Because writing is a spectacularly uncinematic occupation, almost all films about writers rely on tricks more congenial to celluloid: to wit, the writer has an adventure, the writer magically produces a book and is instantly famous with complications, the real-life famous writer experiences a spectacular event that prefigures his classic perfectly and establishes that he honestly didn’t make any of that shit up, he was just reporting. Movies about writers are filled with things like publishing houses that send private detectives to figure out when the writer will make a deadline, editors reading and accepting the book while the author sits there and watches him reading it, books published in a fortnight, writers living fabulously wealthy lifestyles on the basis of a paperback original, and – especially, often – printed “novel” manuscripts that don’t look long enough to contain a short story. Sometimes, the idiocy is risible, as in FINDING FORRESTER, where Sean Connery’s faux-Salinger serves as writing guru to a promising young man and shouts at him to type harder.

Very damn few movies, even the best movies about writers, show actual writing. It’s as boring to watch as the construction of Jigsaw puzzles. But here are a few that show off the writer’s mindset, and the odd pathologies of the profession. You will note that a disproportionate number of these actually deal with Writer’s Block, that disorder which critically both gives the writer angst and keeps him away from the workstation, always a good thing in cinematic terms.

REUBEN, REUBEN (1983) – Tom Conti as well-regarded but blocked indigent poet getting by on fees for readings at colleges, who sticks around one such community, irritating the rich husbands of the women he’s been charming. His response to one suburban fellow who has made a bundle marketing a speed-reading program, (“I wish I could read MOBY DICK slower,”) and the dull, resentful glare of the man he’s been speaking to, who feels personally assaulted, is the writer’s isolation captured in toto.

YOUNG ADULT (2011) – Diablo Cody’s screenplay presents us with the alcoholic Mavis Gary, a writer of absolute minimum success (she’s known for churning out volumes in a licensed series, now canceled and out of print), who returns to her home town to stalk the man who she once loved in High School. Her identity as writer is important to her, politely nodded at by everybody else, and regarded with boredom by the bookstore clerk wholly unimpressed that she has found a cut-out copy of one of her volumes, now out of print, for sale at substantial discount.

THE THIRD MAN (1949) – One of the great movies ever made is also about of the great impotent protagonists, hack western writer Holly Martin (Joseph Cotten), who arrives in post-war Vienna following the apparent death of his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles). The splendid thriller aside – and it really is a splendid thriller – the movie is achingly true when it comes to the discomfiture Martin endures, when the local highbrow community insists on inviting him to speak, even though they have no familiarity with his work and would certainly scorn if even if they had.

JULIA (1977) – Another great film, Fred Zinneman’s adaptation of the Lillian Hellman memoir details a bit of pre-war espionage by Hellman (Jane Fonda) that has long been charged as wholly invented. I won’t argue the point. But unlike most of the films on this list, it actually shows the process of writing: the torturous composition of Hellman’s first important work, her self-doubts, her aggravation at the typewriter, her frustration when her first attempts fail to bowl over her lover and first reader Dashiell Hammett (Jason Robards), and finally, the emergence of something worth the effort.

JOE GOULD’S SECRET (2000) – Yet another great film, the true story of New Yorker writer Joe Mitchell (Stanley Tucci) and the mysterious indigent Joe Gould (Ian Holm), who claims to have been working on an oral history of Manhattan. The problem is, the manuscript remains elusive. The last word on literary works praised in advance of their arrival, writing projects that putter out because they’ve been excessively talked about, and the distracting attentions of the literati. Joe Mitchell also had a literary secret, which arrives with the force of a thunderbolt in a closing text.

WONDER BOYS (also 2000) – Rare as it is for two accurate movies about the writing profession to arrive in the same year, and yes, a third is coming, this one is about several different strata of writing career, the nascent, the promising, the overpraised, and finally, in the person of Professor Grady Tripp (Douglas), the once-promising author who made a huge splash with his first novel and has since labored for decades on thousands of pages of a manuscript that shows no sign of stopping anytime soon. His student Hannah (Katie Holmes), hesitantly tells him precisely what’s gone wrong: “It sort of reads in places like you didn’t make any choices.” Exactly right, folks.

