Screenwriters

To pen a living as a Hollywood screenwriter has always required fortitude and patience. Given the ratio between number of writers and available work, the odds of success are long. Now it looks like the odds have become a whole lot longer. Thanks to a recession-driven downturn forcing studios to make fewer movies and TV shows, coupled with a screenwriters strike last year that ground production to a halt, the wordsmiths of Hollywood have seen jobs and income evaporate. That's the bleak take-away from the annual financial report of the Writers Guild of America, West, the union that represents about 8,000 movie and TV screenwriters.

Time to stash the bong and the bottle of Sauza. Screenwriter Barry Schwartz has sold his original script "Parents Weekend" to Arnold Kopelson, Oscar-winning producer of "Platoon," "The Fugitive" and "Se7en," for low-six figures against mid-six figures.

When Etan Cohen was working on the character of Kirk Lazarus, an actor played by Robert Downey Jr. in the upcoming comedy “Tropic Thunder,” he asked himself: What is the most offensive thing an actor can do to get a part? The answer was to have Lazarus, an Australian Method actor, try to become an African American character by undergoing a pigment procedure and then speaking street slang around the clock. "It seemed about the vilest thing you could do," Cohen said, laughing.

The screenwriters of "Children of Men" and the author of the source novel about a grim, childless near-future in which global infertility has doomed humans to extinction, have won USC Libraries Scripter Award. Screenwriters Alfonso Cuaron (who also directed the movie), Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby adapted the screenplay based on British writer P.D. James' novel.

If a screenwriter turns out a brilliant screenplay and there's no publicist to flog it, does it still make a sound at awards time? Of course, we'd like to think that artistic excellence always rises to the top but it certainly doesn't hurt to have someone reminding people that, as the writer, you actually contributed something of note to the film.

To get a sense of how comedians Chris Rock and Louis C.K. process film genre, it helps to know that C.K. defends "GoodFellas" as "funnier than 'It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World,' " while Rock describes "Lost in Translation" as "the blackest movie I've ever seen." This kind of interpretive creativity explains why the new comedy of marriage they've written, "I Think I Love My Wife," is based on French New Wave writer-director Eric Rohmer's 1972 drama, "Chloe in the Afternoon."

LIKE the stages of grief, there are four steps to accepting one's fate as a top screenwriter. 1. Excitement: You get your first movie made. 2. Validation: You get your movie made by a top director. 3. Frustration-cum-rage: You get a movie made badly and are cut out of the process. 4. Liberation: You opt to direct your own movie. That's how one of the town's top literary agents dryly describes the writer's typical evolution.

Karma may not be a part of Christian theology, but it's awfully tempting to apply it to "Evan Almighty's" underwhelming reception at the box office. With its uneasy mixture of juvenile pratfall humor and shallow piety, the Most Expensive Comedy Ever Made isn't connecting with as many of the film faithful as the filmmakers hoped. In its first two weeks, "Evan" has grossed only $61 million, well short of "Bruce Almighty's" $85.

The best writers are skilled ventriloquists. Just the same, it's a bit jarring to meet Brad Kane. The screenwriter of two gritty, popular, unproduced screenplays -- a Richard Pryor biopic and an epic drama about a black pimp in 1980s New York City -- Kane turns out to be a white former child actor and Broadway veteran who sang the part of Aladdin in the 1992 Disney film. "There were always a lot of conflicting aspects of my personality that I was trying to work out," says Kane, now 33.

Meet the perfect girl. ? Go sky diving. ? See the pyramids, the Taj Mahal, Mt. Everest. ? Get a movie made at a major studio. ? These are a few of the things on screenwriter Justin Zackham's Bucket List, an earnest catalog of all the things he wants to accomplish before he dies, which he scribbled out in a moment of restless self-recrimination five years ago. ?