The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (34 page)

What became clear to WGA negotiators was that creative workers were vastly underpaid based on what they thought the AMPTP was dispersing in residuals. Talent was not receiving 1.2 percent of the worldwide distribution of the gross receipts for video; rather, they were paid 1.2 percent of 20 percent of the gross, a drastically lower percentage.
¹⁰⁰
The AMPTP had found a way to inject into the contracts its claim that studio costs ate up 80 percent of the gross, especially the expenses associated with copying and distributing the pricy new medium of VHS. The DGA accepted this new financing structure in its next collective bargaining agreement.
¹⁰¹
With its next round of negotiations, the WGA wanted to renegotiate the 80/20 split, but the AMPTP responded that it could not give the WGA something better than it had given the DGA and, ultimately, the SAG.

When the contract expired in 1985, the AMPTP and WGA struggled over demands on ancillary profits from prerecorded films and television series sold on videocassettes. Writers demanded that their share of residuals come from the total wholesale revenues rather than from the 20 percent defined as the producers’ share.
¹⁰²
At the time the “tape issue,” as the press called it, seemed to be a larger concern for screenwriters than for television writers. Home video was the driving new technology, with ancillary revenues rising to over 50 percent of the film industry’s income and domestic theatrical revenue dropping to 36 percent.
¹⁰³
The bulkiness of VHS tapes—and the fact that they could hold only about two hours of programming in standard play
mode—made them an illogical choice for a season’s worth of hour-long television programming. Given that television production was now outpacing film production in New York and Los Angeles, the WGA membership was more focused on the burgeoning cable market than on screenwriters’ percentage of VHS profits.
¹⁰⁴

The Guild voted to strike in 1985, but members were far from united on the matter. A vocal contingent of writers, still angry about the last strike and uninterested in this squabble over tape, was eager to continue working. At an all-membership meeting, this group of anti-strike writers, led by conservative television film writer Lionel Chetwynd (who wrote
Ike
), declared themselves the “Union Blues,” took control of the microphones, and called for the Guild to negotiate a resolution immediately. If the WGA would not “bring us back a deal,” their blue buttons proclaimed, they would go “financial core,” meaning that they would break the strike and not be represented by the WGA. After enduring the 1981 strike, the writers were swayed by this no-strike push, even if some knew that the stakes were incredibly high. In discussing the events years later, Larry Gelbart, writer on
Caesar’s Hour
and of
Tootsie
, said to Chetwynd, “You were the Blues, yeah. . . . Well, you made us look like the Reds, which was a very clever ploy.”
¹⁰⁵

After a brief two-week strike, the Union Blues swayed the opinion of WGAw Executive Director Naomi Gurian, and the walkout ended. The WGA agreed to an $84 million contract and $1.25 million in pension and health benefits in return for an agreement to withdraw all arbitration regarding percentages over videocassette sales residuals.
¹⁰⁶
In a letter to the editor of the
WGAw Newsletter
in May 1985, Edmund Morris, writer on
Lawman
, described the destructive nature of the Union Blues plan.

Those members of our Guild who believe that we have triumphed are sadly deluded. . . . Management played upon the frets of our internal division with consummate skill, infecting our negotiators with the desolation of defeat. Our negotiators carried back Management’s cynical offer and bribe with the pride of a Neville Chamberlain. . . . On the cold and sober morning of March 19, our President told the media that the contract was a lousy one and that “the issue of videocassettes” was “dead for all time.” . . . The Union Blues won a Pyrrhic victory. The tidal wave of rollbacks will drown you and the rest of us in 1988.
¹⁰⁷

Though Morris’s tone sounds inflated, the Union Blues’ victory proved devastating. Television writers who saw videocassettes as an issue only for screenwriters may have had second thoughts. Grace Reiner, who was a lawyer for the WGA at the time, observed, “I find it somewhat telling that Paramount released the entirety of
Star Trek
a month after the Writers Guild strike ended. Coincidence? Maybe.”
¹⁰⁸

