill. No matter how many ways the world of the image tries to supersede the word, words and language continually reassert their primacy. One of the most obvious examples of this is in American print publications: as newspapers hollow out their coverage of just about everything, magazines like The New Yorker and The Nation have picked up more and more subscribers because they honour good writing.
There was a time when this was the case in publishing. In November 1934, after years of hacking away at the manuscript of Of Time and the River, the novel which would elevate Thomas Wolfe to the front rank of American writers, Maxwell Perkins wrote to Wolfe about a part of the book which still troubled him: the dedication page. "Nothing would give me greater pleasure or greater pride as an editor," quotes A Scott Berg in his biography of Perkins, "than the book of the writer whom I have most greatly admired should be dedicated to me if it were sincerely done. But you cannot, and should not try to change your conviction that I have deformed your book, or at least prevented it from coming to perfection ... the plain truth is that working on your writing, however it has turned out, for good or bad, has been the greatest pleasure, for all its pain, and the most interesting episode of my editorial life. The way in which we are presenting this book must prove our (and my) belief in it. But what I have done has destroyed your belief in it and you must not act inconsistently with that fact."
Wolfe went ahead and dedicated the book to Perkins anyway, and the modest editor of Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, and James Jones, among others, soon acquired a reputation of "making" writers. It took 10 years to go to his head. In the interim, he edited and guided a staggering list of books into print - from Hemingway's To Have and To Have Not to short stories by Fitzgerald - working himself into a nervous state trying to make their books better. "At lunch in morning meetings [Charles Scribner] could not keep his eyes off Perkins's trembling hands," Berg wrote. "He needs a rest badly, but refuses to take a vacation."
Now another New York editor of famous greats, Gordon Lish, is back in the news as Raymond Carver's widow, Tess Gallagher, has announced plans to publish the un-Lished version of Carver's early stories. I understand the instinct behind this move - especially if the stories of Carver's protestations are true. I also understand why Lish wants credit: from what I've seen of the stories, he did make some of them a lot better. But the truth is: we all know no matter whether it's been Lished or not, the genius in those stories (and their flaws) comes from Carver. Now, if the Coen brothers could just get their hands on some of his work, we'd be in business.
