The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (4 page)

Unless a special clause has been written into the contract, writers have no creative control over their work once it has been purchased. Erik Barnouw, a documentary film writer and the president of the Radio Writers Guild (RWG) from 1947 to 1949, recalled his disappointment when he grasped his loss: “I remember the first time I discovered that something I had written for
Cavalcade of America
was copyrighted, and it said on the copyright card: ‘Author: DuPont Company.’ I remember, I came face to face with the realization that DuPont was the author of what I had written.”
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David Harmon, whose career as a television writer spanned more than thirty years, from
The Man Behind the Badge
to
Hotel
, offered a similar story: “I discovered, much to my chagrin, when I got out here, that I no longer owned what I wrote. In New York, I leased it to the studios for one showing. I come out here and find out Harry Cohn [president of Columbia Pictures] is the author, which put me into shock.”
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When television writers joined the Guild, they were dismayed by their lesser role within the media hierarchy, but they were in a much better
position regarding control of authorial rights. Ernest Kinoy, a writer on
Goodyear Playhouse
and the miniseries
Roots
, explained the complex differences in notions of authorship and creative control between film and television writers as they united under one umbrella guild in the 1950s:

You hired a [film] writer like you hired a carpenter. And they were interchangeable. . . . The project was considered the property (emotional property, let alone legal) of the producer. . . . In New York, in live television, the concept of the playwright and the author lay philosophically behind . . . the writer. It was his play. . . . [Screenwriters] felt that we were neophytes and lesser in prestige. . . . And no screenwriter would demean himself by working in television. We felt that they came out of the Hollywood tradition, in which the position of the writer was in fact demeaned. The truth was probably somewhere in between.”
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Hortense Powdermaker admitted in 1967 that she had been disdainful of film writers in her 1950 anthropological study
Hollywood, the Dream Factory
precisely for their lack of authorial control. She was incensed that prosperity for a writer necessitated a loss of integrity.

Although closer by temperament and profession to the writers than to any other group in Hollywood, I failed to identify with them. . . . I was indignant at the writers . . . and horrified when I found gifted writers (whose work before coming to Hollywood had been literature) working on admittedly mediocre scripts and taking them seriously. But was this any different from the actor taking his role in a mediocre film with seriousness? Obviously not. For both it was a way of preserving some measure of self-respect. But at the time I did not see this. I wrote that the writers had become “soft,” that they sacrificed their integrity as artists for monetary rewards.
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The notion of giving up ownership for financial security infuriated Powdermaker, and many others as well. The idea of selling one’s soul—and setting aside one’s artistry—for money is a popular myth in Hollywood. At various periods in time, challenging this classic conception of screenwriting was reason enough for writers to fight the studios for more control over and credit for their work.

In my conversations with writers, this lack of creative control—at least for those who did not also carry a secondary role as a producer or director—led to a kind of frustrated sense of entitlement. In the 1930s and 1940s, writers worked under exclusive contract for a specific Hollywood studio, making substantial sums of money, but they had little autonomy; for example, writers could be loaned out to other studios for particular projects with little choice in the matter. As Max Wilk describes in
Schmucks with Underwoods
, “You came as a pencil for hire, at sums heretofore unheard of for pencils. You brought no plots, dreams, or high intentions. If you wrote a good movie it was because you were lucky enough to get on the payroll of a classy boss. Class or not, the boss called the shots and you did as bid. You were a sort of literary errand boy with an oil magnate’s income.”
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Playwrights, on the other hand, controlled their own writing and, as pointed out by Stirling Silliphant, screenwriter of
In the Heat of the Night
, also paid their own bills.

If you sit in a New York cold water flat and you write your play and no one is paying your rent and giving you any money you, by god’s right [you] have the ownership of that material. You have created it. But when you are living out here and some producer calls you in and says this is a show we have sold, these are the characters, give us an idea for a story and you have got an assignment? There is a hell of a lot of difference between being subsidized to write that kind of crap than there is subsidizing yourself and writing out of your gut and selling it. The man that sits in the cold water flat and writes out of his gut is entitled to anything he can get. The man who is hired to perform a professional job is, in my opinion and you might as well face it, no different than a plumber, a bricklayer, or anyone else. All the aesthetics cloud the issues. He is a hired professional writer.
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Screenwriters in the contract era were hired scribes, producing subsidized writing or writing on assignment. In giving up authorial control and by writing for film, they could make more money than most of them ever could by writing plays or novels.