Few of the writers interviewed could remember which strike in the 1980s was about which issue. Many of them felt that the issues were not entirely clear to them at the time and that perhaps there was a breakdown between the leadership and the membership about what precisely the union wished to accomplish with each successive strike. Later in 1985, outgoing WGAw president Ernest Lehman, writer of
Sabrina, North by Northwest
, and
The Sound of Music
, expressed a hope for closure on this period of Guild history. “These have been a memorable two years which a lot of us would like to forget and never will, and don’t ask me how the Guild survived the turmoil and the confusion but it did, and [it] even came up with a new contract that to an overwhelming majority of you had meaningful gains, and to a vocal minority was a big disappointment, and each of us swears that he or she knows exactly what did or did not happen and why, but it’s
Rashomon
all over again, with six thousand points of view, all of them equally valid.”
¹⁰⁹
Lehman’s notion of success for the Guild was survival, a low goal given the Guild’s accomplishments in the past (residuals, health care, and pensions). Writers were disgruntled with the Guild and confused by how they had been sideswiped by the AMPTP. Moreover, the financial significance of their loss was not yet apparent to them.

In 1987, news writers at CBS and Capital Cities/ABC went on strike for six weeks. They marched in front of Television City and in Century City. Negotiations proved fruitful for the WGA, in that it expanded its jurisdiction further into news and documentary writing. It was a moment of success in the midst of a series of devastating losses. Just one year later, in 1988, the WGA again entered into negotiations with the AMPTP. The central issues were residuals on foreign sales and syndication and expanded creative rights (access to film sets, comments on casting, rights to review the director’s cut). Many writers hoped, unrealistically, to regain all that had been lost in the 1985 negotiations, but the AMPTP flatly refused to discuss percentages for residuals on VHS, much less overhaul them. Howard A. Rodman captured the mindset of many writers at the time: “When you believe that you have
been screwed out of hundreds of millions of dollars, it’s not the best frame of mind to go into negotiations with because you’re trying to get reparations for past conduct rather than figure out what you can do going forward.”
¹¹⁰
In the spring of 1988, negotiations with the AMPTP broke down, and the WGA went out on strike.

The walkout lasted 155 days (March 7 to August 7), the longest strike in Guild history, and it did not end well for the writers. In May, the WGA signed contracts with sixty-four independent companies, including a number of late-night series. In June, the AMPTP came to negotiations with an offer that acquiesced only on expansion of creative rights—no foreign residual increase, and continued percentage-based domestic residuals. The membership voted by 74.9 percent to refuse the deal, and the strike continued. Cheri Steinkellner remembered the bitterness and deep sense of defeat the membership felt: “Just three years earlier we’d had a big loss that we had not yet recovered from. Those wounds were still so fresh. And so to lose again—it wasn’t even a possibility. And yet, there wasn’t any winning.”
¹¹¹

Brandon Tartikoff, president of NBC Entertainment, issued a two-part ultimatum: if the strike did not end by July 1998, the network would refuse to program series from studios that settled independently with the WGA, and it would begin developing “writer-proof” shows, including reality television.
¹¹²
In circumventing the requisite costs of unionized laborers—actors, directors, writers, cinematographers, editors—production companies and studios were able to make shows cheaply and hold on to their profits completely.
¹¹³
Some shows, like Fox’s
COPS
, emerged out of a plan to counter future strikes. Other networks and studios declared their own plans to punish independent studios that negotiated outside the AMPTP.

In July, the WGA pushed back by filing an antitrust suit against eighteen studios and networks. It was at this point that twenty-one writers filed a charge with the NLRB against the WGA. They declared that they would resign from active membership if the strike was not settled by the end of the month. The WGA and AMPTP jockeyed back and forth for another three weeks, with emissaries working behind the scenes. The membership called a stop to strike actions, and the strike finally ended.
¹¹⁴
Not a single writer interviewed who went through the 1988 strike did not feel angry, defeated, and exhausted by the experience.

