The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (37 page)

This is not to say that union workers were not employed on these shows. Rather, they found temporary employment on reality series. As the number of feature films and scripted series being shot in Los Angeles and New York
decreased, the ranks of writers looking for work grew. Thus, some union writers—along with new writers—tried to make ends meet by working on these “unscripted” series. Even though shooting scripts for reality television often consist of sketches, monologues for hosts, or stories developed after the fact out of captured footage, reality producers inevitably needed professional writers—often now called story producers or story editors—to craft narrative arcs. As one former sitcom writer, now a story producer, said of his work: “I used to write with all the words in Webster’s Dictionary at my disposal; now I write with whatever words Paris Hilton says.”
³¹

Home video game console sales became robust during the 1980s, and video arcade games began luring some young audiences away from movie theaters and live television. In the following two decades, video games matured in content, technology, and market reach. Some game companies designed content to be played on consoles plugged into a television set; others created content for computers and handheld devices. As games became increasingly complex and their story worlds more advanced, game production houses recognized that they could no longer focus solely on game play and graphics. They now needed skilled writers to build narrative and dialogue. In 1996, writer Del Reisman, who was president of the WGA from 1991 to 1993, described the union’s attempts to include new media within its jurisdiction: “We are deeply involved in preparing our members for the exploding interactive media, with frequent seminars, panels, and demonstrations. . . . We are no longer in an institutional industry. New production entities with new sources of financing, new patterns of co-production and new lines of distribution and exhibition are forming and reforming.”
³²
However, members’ comprehension of video games in the 1990s mostly came from their experiences as players or as parents of players rather than as writers interested in new narrative structures, let alone as employees considering professional opportunities.

Compared with steady improvements in visual and gaming technologies, advances in game writing were often slower to emerge. John Zuur Platten, a WGA member and game writer of
Transformers: The Game
, recalled: “When I started writing games, the girl answering the phones at the front desk, who took a creative writing class in junior college, wrote the game’s dialogue and didn’t get any extra pay for that.”
³³
As game writers recount, this disjunction led to a kind of reverse engineering of game narratives. Writers were often called in to consult on projects to fill in narrative gaps or
to write dialogue after much of the technological structure and design of the game had already been created.

Like everyone else working within video game production, game writers were not necessarily based in New York or Los Angeles, and so the notion of unionization under the WGA was hardly on their radar. The industry’s work ethic modeled Silicon Valley far more than Hollywood. Even if some writers of these games were WGA members who also wrote for film or television, it was impossible to push the game companies to agree to Guild rules. Some writers thought they might have a better chance of unionizing once the major media conglomerates began making games. As video game writer and WGA member Christy Marx said in 2004, “The changeover
will
come when more of the big media conglomerates are controlling this stuff. Companies that just come from the game world purely, they’re used to abusing people. It’s common for managers to work people 80 hours a week and run them into the ground. It’s sort of taken for granted in the game world.”
³⁴
Because of these attitudes, the unionization of games workers is still in its infancy.

The Digital Versatile Disc, an optical disc storage format, was a revolution for the industry. The combination of cheaper production costs and higher retail value meant that every dollar earned by a VHS was doubled by a DVD sale in the increasingly powerful home video market.
³⁵
For writers, the DVD was not just an ancillary marketing tool; because of DVD extras that often included conversations with cast and crew, many writers’ names became more prominent and their faces more recognizable to interested audiences. Writers could be heard in DVD commentaries, could be seen in behind-the-scenes extras, and could communicate directly to the audience via commentary or conversation on websites. In particular, consumers became addicted to DVD box sets of television series, learning along the way about the series’ showrunners, who were promoted in the DVD extras as the real-life heroes responsible for creating or shepherding the beloved series. The Guild tried to take advantage of this trend; an internal memo to WGA executive director Brian Walton from members of the WGA staff in 1995 suggested that the “writer is a box of soap”: “We have a product to sell, the writer. We need to market our products. We know there is a need for our product. We need to establish the
brand image of the writer
. . . . BENEFIT: establishes writer[s] as superstars in mass media. Also creates economic return for the Guild.”
³⁶

