In honor of the end of the writers’ strike in Hollywood, I decided to dedicate a DVD column to movies about screenwriters. There are not as many out there as you might think, though I suspect you could fill Fenway Park with all of the unproduced scripts about screenwriters. Here are a few that quite deservedly made it to the screen. They share a single common trait: none of them are very flattering toward their heroes.

Sunset Boulevard (1950): The most surprising aspect of this legendary Billy Wilder film is how disturbing it is. Gloria Swanson is the fading silent star who hires hack screenwriter William Holden to write her comeback. There’s a private funeral for a monkey, the ghostly card game played by silent stars Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson, and H.B. Warner, and of course the very odd presence of Eric Von Stroheim as Swanson’s former director and current caretaker. Even scenes that are supposed to be carefree, like when young Nancy Olson tries to romance Holden at the office party, are uncomfortable. It took me awhile to warm to Wilder, and this one is not my favorite. But what I’ve come to admire most about Wilder’s body of work is his disregard for genre. All of his movies are a mix of comedy and drama. Sunset Boulevard shifts wildly in tone, but never loses its center. Its view of screenwriters? Hacks who are willing to sacrifice every aspect of their dignity for a shot at success.

In A Lonely Place (1950): Released the same year as the classic Sunset Boulevard, this minor classic is no slouch. Humphrey Bogart plays a charming veteran screenwriter with a violent temper and a predilection for booze. Gloria Grahame plays the young actress he woos. Soon she suspects him of foul play, and wonders if she is next. Nicholas Ray’s film is considered a noir, though it’s more of an old-fashioned melodrama. Bogart does a nice job mixing light and dark moods, and Grahame is so smart and sexy the censors must have been baffled. Its view of screenwriters: they may seem stable on the surface, but underneath they’re emotional psychopaths.

John Turturro in Barton Fink. (Courtesy photo)

Barton Fink (1991): Back when the Coen Brothers seemed to do no wrong, they brought this exercise about writer’s block to the Cannes Film Festival and came home with the Palme D’Or, the festival’s highest prize. John Turturro is angst-ridden playwright Barton Fink, lured to 1941 Hollywood to write for the pictures. John Goodman is the ebullient salesman who lives in the hotel room next door, as Fink tries to write a wrestling picture he has no passion for. Barton Fink would also make the list of best movies about hotels, as Fink’s peeling room is a character in itself. Michael Lerner was nominated for an Oscar as the brash movie executive who inveigles Fink, but he gives precisely the worst performance in a film jammed with marvelous supporting actors. This film’s view of screenwriters: they only stoop to write these silly movies in order to support their real writing.

Adaptation (2002): Three-quarters movie heaven, one-quarter self-indulgent mess. Nicholas Cage, in his only bearable performance of the past 10 years, plays neurotic screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. His job is to adapt Susan Orlean’s (Meryl Streep) nonfiction study of “orchid thief” John Laroche (Chris Cooper). Of course, Kaufman, Orlean, and Laroche are real people, and screenwriter Kaufman really was supposed to adapt Orlean’s The Orchid Thief. Adaptation is that rare film that not only makes the screenwriter the star of the story, but also gives him a fictional twin brother. Spike Jonze elicits great work from Cage as the two brothers, but the performances of Cooper and Streep are on another plane. The movie’s tragic shortcoming is that it so nobly trumpets breaking out of standard storytelling, only to embrace it all too grinningly at the end. Its view of screenwriters: neurotic man-children who can’t control their own writing, much less their lives.

Honorable Mention: The Big Picture (1989): Kevin Bacon plays a young filmmaker whose student film has garnered awards, but who now finds himself sinking in the soup of Hollywood. This little-seen film was the directorial debut of Christopher Guest (Best in Show), and features hilarious supporting work from Martin Short, Michael McKean, and an inspired Jennifer Jason Leigh. So it’s not strictly a screenwriter movie, but at least Bacon’s character is a writer/director. The Big Picture is a little clunky, and much of its insight would be trumped by the superior The Player a few years later. But it remains a charming little movie about maintaining your self-respect in Hollywood. Its view of screenwriters: noble artists battling the evils of the Hollywood machine. No wonder this movie fared so poorly.