You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Welcome to Bookworm on KCRW.

I'm Michael Silverblatt, your host,

and on the show we talk about literary matters, large and small.

And today we're going to talk about something

I wish I didn't have to call the plight of the screenwriter,

particularly what happens when screenplays come into published form.

The show began for me when I received a catalog from Rutgers University Press

and noticed that they were publishing a new film series called Rutgers Films in Print,

a series that was going to include

Bringing Up Baby, My Darling Clementine, Touch of Evil, Letter from an Unknown Woman,

Meet John Doe, and Chimes at Midnight. Being an obsessive type, I'd always wanted my own

script of bringing up baby. It was one of my favorites. And so I thought,

well, I'm going to have these people send me the whole series, there being a certain benefit to

being a reviewer of books on radio. When I received the books, I was delighted, but I discovered

that they were all of them without the name of the writer on the cover page.

I thought, well, let me see. Let me look at the title page. No writer there. Well, let me look at the table of contents. No writer there either. Discovered that it was only

once you turned to the credit page, often 25, 30 pages into the book, that you found the name

of the writer. On the cover of these books, we have the name of the film, Bringing Up Baby,

...