Letters to the Editor: Some words to remember from Joan Didion ahead of next year’s WGA negotiations

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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,