The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (12 page)

The NLRB invited all professional screenwriters in Hollywood to cast their votes. The Guild had 615 members and the SP had 158, but the producers did everything they could to sabotage the voting process.
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Studio heads issued an edict: writers could not vote on studio property. With strict rules and anti-union sentiment high on the lots, social events and drinking parties became the best places where writers sympathetic to the union could hold conversations with undecided writers over the course of the month leading up to the election. Frances Goodrich tells the story of luring writers up to Dashiell Hammett’s room at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel with the promise of cocktails:

Everyone was coming up there and ordering a drink, getting people to come in there and talk, getting them to join the SWG. Lillian Hellman came out of a room where she’d been talking to a writer named Talbot Jennings . . . and said, “Well if I get Talbot Jennings to join this thing, somebody’s got to pay for the abortion.” Albert [Hackett] added, “Dottie Parker was in another room talking to a writer named Everett Freeman, trying to get him to join the guild, and he said he didn’t think any creative writer should belong to a union. . . . And Dottie simply could not stand that and she lost her patience. “That sonofobitch, telling me that
he’s
a creative writer! If he’s a creative writer, then I’m [Queen] Marie of Romania.”
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Studios refused to provide lists of their employed writers, making it difficult to assess a potential member’s eligibility. Writers sympathetic to the SWG petitioned their fellow writers at each of the studios to vote for the Guild. They even appealed for support from the Inter-Talent Council. As announced in
Variety
, Robert Montgomery, president of SAG, called on writers to vote in favor of the SWG: “It is time for every writer to choose his side. We have no sympathy for fence-sitters. The issue is clear. No vote at all is just as bad as a vote for the Screen Playwrights. Either is a stab in the back, not only to writers but all creative talent. The Screen Actors Guild expects the great body of writers to do its simple duty—vote overwhelmingly for the Screen Writers Guild.”
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Montgomery’s position might seem strange, given the actor’s enthusiastic support of the investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee only nine years later; but at the time, Montgomery and his union stood behind the more liberal-minded SWG. Finally, in the last days of June 1938, by a vote of 267 to 57 and with a majority of votes at every studio, the SWG won the election. The NLRB certified the election in August, and the vote was official. The SWG had won the right to bargain collectively for American screenwriters. Now the Guild had to secure a contract.

The Long Road to a First Contract

[Louis B. Mayer said,] “It needs more comedy. I want you to inject comedy in the comedy scenes.” For the Lion, the Strawman, and the Tin Man. Which I did. A week or so did it, adding laughs. As he told me then, I would get no screen credit, because I was not writing enough footage. But it didn’t matter. I was getting paid, that was the main thing.

—
The Writer Speaks: Irving Brecher
(writer of
Go West
and
Meet Me in St. Louis
; script doctor for
The Wizard of Oz
), 2007

Two years after the screenwriters voted in favor of it, the studios finally declared Hollywood a closed shop for them. The SWG wanted to guarantee that at least 80 percent of writing jobs would be given to its members, but producers demanded consideration for the SP members.
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By September 1938, the SWG had drafted a contract. It asked for a prohibition on switching
a writer off a project midstream, an assurance that writing credits (“screenplay by” and “original story by”) would be determined by the Guild, a threeyear limit on contracts between writers and producers, and Guild control of contract dispute arbitration.

The producers flatly refused this proposal. The writers walked out and petitioned the NLRB for help. They soon realized that they would never get a fair contract until all ties between the studios and the now virtually defunct SP (officially disbanded in September 1939) were severed. By this time, Hollywood was a union town, from the above-the-line creative workers all the way to the below-the-line craftspeople. The Guild and the studios knew it was only a matter of time before a contract would be signed with the SWG. The contract with the Screen Playwrights was finally canceled in 1940.
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When regular bargaining began, the primary goal—beyond simple recognition of the SWG as the writers’ bargaining agent—was to set working conditions, wages, and the reservation of rights on material for independent writers (the minimum basic agreement). The Guild was fighting for long-term employees as well as independent contractors, many of whom felt disenfranchised.
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The Guild believed a two-tiered contract for employees and independent writers was essential to securing the rights of all professional screenwriters.

By 1940, the writers were virtually the only employees at the studios working without the protection of a contract or bargaining rights. The Guild made some concessions in the MBA negotiations and gave producers the first right of refusal, whether or not a writer was working for the studio at the time of creating a particular script. In addition, the Guild waived rights to material from members who wrote during periods of unemployment—so long as the writer was paid for the time if the script was eventually purchased.
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In turn, producers agreed to a 90 percent closed shop after three years at an 85 percent closed shop. This six-month agreement was voted on and ratified in June 1941 as the first Screen Writers Guild contract.