Especially for television, this brand-name recognition defies the nature of collective authorship, and yet the industry and the popular press continue to celebrate the individual writer as a new iteration of the American Dream.
³⁷
Writer-producer David Goodman remarked: “As a career track, most people in the country weren’t aware that you could break into it. Now they have heard of these people, they start to identify with them, and they want to be a writer. More people are understanding that there is a man behind the curtain and ‘Maybe I want to do that.’
”
³⁸
Media studies scholar Denise Mann refers to the persistence of the singular auteur as an obsolete paradigm in a discussion of contemporary quality television production.
³⁹
And yet, the DVD box set promotes the writer-auteur of a television series in ways previously never imagined.

All of these developments show how this period in American media industries was an era of prolonged and profound transition, mergers and acquisitions, centralization and further deregulation, significant technological transformation, and concentration of capital. Media scholar Michael Curtin describes how this dynamic impulse created “interactive exchanges, multiple sites of productivity, and diverse modes of interpretation and use.”
⁴⁰
The rise of digital media, the fragmentation of audiences, and the conglomeration of media corporations in the 1990s set American media on new economic, social, political, and cultural paths as they entered a new millennium.

The State of the Guilds

Homogenization is good for milk, but bad for ideas.

—Patric Verrone, president of the WGA West, statement read before the FCC public hearing on media ownership, 3 October 2006
⁴¹

As DVDs grew in popularity, writers realized precisely how much they had lost in their 1988 negotiations. Robin Schiff, who wrote
Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion
, explained: “Having been in the Guild . . . since 1980, I’ve been around not only for strikes, but also [long enough] to have a sense of how the membership views the Guild—which was incompetent, a joke, not worth standing behind, like a litter of puppies that you couldn’t get together. And in a way, that’s what the companies counted on. There was so much
division within our own membership that we could never be effective. You can argue that one guild can’t be effective by itself anyway when seven multinational corporations are basically allowed to negotiate together and have a consortium.”
⁴²
Schiff’s frustrations with the Guild echo many WGA members’ concerns that every three years they faced an increasingly powerful force across the table at contract negotiations. To Wall Street’s delight, in 1995 Disney purchased Cap Cities/ABC for $19 billion, creating a conglomerate with a combined calculated worth of $48 billion. A year later, Time Warner purchased Turner Broadcasting System, and Viacom picked up Paramount and, later, CBS for $34.8 billion. With little inflationary pressure, media industry expansion in this New Economy increased rapidly.

By 1994, the WGA leaders realized they were gaining little ground in the bargaining space of the Contract Adjustment Committee (CAC), created in 1992 by WGA West executive director Brian Walton, as discussed in
Chapter 4
. Walton then began to promote pattern bargaining with the DGA and SAG and warned the companies that if the CAC meetings in June 1994 did not yield reasonable increases, the Guild would insist on returning to traditional negotiations—which could, at some point, trigger another strike. This ultimatum worked for a month, but then negotiations with the companies and the other guilds became contentious. At the time, the WGA was in a difficult battle with the DGA over the possessory credits, and pattern bargaining fell apart.

The Guild worked out a collective bargaining agreement with the networks that was signed in December 1994, but an agreement with the AMPTP was not completed until February 1995. Walton’s original plan, designed to save time and energy, had turned into an exhausting nine-month-long deliberation that inched forward piecemeal. Grace Reiner, WGA counsel at the time, knew that the membership felt disengaged from the process and that, for them, the ends could not justify the means. “We said, ‘This really got you a better deal than you were going to get.’ . . . But they just didn’t see the value of it because they hadn’t lived through it. When you don’t see what’s behind the curtain, you don’t see how much work is being done.”
⁴³
The membership preferred traditional negotiations along with membership meetings, opportunities for input and discussion, and last and final offers. For them, more transparent results were better than closed-door meetings.

