I wrote this sometime during Covid as I struggled with the realization that it was time to start thinking about retirement. I thought it might be a piece for CineMontage, the Motion Picture Editor’s Guild magazine. (As a story analyst, I’m a member that union local.) But as it became increasingly philosophical, that no longer seemed appropriate. Meanwhile, it never quite worked as I hoped it would. And so like so many other things, it went on the shelf.
I was in college when I first saw the 1950 Billy Wilder film Sunset Boulevard. A budding cinephile classmate learned it was on a local S.F. Bay Area station and convinced one of the few dorm residents with a TV to let a group of us pile into his room to watch it. Despite the endless commercial breaks (this was, after all, the early, pre-VCR 1970s), I was mesmerized by Wilder’s comic noir look at the intersection of Hollywood desperation and narcissism.
The film tells the tale of unemployed screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden), who, evading car repo men, stumbles upon the crumbling mansion of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a once famous silent film star rendered obscure by the talkies. Certain that fans are pining for her return, Norma has penned a thousand-page comeback screenplay and asks Joe to give it a read. Joe finds it execrable, but sees an opportunity and manipulates Norma into hiring him to “whip it into shape.” Before he knows it, he has become Norma’s kept man, a boy-toy she showers with lavish gifts, and of whom she becomes increasingly possessive. Along with her ex-director butler Max (Erich Von Stronheim), Joe enables Norma’s delusion of a return to the caress of the camera and the adoration of those “out there in the dark.”
A small but pivotal player in this sordid Hollywood melodrama is Betty Schafer (Nancy Olson), a script reader at Paramount and fiancée of Joe’s assistant director pal Artie Green (Jack Webb). Movies about Hollywood rarely portray the low-level employees who read and analyze mounds of material for studio execs and producers. But these readers – or “Story Analysts” as they are officially known in the classification of the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE) – have been at the bedrock of the business since the silent era, and still are. Betty is an iconic representation of the profession, one easily recognized by anyone who’s had the job. She experiences a reader’s worst nightmare-turn-reality when she first meets Joe: she trashes his script to her producer boss only to discover he’s right behind her and has heard every dismissive word. She also voices many a reader’s frustrated ambition when she tells Joe: “I don’t want to be a reader all my life, I want to write.”
As a 19-year-old boy watching on a small, grainy TV, I was particularly struck by Betty Schafer — and not just because of an attraction to luminous girl-next-door actress Olson. Like Betty, who was raised a stone’s throw from the Paramount lot where both her parents worked, I too was a child of Hollywood. My father was a sound editor at 20th Century Fox. My mother had been personal secretary to legendary film producer Alexander Korda. Like Betty, I burned with a desire to take the town by storm.
A college grad a few years later, I landed my first job in the business as an “office assistant” (read “office boy”) at a TV production company that, in an auspicious coincidence, was officed on… you guessed it… Sunset Boulevard. Among my duties was delivering the mail. Every morning I pushed a cart with letters, packages and trade papers down the long corridor that wrapped around the 10th floor suite. In the lonely, mostly vacant and completely ignored end of the corridor was a young woman named Diana. In response to my inquiry, she revealed she was the company’s reader. “Betty Shafer, Sunset Boulevard,” I chimed, delighted to have found a flesh-and-blood version of the scrappy celluloid reader with whom I had been so taken. Like many young Hollywood wannabes when they first discover that people actually get paid to read scripts, I thought this might be the gig for me. Diana kindly showed me samples of her work. Seven months later when the company was shuttered by its corporate parent, I offered to read for free for the yet-to-be-financed firm being born of its ashes. It turned out I had a knack for it… and a career in story development was born.
It took a couple of years of part-time reading work cobbled with assorted PA (production assistant) jobs before I landed a full-time union gig as a story analyst. It took less time than that to start feeling Betty’s impatience with the work, and to be itching to be writing scripts, not just opinions about them. Every fellow young reader had the same arrogant hunger, if not to be a writer, then a director or producer. If only given a chance, we’d all be brilliant. And we all swore we’d never end up as “career readers,” i.e. men or women who never got beyond what we saw as an entry-level job and were still reading into their 50s or 60s. We’d look at colleagues like that with respect for their skill and experience, but with an underlying pity and scorn.
Laboring away on my own writing nights and weekends, I soon had an agent and a script that was getting attention, but also a baby and a mortgage. So, when the big screenwriting break didn’t come, I seized an opportunity and got on the studio executive path, another thing I had sworn I’d never do. Climbing the ranks, I was soon a vice-president at MGM and a “player” in the mold of Tim Robbins in the 1992 film. I was so convinced I’d never again be a reader, I cashed out my union pension. MGM in the late 1980s, unfortunately, was being endlessly sold and bought back again. By the time I finally left the crippled studio with a buyout, I realized that I really wasn’t happy as an executive and revived my old writer ambitions. Needing a day job, I dusted off my union card and went back to work as a story analyst. Hollywood ego being what it is, I wasn’t about to admit to a return to such low-level grunt work. For a good while I read under a pseudonym, the name “Michael Rouse” serving as cover for my shame.
