to the editor: Since none of your literary commentators on Joan Didion mentioned her work as a screenwriter, they missed what might be her best writing about Los Angeles: “Strangers in Hollywood” published (ironically, in the New Yorker) just after the disastrous Writers Guild strike of 1988 (“Six writers remember Joan Didion, the literary prophet of Los Angeles who 'is still full of surprises'” December 4). She starts off with some laughs about how we experience earthquakes and comments about the red-hot real estate market. This concludes with his reflections on the Spelling mansion (then under construction) as a continuation of a scathing comparison between “movie people” and executives.
In Didion's classic prose, she adds anecdotes about how the industry mistreats writers, but she really gets heated when she talks about the writers whose defection sank the 1988 strike. Towards them, she felt “a coldness that bordered on disgust, as if we had gone back forty years and they had named names.” Words to remember as the industry prepares for 2026 contract negotiations.
Alan Paul, Los Angeles