STATE AND MAIN (also 2000) – Philip Seymour Hoffman stars in David Mamet’s one uncharacteristically sunny film, about a screenwriter trapped with Hollywood folks making a period piece called THE OLD MILL. Seventeen years before Hollywood’s sexual misconduct scandals finally became overwhelming, the crisis is brought on by a pig of a lead actor (Alec Baldwin), and the writer’s struggle of conscience versus the commercial success that appears just out of reach, at the possible cost of his soul – and all that sounds heavy, but relax, it’s light and delightful and a movie you can take to your heart.

ADAPTATION (2002) – Charlie Kaufman, brought on to write a screenplay based on Susan Orlean’s much-praised but wholly uncinematic book The Orchid Thief, was so stunned by the challenges was instead a screenplay about a fictional Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) wrestling with creative paralysis after being hired to write a screenplay based on that Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep) work. Meanwhile, his fictional twin brother, Donald (also Kaufman) adds to his anxiety level by writing what sounds like a rancid but more commercial (and ultimately successful) screenplay. One of the great movies about the sweaty panics of writer’s block, it also features Chris Cooper and Tilda Swinton.

BARTON FINK (1991) – The Coen Brothers made this authentic writer’s nightmare, about writing to assignment with absolutely no guidelines. The titular pretentious playwright (John Turturro), a man who seems to have only one story in him and no instincts via which to create more, is brought out to Hollywood, subjected to smoke blown up his ass, and told to write a Wallace Beery wrestling picture that nevertheless has “that old Barton Fink feeling.” He has absolutely no idea what this means and the journey takes him to a form of Hell, along with new acquaintances Charlie Meadows (John Goodman), a traveling salesman who “has some stories,” and who ultimately gets to tell Barton just what he thinks about writers who want to write about the working man but won’t listen to him. Then there’s also W.P. Mayhew (John Mahoney), a wreck of a great writer who Fink venerates, but who has been hiding a creative secret for years. Again, it’s about writer’s block. But it’s about process, and the way in which writers can be complicit in their own destruction.

BARFLY (1987) – One of the few Cannon films that was actually a great movie, this adaptation of the universe of Charles Bukowski novels, with a screenplay by that author, is about the raucous life of Henry (Mickey Rourke), a denizen of skid row living in a perpetual state of inebriation, whose life is all about joyfully maintaining that state; he joins up with fellow alcoholic Wanda Wilcox (Faye Dunaway) and, in between drunken adventures, writes a little. It turns out that he needs to live the life he lives in order to write authentically about the life he lives, which is, you know, circular, but hey, it works for him. See also: FACTOTUM (2005), based on the same character.

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP (1982) – John Irving’s novel about the wildly eccentric life of the titular minor literary novelist (Robin Williams), and his relationship with his much more lionized feminist guru mother, Jenny (Glenn Close). Some of the plot’s machinations, and especially its portrait of how the writing business works, are fanciful, but few things capture the writer’s bruised ego more than Garp’s late-night rant about his reaction to finding out that his Mom’s book has been translated into Apache.

FUNNY FARM (1988) – A minor but reasonably effective trifle that damns Chevy Chase with faint praise by being, honestly, one of the few good films of his career, it’s really just a plotless series of aggravations besetting his character and the wife played by Madolyn Smith, after he retires from journalism to write a novel, and they move to a big house in the country. The true-to-life moment comes when, with great fanfare, he hands his wife the first few chapters and orders her to read them. First, he hovers annoyingly, a habit many starting writers seeking feedback have to break; then, he gets her reaction, that the novel is beyond hopeless. In a movie driven by much slapstick, the scene remains funny while also being searingly real.

Please note: I do not claim this to be a complete list. But these remain outliers, because honestly, most times, the movies get it all wrong.

Tags: Adaptation., Barton Fink, Charlize Theron, Coen Brothers, Dashiell Hammett, David Mamet, Diablo Cody, Glenn Close, Jane Fonda, Jason Robards, Joe Gould's Secret, John Irving, Joseph Cotten, Julia, Orson Welles, reuben Reuben, Robin Williams, Stanley Tucci, State and Main, The Third Man, Wonder Boys, writing, Young Adult | Category Movies, Writing