In addition to my career as a curmudgeonly commentator for The Writing Show, I also review films for an online magazine dedicated to horror, science fiction, and cult film and DVD. In this role I've had access to some of the best and worst movies ever made. Within this massive cloud of celluloid are a bunch of films that tackle the craft of writing as an integral part of the plot. A few of these not only capture the spirit and craft of writing, and do it with such profound accuracy that, at least for me, it overshadows the rest of the film.

The best writer's film ever made is David Cronenberg's film adaptation of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. I don't know if you've ever waded into the impenetrable madness that is the book Naked Lunch, but the film actually manages more than a little coherence in its tale of William Lee (Peter Weller), an exterminator addicted to the poison powder he uses to eradicate roaches sent into the mysterious "Interzone" and instructed to send reports back. To whom do these reports go? He does not know.

Cronenberg, who also wrote the screenplay, weaves together some of the almost mythical life of William Burroughs, shooting his wife during a whiskey bender, being a heroin addict, his relationship with the early beat writers Kerouac and Ginsberg, with the act of authoring these bizarre reports. And this is the writing bit - as Bill interacts with a manual typewriter given to him by whoever receives the reports. Clark Nova, like everything else in “Interzone,” is not all that he appears. While Bill clacks away at the keys, the machine transforms into a strange symbiotic bug that literally draws the reports out of Bill's fingers.

This, as any working writer will tell you, represents "The Groove"--that magical impossible span where linear time ceases to exist and you as a writer live in the time of your characters in their narrative in their world. “Naked Lunch” captures "The Groove" so perfectly as to be dismissed as some bizarre metaphor by non-writers. But if you write, and you watch, you'll see these scenes for what they really are. And it's awesome.

Bill Lee: I understood writing could be dangerous. I didn't realize the danger came from the machinery.

The second best writer's film ever made is “The Whole Wide World.” The title doesn't sound like much, but the film, oh the film… “The Whole Wide World” is based on the memoir "One Who Walked Alone" by Novalyn Price, one-time girlfriend of Robert E. Howard. You know who Robert Howard is, right? He created Conan the Barbarian, and Kull the Conqueror among dozens of dozens of short stories in any genre that paid-- westerns, boxing stories, you name it. The film versions of these people are played, respectively by Vincent D'Onofrio as Robert Howard and Renee Zelwegger as Novalyn Price. Howard, for those unfamiliar, was devoted to his tuberculosis-stricken mother and socially retarded. “The Whole Wide World” is much more about how Price is able to pull Howard out of his antisocial weirdness, but her attraction to him is based solely on her wish to learn his craft, which we see on screen in more than a few different ways. First when Novalyn visits Howard, he is screaming out a Kull the Conqueror tale as he types furiously in his bedroom. Howard's voice booms out though an open window as he rides The Groove for all it’s worth. He also spends a great deal of time discussing how he writes the Conan stories, and structures them. Later he shadow boxes down the middle of the road to "work out a boxing yarn I've been toying with."

The film is amazing and wonderful and engrossing and tragic all at the same time.

The third best writer's film is Joel and Ethan Coen's "Barton Fink," which, while an exploration of writer's block and a slow descent into insanity, is also a disturbing and often funny look at how Hollywood in its heyday co-opted the talents of America’s greatest authors and used them to write B-movies. Fink (John Turturro) is a New York playwright with a hit Broadway show when he's brought in to write for a Hollywood studio. They've heard great things about his play--it's a very earthy study of "the common man"--and want him to take that connection with the audience and apply it to their upcoming slate of productions. He's assigned to write a Wallace Beery wrestling picture. Wallace Beery, was a washed-up former silent film star who transitioned from leading man in such films as “The Lost World” to Z-grade exploitation flicks by the mid 1940s. Fink, who is committed to reviving the theater for the common man (as he pontificates endlessly) can't manage to get beyond the first line of his screenplay. Fink is cloistered away in a fleabag hotel with nothing but his typewriter and sanity until he meets Charlie (John Goodman), the "common man" Fink aspires to write for. He also falls in with W.P. Mayhew (John Mahoney), an ersatz William Faulkner drowning in whiskey and also blocked. When asked by Fink if he writes to bring the stories and history of the common people to the masses, Mayhew replies "I just like to make stuff up."

The real pivotal scene for Fink is when he's allowed to watch the dailies of another wrestling picture in production to help give him a feel for the material, and one scene plays over and over and over of a fat, old wrestler walking from his corner screaming "I WILL DESTROY HIM!" The wrestler, if course, is Fink's project and that look in Fink's eyes as that line is growled over and over and over again is every writer.

Burroughs sums it up this way -

"Just remember this. All agents defect, and all resisters sell out. That's the sad truth, Bill. And a writer? A writer lives the sad truth like anyone else. The only difference is, he files a report on it."

(c) Jeffrey R. DeRego 2008