I had some small successes as a screenwriter, but the big break again failed to come. A tumultuous two-year return to executive at a small production company had me fleeing back to the low stress reading with a sigh of relief. Then, before I knew it, I realized I had become one of those career readers I once pitied. My life, however, was far from pitiable. I had a comfortable gig at a stable 20th Century Fox with a great boss, brilliant colleagues and a corps of smart, personable executives who valued my work. Yet a sense of failure lingered. In telling people what I was doing for a living, I was always quick to add what I had done, i.e. that I was once an exec, not just a reader. Indeed, there was a bit of Norma Desmond in me, still clinging to when I was a “somebody” in this town. (“I’m still big, it’s the pictures that got small.”) The ambitions, expectations and prejudices of youth were hard to shake, even with the maturity and wisdom of age.
In Sunset Boulevard, Betty and Joe secretly collaborate on a script… and fall in love. But no happy ending is in store of them. When Norma discovers their liaison and menaces Betty in a late night phone call, a self-loathing Joe rejects Betty to set her free, then packs to leave Norma, and Hollywood, forever. This leads Norma to shoot him in the back as he walks out the door, the act that produces the famous pool-floating corpse that’s been narrating the tale.
I often wondered what happened to Betty after that nightmarish dismissal by Joe in Norma’s flamboyant living room — after she went home to cry her heart out only to wake up the next morning to the sensational news of Joe’s murder at Norma’s hands. Did she follow Joe’s advice and get on a bus to Arizona to marry Artie? And what about her and Joe’s script? Did it find a life anywhere? Or, forever tainted by the Norma Desmond scandal, was it condemned to the shelf?
I ask such questions because now, as a career reader with retirement on the horizon, I find myself still struggling with those gnawing feelings of failure, those waves of “what if” musings and regrets, the belief I didn’t live up to my potential, that maybe, if I only had made different decisions or been a little tougher, I’d have an Oscar or Emmy on my shelf rather than a pile of unproduced screenplays. So I wonder how Betty, after the heartbreak of losing Joe and the career she dreamed of, weathered similar feelings. Twenty-two years old in 1950, Betty would be only eighty-seven today.
Where are you, Betty Schafer?
If she actually existed and I could find her, what advice would she have for me?
This question rings within me enough that, in my mind, I embark upon a imagined search for my celluloid mentor.
I start at the union office. There I make two discoveries: One is that Betty returned to reading at Paramount in 1957, remaining there for thirty-three years until she retired in 1990. The second is that she did so under the name “Elizabeth Schaefer Green.” So she did marry Artie!
From there it’s on to the Paramount story department, where I find Sylvia, a still spry 75-year-old in Story Files who started at Paramount as a secretary in 1977 and had an office in the same building as Betty. I learn from her that Betty and Artie divorced, but not before there were two kids. As the oft-unemployed Artie wasn’t the best at child support, Betty needed a job, and so she called up Paramount and got her old gig back.
As they still exchange Christmas Cards, Sylvia has an address for Betty in Portland, Oregon, where she moved after retiring to be closer to children and grandchildren.
I write an awkward letter to Betty, introducing myself, explaining how she inspired me and offering to fly up to Portland if she’ll be so kind as to meet. She writes back an enthusiastic “yes” and I’m soon on a plane, palms sweating as if I’m off to meet Katherine Hepburn, not a fellow reader.
We meet at her favorite coffeehouse down the street from Powell’s bookstore. The older Betty is wrinkled and white haired, but still a beauty, those doe eyes sparkling as they did when she and Joe Gillis realized an attraction over spiked punch at Artie New Year’s Eve party. I babble and feel incoherent, but she is grace personified.
I tell her my story, confessing the lingering sense of failure over ending up a career reader. She laughs. After returning to reading, she too again tried to make the jump to screenwriting, and has a drawer full of unproduced scripts to prove it. She too struggled with that gnawing feeling of having missed the boat.
Then she looks me in the eye and tells me such thoughts are bullshit.
“Don’t dwell on what you failed to do,” she orders me, “but what you accomplished, which, if you take the time to think about it, is quite a lot. And I’m not talking about all your unproduced screenplays, but what you’ve done — and are doing — as a reader.
“Every day is a creative one; that’s a gift. You retell stories, which is a special talent. You get to take them apart and see how they work; that’s fun. And while it might not seem that anyone is paying attention to what you have to say, they are, even if they don’t know it. You’ve had a lot of influence, Chris, more than you can possibly imagine.”
At this point in my fantasy, I realize that it’s not Betty who is telling me these things, but myself. I realize that this make-believe has been a conversation between two sides of myself – one that still thinks he’s a failure, and the other that knows better but believes he needs to defer. Betty Schafer, I now know, is not just an iconic movie character, but a part of me. When I followed her lead into the movie business, she became a symbol for me, not just of my ambitions and confidence, but of my doubts and insecurities.
The question is whether I’m going to hear what she is saying… and heed her advice. Maybe.
And then, back in the fantasy, Betty tells me she’s got to run. It’s the day of her “film club” – a group of elderly cinephiles like herself who religiously go to the movies together once a week. That day’s matinee starts in an hour. We step out of the coffeehouse. I give her a clumsy hug. She tells me to keep in touch. I promise to do so, but both of us know this was a onetime deal. I wait outside the coffeehouse for my Lyft to the airport as she heads down the block on arthritic knees.
As she disappears around the corner, I think how she has shone the light for me, both into a Hollywood career… and now, perhaps, out of it. And I whisper…
“Thank you, Betty…”
