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Million Dollar Baby writer Paul Haggis is carving himself out a nice little part-time career of whining in the press about how his aspirations to bring his heavy-handed vision to the big screen have been hampered by his sordid past as a (get ready for it) highly paid, successful television writer. [Ed.note—We'd gasp audibly, but we're too busy vomiting in horror!].

But when it came to "Crash" — a film he wrote and directed that looks at race and class among Americans in Los Angeles — he said no major studio would give him the money to shoot it because, among other things, Hollywood saw him as a TV guy. "The stigma is still there. No matter how many times someone breaks through, they still think that is the one exception," Haggis said, referring to studio executives.

"There's a snobbery in Hollywood, actually," he added with a slight touch of sarcasm.

Perhaps most galling is the humiliating treatment he receives from the movie executives who still won't accord him the respect due a writer of his Oscar-nominated stature. Each time he arrives at a studio lot, he's picked up in a golf cart, forced to wear a dunce cap emblazoned with a scarlet "TV," and driven slowly past a throng of film development types who chant lines he wrote on Diff'rent Strokes. He still can't make it through the "Wha'choo talkin' 'bout, Willis?" section without bawling.