This working agreement would be structured as a seven-year contract open for negotiation after three years and then every two years thereafter. It included Guild control over the determination of screen credits, with an arbitration committee to handle any disputes, a minimum wage of $125 per week, and a mandatory termination notice for independent writers after eight weeks of employment (or status as employees after eight weeks).
The contract prohibited flat fees for scripts under $1,500 ($1,000 for Westerns and action-adventure films). Also, writers had the right to find out whether other writers had been assigned to the same project. Some expenses were allowed for out-of-town writing work, and writers were required to be notified of sneak previews.
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Another issue on the table was speculative
writing. Sheridan Gibney, president of the SWG from 1939 to 1941 and from 1947 to 1948, remembered:

The one thing that we did stress in our initial contract with the producers was that there would be no writing on speculation. This became a hard and fast Guild rule. But as we know now this rule has been subverted and everybody writes on speculation for television and it is one of the basic things in any contract with the producers that the Screen Writers Guild fought for and won and now it has been abandoned.
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Even though speculative writing would not become an issue for several decades, the clarity of the rule at that time—and the level of import placed on it—is worth noting. While negotiating the details of a contract with the studios, the Guild membership also voted to start collecting money to save toward a strike fund. The studios had previously required at least some of their employees to show a viable strike threat in order to be moved to agree to a final contract. The writers, therefore, had to be ready for another showdown.

IMAGE 10   Philip Dunne (right) was a founder of the SWG and later served as vice president from 1938 to 1940. Here he reads through the script for
How Green Was My Valley
with director John Ford (left) and actor Roddy McDowall, c. 1941.

Writers Guild Foundation Archive, Shavelson-Webb Library, Los Angeles

While writers prepared for a strike, the producers started to listen. They were paying attention not just to the growing power of the writers’ labor force, but also to the sounds of war. This was not a time for internal battles. Once the Nazis invaded, Europe rapidly shut down studio productions. Hollywood moguls saw a unique opportunity to make films for audiences craving information and entertainment, not just in the United States but also overseas. Sheridan Gibney posited, “I think that if Pearl Harbor hadn’t occurred we probably would not have gotten any kind of contract at all unless we’d actually gone on strike.”
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When the United States entered the war, the writers convened to discuss their upcoming meeting with the producers. Many in the room felt the war effort was paramount and voted to cease negotiations toward a contract until peace was declared. Harry Tugend, shocked at the idea that all that had been gained by the union could be lost in a moment, urged the writers to let the producers speak first at the meeting, hoping perhaps that the studios would see the need for solidarity within the industry in service toward the country. A few days later at the Brown Derby, the producers committee, the negotiating committee of the SWG, and their respective lawyers gathered. Tugend remembered,

Eddie Mannix, the head of their committee, took the floor. “Okay, you guys. There’s a war on. We don’t know what’s ahead of us. But we do know this. We ain’t got time for any more screwing around. . . . Let’s get this goddamn thing settled. We’ll give the writers a contract. We’ll give ’em as little as we can get away with, but whatever we have to give ’em, let’s get it done!” . . . That’s how we got our contract. It still took months. Factions within the Guild heckling each other, producers whittling down our demands for reasonable minimums. But we finally had a signed contract.
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The fractious contract negotiations were resolved in the early months of 1942. The Guild signed its first contract, the Producer–Screen Writers Guild Inc. Minimum Basic Agreement (MBA) of 1942 with the eight major studios—MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., Columbia, RKO, Twentieth Century–Fox, Universal, and Loew’s Inc.—that controlled 95 percent of first-run exhibition in the United States. Three independent producers also signed: Republic Pictures, Hal E. Roach Studios, and Samuel Goldwyn.

In the end, after this exhausting nine-year battle, what the writers had gained was the formation of a union, jurisdiction over all screenwriters, and the determination of credits. As one of Rosten’s subjects described it, “This was a battle for self-respect.”
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It was as much about recognition as it was about dignity. Yet, in order to get the contract signed, the Guild had to sacrifice two issues that had been critical for writers during this battle. The first was copyright control; writers had to accept that they had lost it to the studios and would never get it back. As John Bright said, “It’s a wistful problem that the screenwriters have always been concerned with and nothing important has ever been done about. It has always been a niggling problem with the Guild because in other fields writers do have that control.”
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The NLRB had determined that the SWG lacked control of copyrights, and it certainly seemed that the writers acquiesced on this point. Their choice not to amalgamate had virtually ended all chance of fighting for authorship—at least for the time being. In 1940, they tried to bar anyone but writers from having the possessory credit (“a film by”), but they were unable to include such a provision in the MBA.
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The power and dignity of authorship that the SWG had fought for in those early days was set aside in exchange for something more tangible: writers’ names established clearly and correctly in credits. That was enough for a first step, they thought.

The second sacrifice was that the new MBA did little to assure salaries beyond minimums. For the Guild’s screenwriters, it had become clear that salaries were determined less by seniority and more by a writer’s credits. Strong credits, and a number of them, would garner more job assignments and a significantly higher salary. Ultimately, having one’s name in a film’s credits was the most powerful gain in this first contract. Writers who had had their names on films had the most powerful weapon for front office salary negotiations. But as writers would soon see, a film credit was also something that could be used against them.

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Two Front Lines