Was there ever a time when writer-producer-director Helgeland, an Oscar-winner for his LA Confidential screenplay, actually wanted a screen version of Chaucer's Knight's Tale?
But this was the 1950s, a time when writers - particularly writers with strong views about post-war social development - were objects of intense public scrutiny.
There was a time when writers could hardly mention the name of the actor Richard Harris, who has died aged 72, without using the dread epithet "hellraiser".
There is something painfully nostalgic about Dreadful, because it recalls a time when writers could rise up so high that their fall might kill them.
There used to be a time when writers, purely on the basis of the books they had published, were invited to eat dinner with presidents.
In any society Fallada would have struggled, but he had the supreme misfortune to be born at a time when writers who wanted to avoid the attentions of the Gestapo could choose between compromise, silence or exile.
At a time when writers often write with calculated eccentricity rather than out of a fateful obsession, and compose memoirs that seem devoid of self-understanding, his raw, original studies of culture and his masterly autobiographies provide a rich diet for famished readers.
At a time when writers sold their plays for a flat fee to an acting troupe, this meant he got a cut of the box office and any publishing fees for his plays essentially getting paid twice for the same work.
There was a time when writers worked their lifetimes for no money or recognition or fame at all, maybe with hopes a post-humus recognition.
The comedian recalled a time when the writer, director, and producer of a film he was working on all tried to convince him to get in drag out of the blue.
But he wrote honestly and unabashedly about desire, male and female, at a time when other writers were more circumspect.
