West Coast Work

The relationship of writers to the Hollywood dream machine has been extensively documented--the Coen Brothers' Barton Fink even gave us a spoof of poor William Faulkner's stint writing for the movies. In the past few years, Jim Harrison has mused on screenwriting in his memoir Off to the Side and Richard Price has been less than enthusiastic about West Coast work. Richard Russo, who has worked on a fair number of films (on his own Nobody's Fool with Robert Benton, among others) has the protagonist in his new novel That Old Cape Magic (Knopf) fulminating:

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