In the following years, Brian Walton, the WGA West’s executive director starting in 1985 and a witness to the worst of the 1988 negotiations, was
determined to find an alternative approach. In 1992, he helped establish the Contract Adjustment Committee (CAC). The CAC offered writers, producers, and the companies the opportunity to sit down once or twice a year to discuss contracts and make adjustments to the MBA. As a preemptory bargaining space, the CAC pleased writers and management, neither of whom had any interest in letting negotiations reach a breaking point. In reality, the Guild’s agenda during these years was modest; while little was gained, there were no rollbacks. Some members then, and many more members in hindsight, realized that the CAC placed the Guild in a passive position in terms of negotiating power. Existing agreements were extended in 1992 (a four-year contract that was negotiated early) and 1995. That said, almost a decade of labor peace with no rollbacks was perhaps, as WGA Executive Vice President Chuck Slocum stated, the biggest gain of the 1988 strike.
¹¹⁵
For the next ten years, Guild members were not particularly interested in stirring up controversy. This was the case not only in terms of contract negotiations, but also in terms of questions of public policy or conglomeration of the media industries. It would be twenty years before the membership would vote for another strike.

Corporatization and the “Me” Generation of Writers

The WGA’s defeats in the 1980s were not just the result of a lack of consensus among different communities of writers or a failure to read industry trends regarding residuals from ancillary markets. The merger mania discussed earlier changed not only the structure of the media industries but also the way that executives were doing business. The new type of executive, Marc Norman said, “basically brought business school ethics into the movie business.”
¹¹⁶
George Axelrod agreed: “The producers are no longer colorful. They’re lawyers and accountants and business people.”
¹¹⁷
The first executives running studios had emerged mostly from the exhibition branch of the industry and understood movie-making as a gut industry. The next generation of studio heads worked their way up through the ranks and learned on the job. The executives emerging out of law schools and business schools had little knowledge of the film industry except at the level of viewership and contract law. Moreover, the concerns of the larger parent company focused entirely on immediate profits. “The confusion over market share with profitability is really enormous,” noted writer-producer
Ronald Bass, using a baseball analogy. “So there’s no such thing as a single or a double anymore. It has to be a home run because you have to open it in 3,500 theaters, because if you don’t, you can’t be first.”
¹¹⁸
The growing corporatization, in turn, tended to nurture the cult of star power in both films and television. It was the rise of the “Me” generation in America, and writers and their union were both products and perpetrators of that navel-gazing bias. This was the dawning of era of the million-dollar screenplay and the showrunner.

Melissa Mathison’s arbitration to secure a share of the marketing revenues (from lunchboxes, dolls, clothing, and toys) generated by the little alien she created in her script for
E.T
. (1982) set a precedent for writers. From then on, writers could negotiate licensing and merchandising. By the end of the decade, Joe Eszterhas had sold his script for
Basic Instinct
for $3 million. The story excited not only the trade papers but even the popular press.
¹¹⁹
The names of A-list screenwriters were beginning to appear in the national entertainment sections of newspapers. But even with these huge paydays, screenwriters felt aggrieved. Ronald Bass explained why: “We feel put down because we never have any control and everybody above us tells us what to do. The public doesn’t know who we are. We don’t feel we have respect. So we’re the least satisfied.”
¹²⁰
Though some apects of that attitude have been characteristic of writers since the 1920s, the volatile, dissatisfied screenwriter became a more familiar stereotype after the strikes of the 1980s.

In television, the networks were turning to auteur filmmakers like Michael Mann (who had written and directed
Thief
and
Manhunter
), David Lynch, and Steven Spielberg (who had written
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
and
Poltergeist
) to create upscale programming, a practice that John Caldwell describes as “boutique programming” to lure audiences bored with the assembly-line production of the average series at the time.
¹²¹
Hyphenate writers were paid well beyond scale through their roles as producers on these series. Saul Turteltaub found this trend troubling: “It diminishes the writer’s role. On
The Cosby Show
, there were so many people listed as producers, but they don’t produce! They just write. . . . I think the pride should be in being a writer. Period.”
¹²²