Writing From the Soul
by Charles Edward Pogue

I once had a producer who, whenever the inexorable, inevitable evisceration of the script began, would try to placate me with, "It's only a movie." Wrong! It's my blood, sweat and tears on each page. My heart, sometimes years of my life and yes... my soul!

Amelia Barr once wrote, "I press my soul upon the white paper." That's what writing is, or ought to be... soul-baring.

And because it is, I refuse to rewrite other writers. I write to give my soul life, not slay someone else's. I think anyone who rewrites a fellow writer without his permission is a carrion-eater. Plain and simple.

I first noticed the rewrite issue fomenting back during the great credits manual debate where our leaders were stunned when the membership reared on its haunches and roared down any attempt to make it easier to replace the original writer. In my short time on the Board, I have seen this issue bubble over the cauldron of discontent.

And why shouldn't it? How many of us have labored on projects for years, our words initiating them, making them viable, attracting the talent, only to be cast aside at the last because of a director's ego or a producer's insecurity? While you expect to get mauled by studio ingrates, you don't expect it from your pal fighting beside you in the trenches.

True, the system fosters betrayal when it's tied to credit, backend money, and a cut of the cable/cassette pie. Sadly, some are all too willing to usurp the passions of their fellows if it means a plumper pocketbook.

Over the past few years, I've heard... and suggested... many solutions to stop this wholesale trend of replacing writers. These were passed on to our recent negotiations committee and, I hope, will emerge in our creative rights discussions with the CEOs.

But perhaps we should look inwardly, too. We are often our own worst enemies, gleefully slashing our own throats on the studio knife-blade.

Every time we casually, callously replace a fellow writer against his will, we make it easier to be replaced ourselves and help diminish the status of writers. We will never achieve parity with the directors as long as we are willing to undermine each other.

Want to take the decision to replace writers out of the studios' hands?

Refuse to rewrite each other.

It's not as impossible as it seems. Several writers have already started non-rewriters clubs. I'd like to make it Guild-wide, unscroll a huge roll of paper across the bulletin board in the Writers' Coffee House, entitle it "The Non-Rewriters Club" and invite every WGA member to sign on. Wouldn't it be great if every time a studio sought a replacement scripter, they heard, "Sorry, I don't rewrite."?

And if we knew our vision might actually make it to the screen intact, how much freer and finer it would flow out of us.

In this era when film has been divested of all its myth and wonder through a glut of dissecting TV shows, magazines, "how to" books, and seminars that lift the veil and reveal the magician's tricks, we hear much about "the craft of screenwriting," but very little about the art.

Good writers should aspire to be artists. And what artist would graft himself onto the passion of another? For art is about pursuing one's own passions, expressing one's own voice... pressing your soul upon the white paper... and not having its pristine purity smudged under a bunch of other souls.