To the editor: Because none of your literary commentators on Joan Didion mentioned her work as a screenwriter, they missed what may be her best writing about Los Angeles: “Strangers in Hollywood,” published (ironically, in the New Yorker) just after the disastrous 1988 Writers Guild strike (“6 writers remember Joan Didion, L.A.’s literary prophet who ‘remains full of surprise,’” Dec. 4). She opens with some chuckles about how we experience earthquakes and commentary on the red-hot housing market. That concludes with her reflections on the Spelling mansion (then under construction) as a segue to a biting comparison of “movie people” and executives.
In classic Didion prose, she peppers this with anecdotes about how the industry mistreats writers — but really heats up when she talks about the writers whose defection sank the 1988 strike. Toward them, she felt “a coolness bordering on distaste, as if we had gone back forty years, and they had named names.” Words to remember as the industry prepares for the 2026 contract negotiations.
Alan Paul, Los Angeles