Thomson ?cannot hold back the realization that the movies have never been good enough.? As a form, he writes, movies are ?most acute when fixed on what happens next; whereas literature, sooner or later, is about the meaning behind events.? This explains better than anything else I know why it is that the finest movies seem to have been made not from first- but from second-rate fiction: The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett), The Postman Always Rings Twice (James M. Cain), Farewell My Lovely (Raymond Chandler), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (B. Traven). In all these books, plot takes primacy over style and penetrating observation.
Which brings us to screenwriters. ?Product,? the old Hollywood moguls used to call the movies they made. —Joseph Epstein —What Happened to the Movies? (Commentary)
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So is Epstein lowbrow-beating around the bush leagues?
I don't know what that means, but it sounds clever as I type it at 3am. Darned insomnia.
Seriously, you're right to point out that this article is a defense of the romanticized solitary author, as constrasted to the soulless hive mind of the megastudio. But I did like his observation that there are movies that are better than the books, precisely because of the visual style and action (which, according to Aristotle, is not as important as the plot in a drama).
Sobering article about what sadly drives Hollywood. Have to comment, though: I don't buy this (cited) point when comparing film to lit, though, because Epstein is making an oversimplified and mass media-centric hasty generalization: Hollywood studio films are not all movies. And not all movies are narrative, either. NONE, while I'm at it, are ENTIRELY narrative. Besides, "penetrating observation" is precisely what a camera allows the audience to make, and there's a reason that "image" is what most people associate with the word "style." Good article, but it's more telling about the burst bubbles of screenwriters than it is about film narrative.