In 1970 Film Comment devoted a whole edition to the work of screenwriters. This was belated recognition for a largely neglected tier of cinematic exponents. Long a champion of their cause, editor Richard Corliss would continue to be so when he became Time film critic, and he would author a definitive book on movie scribes. Although some film scholars would follow the trail he blazed, mostly in extended appreciations of the film industry and the odd biography, it remains something of a cliché – albeit an accurate one – that writers have never had their due in the Hollywood story. This was why Jorja Prover entitled her study of them No One Knows Their Names.

Prover poses a somewhat contradictory question in her opening chapter, ‘Why another book about Hollywood writers?’, when her bibliographic sources handily point out the answer. In reality there had not hitherto even been a stream of work, let alone a deluge, on screenwriting as an art form, and still less on the people engaged in it. Prover's seemingly schizophrenic outlook actually refl ects that of the practitioners she documents. ‘While people working within the industry emphasised the importance of writing’, she observes, ‘the same individuals added a contradictory claim that screenwriting was relatively simple, requiring little unusual skill or ability.’

A number of scholars have reached the same conclusion as Prover that writers are ‘essential but undervalued’. Some histories of screenwriting have finally started to appear as revisionist history has gained ground in film studies. As Steven Maras points out, however, this new approach has cast the screenplay into a melting pot of structural forces – reception, technology, business – that have emphasised the predominance of the ‘system’ and how screenwriting might conceivably fit into, if not emerge from, that system.

The neglect of screenwriters in their own right has its roots in the 1930s, a decade that saw the consolidation of the studio system, the advance of sound technology, and the proliferation of scribes who made their way out west in the hope of writing for the movies.