The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (32 page)

Blinn lamented the decline of the television film in the 1980s: “We lost a lot when television lost movies of the week. Movies of the week meant two nights a week and sometimes three nights a week there would be a story you hadn’t seen before with characters you didn’t know about. Some of it was kind of awful and predictable and silly. Some of it, occasionally, was absolutely wonderful and heart-stopping and they were taking risks because they couldn’t say, ‘Oh, let’s do what we did last week.’ We didn’t do anything last week.”
⁶⁴

In the realm of comedy, CBS stole Saturday nights in the ratings with season after season of extraordinary series in the 1970s:
All in the Family, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show
, and
The Carol Burnett Show
. Fred Silverman, who was the head of programming at CBS at the time and who, with Bob Wood, scheduled the series in a block, called Saturday “probably the best night of television in the history of television. People didn’t go out on Saturday night.”
⁶⁵
Paramount produced
M*A*S*H
, but the rest of these series, like much of primetime in this decade, originated from independent television production companies.

The rise of these production companies—and the reason for their two decades of success—was a direct outcome of the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules (Fin-Syn) established by the Federal Communications Commission in 1970. Fin-Syn prohibited networks from owning equity in the programming they aired, including syndication rights to series. These new rules allowed the Hollywood studios to invest more in television programming and encouraged the formation of independent production companies, including Lorimar, Carsey-Werner Productions, Aaron Spelling Productions, Stephen J. Cannell Productions, MTM, and Tandem/TAT.

IMAGE 21   Opening page of the show bible for Allan Burns and James L. Brooks’s
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
, c. 1970.

Allan Burns Collection, Writers Guild Foundation Archive, Shavelson-Webb Library, Los Angeles

Great production houses made a programmer’s job easier: they had already vetted writers and series—and paid for them. They knew the character of the networks and could assess whether a series might find an audience. Fred Silverman appreciated the simpler corporate structure of the networks at the time, which made the process of greenlighting a series easier and faster. There might be challenges bringing a series to air, but once he had a hit and was working with known hyphenates or established independent production companies, he could make decisions quickly. For example, he told the story of asking Garry Marshall to pull together a test pilot (in fact, just a few scenes) for a possible
Laverne and Shirley
spin-off from
Happy Days
. “It makes a big difference to be able to do something quickly, but also to be able to recognize something that’s good. . . . That was probably the best program development.”
⁶⁶

Easily the most exciting independent players in television production, especially for writers, were Grant Tinker at Mary Tyler Moore’s MTM and Norman Lear at Bud Yorkin’s Tandem/TAT Productions. John Caldwell argues that many series created under the leadership of Lear and Tinker challenged audiences’ opinions on contemporary social issues and intellectual problems but were conservative in terms of their visual aesthetic. “Although the old aesthetic standbys—liveness, character acting, and sensitive writing—increased in programming value and stature during this period, many of television’s stylistic capabilities were essentially ignored. . . . For both Tandem and MTM, then, company style was defined entirely as an issue of content, not form.”
⁶⁷
In part, the rationale behind high-content, low-style series was to allow the production companies to create television on a limited budget. If they saved on the aesthetic side, Tandem and MTM could reinvest their profits in more series that they loved and believed would succeed. If the series failed, they were stuck with the bills. Lear described his sense of personal and social responsibility for the programming he created and for the series that his company produced with little to no financial help from the networks. When asked about deficit financing, Lear replied, “Nobody would make
Mary Hartman
so I made
Mary Hartman
. We paid for that. I don’t think of it as deficit financing, we just fucking paid for it.”
⁶⁸

These two independent companies put their money into making intelligent, content-rich, topical programming using extraordinary acting, directing, and writing talent. Pretty much every writer during the era wanted to work on an MTM or Tandem series. Susan Harris, who scripted the abortion episode of
Maude
and later went on to create
Benson
and
The Golden Girls
, expressed her gratitude for working with producers and executives who let her push social and cultural boundaries. “Comedy is a less threatening way to deliver messages to audiences. . . . The first job was to entertain and then I was always looking for something more, something to say, to express myself. And sometimes that comes from a very dark place.”
⁶⁹
Allan Burns described working with Grant Tinker at MTM: “Everybody wanted to work there because of Grant. You knew you would be backed up. The writer came first. . . . That was his
modus operandi
for everything that happened at MTM. He would hire the best people he could find, listen to their ideas, they would work out an idea together, and he would say, ‘Go do it.’ And, if it was good, he knew it. . . . Look at
St. Elsewhere
, which started with very low ratings. So did
Hill Street Blues
. And then when he went to NBC and started
Cheers
and
Cosby
? He protected everybody.”
⁷⁰

The two companies had a friendly rivalry. Robert Schiller, who was the head writer for
Maude
, used to joke about
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
as light entertainment: “We have a two-parter on abortion and they’re going to counter with a three-parter on mayonnaise.”
⁷¹
The two programs were arguably the most forward-thinking series about women that had ever been on American television. Norman Lear talked about his relationship with Grant Tinker and how they partnered in picking writers who would best fit their shows: “We actually could talk about what was best for the writer. [If both] of us wanted the same writer, where was the better opportunity? . . . That came up several times. It was easy for us because we cared about the writer.”
⁷²
The sense from many writers interviewed was that the system was less paternalistic than it was dedicated to working with writers to craft their skills and to encourage excellence.