Walton’s idea for the 1998 negotiation cycle was to make sure that industry management followed through across the board on the terms
that had been agreed to in earlier cycles and to align Guild members solidly behind their leadership. Walton went into writers’ rooms, talked to many major screenwriters, and started meaningful, deliberate negotiations early. He implemented stronger arbitration provisions to protect writers’ interests and added more arbitrators. Unfortunately, by then, WGA the West membership had already chosen Walton as the scapegoat for all their frustrations with the union. In 1997, Mona Mangan announced that the East was breaking with the West on a joint contract, and the WGA lost leverage on that round of negotiations. In the end, the WGA returned to traditional arbitration.

In September 1998, after a year of protracted debate regarding the MBA, WGAw president Daniel Petrie Jr. (writer of
Beverly Hills Cop
) and vice president John Wells (showrunner for
ER
) called for a poll among the membership to determine what they wanted from their leadership and for a referendum vote to preserve the early termination clause in Walton’s contract.
⁴⁴
Voter turnout was quite low, only 1,742, with 52.9 percent voting against a poll on strategic goals and against a modification of Walton’s employment contract.
⁴⁵
The matter was taken to the Board of Directors, which reached a fair settlement with Walton and terminated his contract. For six months, an internal three-person committee composed of Paul Nawrocki, Ann Widdifield (both assistant executive directors), and Grace Reiner (director of contract administration) ran the WGA West.

After the 1997 negotiations, ill will between the East and West branches made upcoming negotiations increasingly difficult. Members in the East considered themselves union people, and for almost ten years they had been a part of the AFL-CIO, whereas the West branch had no such affiliation. Elias Davis only part jokingly believed his eastern counterparts considered him and the other members in the West “a bunch of Hollywood dilettantes.”
⁴⁶

John McLean, a former industrial relations executive at CBS who was well-versed on labor and contract law, was hired to replace Walton in May 1999. Presuming that someone who had worked for management might prove a smarter player in negotiations, Guild leaders thought they would now have a strategic edge with the studios. But members almost uniformly recalled McLean’s tenure as disastrous. In 2001, WGA members took a strong stance as they went into negotiations, threatening a strike. But the companies were not convinced of the threat. McLean’s focus was entirely on
establishing News Corporation as a signatory, effectively ignoring a chance for negotiations with cable networks. As one writer recalled, “Basically his plan backfired and we got nothing, or nothing to speak of. Let’s put it this way: we started out by asking for $225 million over four years for the improvements in the contract. We got $5 [million].”
⁴⁷

Although the contract McLean brokered was helpful in some areas, the deal was structured around Fox. Grace Reiner saw that choice as personal rather than tactical. “I said, ‘I want to tell you something, John. You’re making Fox a network will get $600,000 a year. . . . I want to focus on HBO and Showtime and get those people more than a million dollars a year.’ His was a personal thing. It was about Fox.”
⁴⁸
McLean’s tendency to push his personal goals to the forefront did not end there. He was a central player in the increasingly tense relationship between the West and the East.

In 2003, under the leadership of Vicki Riskin, the WGA West launched a billboard campaign in well-trafficked areas of Hollywood and West Los Angeles in celebration of the Guild’s seventieth year, but also with the clear intention of bringing literal visibility to the Guild among a particular echelon of Hollywood players. The black-and-white billboards showed a close-up of a writer’s face next to a famous line of dialogue from one of his or her films, with a small WGA West insignia at the bottom. Marc Norman, the Guild member who devised the campaign, said, “We wanted to change their minds a bit: Here’s a line you know. Here’s the face of the writer. You should know who this is—and if you don’t, you oughta make it your business to find out.”
⁴⁹
William Goldman, one of the first writers picked for the campaign, expressed his hope for it: “Everybody always thinks that all the directors have the visual concepts and the actors make up all their lines. There is such an ignoring of the craft of screenwriting that anything that calls attention to it is a big help.”
⁵⁰
That the billboards neglected to include the writers’ names was yet another example of the Guild failing its membership. As noted above, a number of writers on the 2004 negotiating committee were exasperated by their experience. A group of them, some of whom had been involved during the San Francisco accords, banded together to run for office. They had a vision for what they wanted the Guild to become and a plan of action. They called themselves Writers United.