The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (2 page)

IMAGE 1   Summary notes on the pilot episode, “The Target,” from David Simon’s show bible for
The Wire
.

Show Bible Collection, Writers Guild Foundation Archive, Shavelson-Webb Library, Los Angeles

The main reason the studios and the producers are scared of [writers] is because they know that they are crazy, that writers will do things that could be considered either suicidal or heroic, depending how you look at it—which is to act against what seems to be their best interests. . . . They are a particular breed. . . . It is the most miserable thing—you sit by yourself, wanting to kill yourself, looking at this blank screen, and who would want to do that?

—Walter Bernstein (writer of
The Front
and
Miss Evers’ Boys
), interview with the author, 16 July 2009

Screenwriters are storytellers, dream builders, and, more often than they would like, simple workaday hacks. They envision new worlds and the beings to populate them, bringing them to life through storylines and idiosyncratic details. Writers craft tales of heroism against all odds—so much so that they are sometimes swept up in the formula, becoming their own plucky protagonists in epic behind-the-scenes Hollywood dramas. Walter Bernstein, a sixty-year industry veteran and blacklist survivor, feels compelled to write by an artistic zeal and a fearless drive for individual expression. Screenwriters exist in their professional community as socially alienated intellectuals, spurned luminaries, and entertainment’s most replaceable but ultimately indispensable artists. They are creative workers building widgets within a capitalist system, fabricating stories for others to bring to life. United as a labor group, these vociferous and contentious hero-makers have lived through many episodes of industry drama writ large.

The history of each unique writer in the American entertainment industry is further revealed in the thorny tale of the union that has represented them for more than eighty years. Generation by generation, writers and their union have fought to stay afloat amid evolving screen technologies, production
methods, distribution models, and shifts in the industry’s economy.
¹
Rather than proactively bargaining for innovative contracts, the Writers Guild’s labor negotiations emerge as reactions to industrial economics and national politics. At each juncture in the history of their craft, writers have grappled with traditional definitions of authorship, insider status, and creativity.

While most books on screenwriting focus on the script drafting process, often narrowing to an examination of an individual career arc,
The Writers
mines the collective experiences of writers as media practitioners and tracks the conditions of their creative labor. In the process of researching this book, I collected more than two hundred accounts of professional storytellers from in-person or historic interviews, memoirs, and archival documents. This task of patching together oral histories—each tainted by faulty memory, opinion, personal politics, and creative enhancement and omission—is, as one writer put it, “a kind of
Rashomon
.”
²
The broader history I unearth is larger than the amalgamation of these narratives. In more than eighty years of American film and television history, writers have initiated action in pursuit of collective rights more frequently than any other professional group.

Five key moments in media history triggered monumental shifts in the profession: the formation of the Screen Writers Guild in 1933, the era of the blacklist, the wildfire expansion of television and the ensuing strike of 1960, battles over hyphenate roles and ownership in the 1970s and 1980s, and the strike of 2007–2008. In reviewing writers’ accounts of these landmark moments, I trace three concerns that inevitably manifest themselves in each era: ownership of creative work, the adjudication of credits, and the liminal boundaries of membership and community.

Defining the Writer and the Guild

BANKS: Why do you think writers have been at the forefront of labor issues in Hollywood?

NORMAN LEAR, creator of
All in the Family
: Maybe because they’re paid to think.

—Interview, 20 August 2013

Before diving into this rich and layered history, I want to specify what I mean by screenwriters, how I define the scope of their work, and what a writers’ guild does. Screenwriters are practitioners who put pen to paper (or fingers
to keyboard) and set a scene. I define screenwriters as industry professionals who write for screened entertainment, whether their work appears on film, television, a video game, or streaming media. They plot narrative, craft characters and give them unique voices, and devise the action that unfolds on the page and, ultimately, the screen. Irving Thalberg, the much-celebrated head of production at MGM in the 1920s and 1930s, interrogated the writer of
Street of Chance
and script doctor Lenore Coffee at a story meeting: “What’s all this business about being a writer? It’s just putting one word after another.” To which Coffee responded, “Pardon me, Mr. Thalberg. It’s putting one
right
word after another.”
³

Ideally, the work of writing is complete before the cameras roll. Writers either conceive a story idea or they are the first employees hired to flesh out someone else’s vision. In most cases, they arrive long before a cast or crew. Mel Brooks, who has worked in every facet of the artistic process, hailed writing as the highest of all the creative crafts in entertainment: “It’s the most splendid job . . . of all the jobs in Hollywood. The toughest job. . . . You would think the miracle would be starring or appearing in a movie, getting a movie job directing? No. The miracle is . . . getting your screenplay made into a movie. . . . Getting your dream realized. That is the biggest miracle.”
⁴

George Axelrod, an acclaimed playwright and novelist who adapted both
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
and
The Manchurian Candidate
for the screen, declared script writing to be the most demanding form of writing. “A screenplay is the hardest single form there is. . . . It’s continuous, razor-edge-of-now action. You aren’t allowed any mistakes, because the audience is a fantastic entity. You can have 1,100 morons sitting in the audience, but when they come together in the darkness, an almost mystical thing happens, a kind of mass unconsciousness that is smarter than you are. They can spot a phony a mile off.”
⁵

But writing takes time. Although the screenwriter is a vital player in the production process, cast and crew often gripe about the protracted period of creation. Robert Towne, who scripted
Chinatown
and the film version of
Mission: Impossible
, explained why: “Until the screenwriter does his job, nobody else has a job. In other words, he is the asshole who keeps everybody else from going to work.”
⁶
When assuming the role of producer, though, a writer works in the front office and on the set. In the world of television, writers increasingly hold producer credits. As
Cheers
showrunner Cheri Steinkellner noted, “The easiest, quickest way to get from page to stage is to just do it. To be the ultimate interpreter.”
⁷