David Isaacs and his writing partner Ken Levine mapped three distinct schools of writing in the era: Norman Lear’s “socially aware comedy”; MTM’s “more sophisticated and smarter and character-based” formula; and “the Garry Marshall school [then Miller-Milikis-Boyett Productions], which was silly and fun and really well written.” A comedy writer who could get into one of those companies would be “well-served, you’d learn a lot.”
⁷³
Isaacs and Levine were both talented and lucky enough to land sought-after staff writing
jobs. Increasingly, during the 1970s and 1980s, there were far more writers looking for work than film and television studios could absorb. And not everyone felt that the playing field for employment was level.

Representation in the Room

Four or five years ago, I was in that woman-writer trap. If it was a show about Army, Navy, business, or war, I had no chance at all. Babies, crying, love, or an ovarian cyst—then I was your writer.

—Lila Garrett (writer on
Bewitched, All in the Family
, and
The Nanny
), quoted by Martha Humphrey in
Fade In
1 (Summer 1979): 34

Even though women writers had been working in Hollywood since the earliest days of the film industry, their representation in the WGA and among writers of produced films and television series was scant at best in the 1970s and 1980s. Alvin Sargent recalled that in the 1960s and 1970s the number of women writers was so small that they stood out in the room: “What I remember most about meetings was there were mostly men and then little by little women started [appearing]. You’d say, ‘There’s a woman!’ And then more and more women, until now it doesn’t make any difference.”
⁷⁴
Sargent is not entirely accurate. The percentages of men and women are still uneven, and the number of minorities is still meager.

The WGA has tracked the employment of women and minorities in television more diligently than in film, both because the overall employment numbers are higher and because the turnover of employees is faster (television writers are sometimes rehired for subsequent seasons). In April 1974, the Guild sent signatory companies a report on how many men and women were writing for television series. Although 13 percent of the Guild’s members were women, only 6.5 percent of the current season’s television series had hired at least one female writer on staff or as a freelance writer.
⁷⁵
Of the sixty-two primetime series identified in the survey, twenty-six of them had never hired a female writer. Even more telling, only 1.5 percent of pilots on the air in 1973 were written by women. The Guild emphasized that, “[w]hile we do not favor the employment of one writer over another and we do not and will not recommend any particular writer for employment, we do want all of our members to have an
equal chance
at employment.”
⁷⁶
WGA Executive Director
Michael Franklin signed this letter, but his commitment to the general cause was less than fervent. “I had meetings with several women, four or five women, who had formed a group. And I tried, and we had little gains. We made all kinds of threats to the studios, and we filed suit for the women, and got something, but it was still bad. But with the women writers from the Guild there wasn’t anything done. We ignored them [laughs]. There were a number of women that were successful writers, but it was obvious there should have been more.”
⁷⁷
Franklin’s letter did some good, at least for a while. Veteran soap opera showrunner Jean Rouverol Butler recalled “a sudden rush of—at least—tokenism on the part of producers.”
⁷⁸

That is not to say that women were not involved in the production of television series. A good number of women worked as script supervisors (then known as “script girls”) and producers. When asked about women and minorities in the writers’ room, Norman Lear argued that women were critical to the functioning of the production. “For me, it has nothing to do with color or sex. That was true of everybody in our little club. Most of the people could have been in the writers’ room. There was never a show that was produced by men. They were all women. The people who held it together—kept the schedules, kept everybody on time—were women. They carried the script, they knew every word, and they had every schedule, and they had every relationship that mattered, that the director didn’t have. They were all women. The glue. The glue was all women.”
⁷⁹
But the “glue” that was holding the production together was not leading it on the set or in post-production.

The statistics had not improved much by the end of the year, when the WGA Women’s Committee reported that among 106 production companies it surveyed, sixty-one had posted no writing credits at all for women.
⁸⁰
Chaired by Noreen Stone (writer on
Amy
and later
Dynasty
), Joyce Perry (writer on
Room
222 and
Land of the Lost
), and Howard Rodman, the group tallied the genders of all writers paid by the networks to write primetime series during the 1973 season. The gender ratios for top-rated series were remarkably skewed (see
table 4.1
). The report stressed the dismal representation of women writers at the three major networks: 10.8 percent at ABC; 8.2 percent at NBC; and 8.4 percent at CBS.
⁸¹
Yet women were scripting some of the most impressive shows on the air. In 1974, Fay Kanin and Treva Silverman (
The Monkees
) were singled out at the Emmy Awards with special awards for Writer of the Year in the categories of Special and Series, Kanin for
Tell Me Where It Hurts
and Silverman for
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
.

.   .   .

TABLE 4.1.
WGA Women’s Committee Statistics on 1973 Network Primetime Series