Dec. 7, 2025 7 AM PT
To the editor: As a result of none of your literary commentators on Joan Didion talked about her work as a screenwriter, they missed what could also be her finest writing about Los Angeles: “Strangers in Hollywood,” revealed (paradoxically, within the New Yorker) simply 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 expertise earthquakes and commentary on the red-hot housing market. That concludes along with her reflections on the Spelling mansion (then below development) as a segue to a biting comparability of “film folks” and executives.
In traditional Didion prose, she peppers this with anecdotes about how the business mistreats writers — however actually heats up when she talks in regards to the writers whose defection sank the 1988 strike. Towards them, she felt “a coolness bordering on distaste, as if we had gone again forty years, they usually had named names.” Phrases to recollect because the business prepares for the 2026 contract negotiations.
Alan Paul, Los Angeles