The script is the first step toward a leap of faith that the cast, the crew, and ultimately the audience must willingly make to enter into the universe of a filmed narrative. Even when a writer delivers the work, the plan is only partly detailed. A screenplay does not equate to a film, nor does a television script amount to an episode. As Philip Dunne, screenwriter of
The Last of the Mohicans, How Green Was My Valley
, and
Pinky
, remarked, “The true analogy of script to picture is that of architect’s blueprint to finished house. Without the first, the second could not exist. No director can make a good picture out of a bad script, and it takes a very bad director indeed to ruin a good one, though it has been done.”
⁸
Paul Schrader, who scripted
Taxi Driver
and
Raging Bull
, echoes this analogy: “A screenwriter is not really a writer; his words do not appear on the screen. What he does is to draft out blueprints that are executed by a team.”
⁹
Screenwriters, then, are architects who might never visit the construction site. If a writer is not also the producer on a project, often the job ends after the planning phase. Writer Charlie Kaufman parodies this phenomenon in
Adaptation
when Charlie Kaufman the character arrives on the set of
Being John Malkovich
. Not only does the crew fail to recognize him as the film’s writer, they even find Charlie’s presence distracting and ask him to step out of the way.

Although writers dream of crafting scripts that are ready to be shot as written, in reality they are often called back, or others are hired in their place, for multiple rewrites. Sometimes a script is purchased and then shelved. If a project moves forward, cast and crew build upon the blueprint, collaborating to realize plot and characters. In the early days of the industry, most writers worked under long-term contracts with studios. Now, more often than not, a writer works script by script. The time it takes to move from script to screen varies depending on the medium. Norman Lear found pleasure in both short and long formats: “You can have an idea on the first of the month and by the eighteenth, deliver it to . . . sixty million people [in television]. . . . But a movie, you can complete and make love to it for a year.”
¹⁰

If a writer lands on a successful television show, the work, no matter how satisfying, can become a routinized act of multitasking. Saul Turteltaub, who wrote on
Candid Camera, The Carol Burnett Show
, and
Sanford and Son
, dismissed any notion of his work as glamorous: “I’ll tell you the truth, a job is a job, and having a job was the most important thing. And bringing home a check . . . and supporting my family. . . . One show led to the other. As far as the work was concerned, it was just the same work,
sitting down, then at a typewriter, and typing, and turning it in, and hoping it was performed.”
¹¹
As Turteltaub acknowledged, the writing itself is creative, but the task of writing a formulaic episode each week becomes habitual. Elias Davis, writer on
M*A*S*H*
and
Frasier
, provided a similar perspective: “You write for TV, you sit down and basically every week you’re doing about three or four things at once. You’re breaking the stories for new scripts, you’re writing a script, you’re rewriting another script, and you’re working on a script that’s onstage that week. And at the end of that week, one of those is . . . done. And then everything moves up on the checkerboard one square. . . . You come into the office every day, five days a week, sometimes six. . . . It’s a lunch-pail kind of job.”
¹²
Television writers parcel out their weeks between writing alone, hammering out scripts in the writers’ room (more so if they are writing a comedy), and, if they are also producers, tweaking lines on the spot as needed. The work is varied and collaborative. And, as Turtletaub said, it is often rote.

IMAGE 2   Writing staff of
Caesar’s Hour
in the office, c. 1955. Left to right front: Gary Belkin, Sheldon Keller, Mike Stewart, Mel Brooks. Back: Neil Simon, Mel Tolkin, Larry Gelbart.

Mel Tolkin Collection, Writers Guild Foundation Archive, Shavelson-Webb Library, Los Angeles

Many writers try to seek a balance, making the most of their talent and passion while complying with the needs and expectations of the executives who pay them. Feigning the former rarely works on the page. William Goldman, who wrote
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men
, and
The Princess Bride
, insists that writers should work only on stories they are passionate about, not ones they think will sell. “This sounds so rabbinical, but you can only write what you give a shit about. And you have got to keep doing that. For example, if you don’t like special effects movies, don’t try to write one, because it will suck. . . . I don’t like special effects movies. . . . It would be ridiculous for me to try to write one. You have got to try to write about something you care about—that sounds really corny, but it’s true.”
¹³
Alvin Sargent, writer of
Paper Moon
and
Ordinary People
, echoed this sentiment when touting the superlative skills of a peer: “Well, I shouldn’t say this because he’s a friend of mine—but I wish I’d written
Cool Hand Luke
. But I can’t write that stuff. There’s a kind of muscle in Frank Pierson’s work. He’s extremely articulate. He’s a very, very bright guy with a history, in every way, as a journalist, a fighting Marine. I’m a nice guy. I did write [for]
Naked City
. But in my
Naked City
, the writing was
nice
.”
¹⁴

Many television writers make their way in the industry by emulating the voice of a series creator. Courtney Lilly, writer on
Arrested Development
and
The Cleveland Show
, explained how television writing often means learning to be a brilliant mimic: “You are writing in somebody else’s voice for a living. There are people that make a living with that as their primary skill set. And there are people like David E. Kelley [who originated
Ally McBeal
] who just create shows, and that’s kind of their thing. . . . And the people with the most versatility are the ones that have the most opportunity to work. It is a job. It’s fun, it’s creative, it’s great. But just like anything else, it’s not like ‘Ah, I’ve arrived! It’s perfect!’ It’s not like that.”
¹⁵
The bureaucratic structure of the industry does weigh heavily on many writers, making them feel they must disengage with their own creative visions and become team members in order to succeed.