Screenwriting

Well, Jack Warner may have been celebrated for calling writers "Schmucks with Underwoods," but 20 years earlier Irving Thalberg … said, "The most important person in the motion picture process is the writer, and we must do everything in our power to prevent them from ever realizing it."

It seems to me it's the hardest thing 'cause you're starting from nothing and creating something. Everybody else is interpreting what you've written. Everybody else is an interpretive artist. Even the best of them. Stanley Kubrick was an interpretive artist. The best actors in the world are interpreting what's on the page, and they use it as a springboard to something else, but if it's not there, there's nothing to spring from. So the writer is the only person who's taking absolutely nothing, and 120 pages of it, and dirtying it up in such a way that it's gonna gross hundreds of millions of dollars and make a lot of people happy.

This...is why screenwriting pays so well. They don't pay me to write. I'd write for free. They pay me NOT to punch people in the neck.