With the end of contract labor, the work of the writer was transformed. For some writers, the need to pitch and sell their ideas was decidedly unappealing, outside the confines of what they had experienced as the nature of the job. Interviewed in 1978, Maurice Tombragel, a writer on
Walt Disney’s
Wonderful World of Color
, expressed his distaste for what he called the new job description of the writer-auteur: “Today you have to be an auteur. You not only have to create your material . . . you have got to raise the money for it, you have to direct it, you produce it. You are the one-man show . . . [doing] a picture today. And the writers that I knew . . . we just couldn’t do that nor were [we] interested in doing it. . . . To sit down and write something, fine. To try to sell it? Just leave me alone. I don’t even want to go on a set. I don’t want to even be involved in the studio.”
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For Tombragel and some in his cohort, the added work of pitching and producing was distracting to their job; others found this new proposition thrilling. Writers now had a better chance at gaining an authorial position and, perhaps, wresting back creative control of their scripts. Moreover, any form of ownership tends to take the form of profit participation and residual rights, where writers can receive a percentage of profits divvied up by the studios or networks.

IMAGE 4   Shonda Rhimes’s early pitch outline for “Under the Knife/Cutting Edge,” an early draft of what would become the series
Grey’s Anatomy
.

Anatomy of a Script Collection, Writers Guild Foundation Archive, Shavelson-Webb Library, Los Angeles

The lack of copyright and authorial control continues to exasperate writers, but ultimately leaves many with feelings of resignation. In moments of crisis, questions of copyright, control, and authorship inevitably seem to enter into the Guild’s debates and sometimes even into its negotiations. It is not just the writers who are haunted by notions of authorship; the concept of the auteur has been a point of fascination for other media makers and media studies scholars. With artistic and creative control also come prestige and recognition within the industry. These attainments lead, in many ways, to another recurring theme: the importance of a writer’s name.

The Name

The power and prominence of a writer’s name is significant to both the writer and the Writers Guild. One of the terms written into the first Guild contract regulated control over and determination of writing credits, assuring that they were correct and valid. Though writers may not have been fairly compensated at the time, they demanded that their work be properly credited. Screenwriter William Ludwig noted how in the 1930s it was sometimes a gamble whether a film would be credited to the script writer: “You never knew until you saw the picture at the preview what the credit was going to be. You could work on the script all by yourself, you’d go out to see it and there was another name on it. Maybe not your name at all. Maybe your name with somebody else’s. Sometimes the other writer’s name was also your producer or somebody you never knew. [Studios] determined credits.”
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Credits, as well
as rights and residuals, are now non-negotiable and are determined by the Guild’s minimum basic agreement (MBA). As legal scholar Catherine Fisk notes, “even hiring contracts for writers on projects not covered by the MBA stipulate ‘credit per WGA.’
”
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While prestige is a legitimate reason for wanting credit, for most writers a more significant concern is that pay scales are based on the success of their pictures. If a writer’s name is not on a film, not only does he or she not get credit on that project, but the person might subsequently be out hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of dollars during the next contract negotiation. Howard A. Rodman, screenwriter of
Savage Grace
, vice president of the WGAw, and son of Howard Rodman, creator of the series
Harry O
, explained the complexities of credit. Although the Guild was created in part to protect writers’ right to have their names on what they wrote, oftentimes writers worked on projects that paid the bills. And sometimes those projects did not represent the kind of work a writer wanted to have associated with his or her name. “The issue of credits is as fraught as anything we do. It was believed that the fewer the number of writers’ names on a project, the more dignity it had. . . . It was part of the dignity of writing, but very quickly there are all kinds of thorny problems. I grew up in a house where my dad used a pseudonym far more often than he used his real name. Our family motto was, ‘The script isn’t finished until the name comes off.’
”
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The rules for credits are complex, and only a certain number of writers’ names can be attached to a particular script. Given how common rewrites are, many writers are not credited for work they perform. Elaine May, who wrote
Heaven Can Wait
and
Primary Colors
, also worked on the scripts for
Reds
and
Tootsie
; yet her name is mentioned nowhere in the credits for those films. “You can make a deal if you’re going to do the original writing,” she said. “But if you’re going to do the original re-writing, you can’t. . . . No matter how much you write, what you write, you’re still a hired gun, and you have no control.”
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Those who excel at rewrites are known as script doctors. Robert Towne doctored
Bonnie and Clyde
and
The Godfather
. He thought that these “could have been arbitrated,” but if he “had been on the arbitration committee, I don’t think I would have given myself screenplay credit. I did a lot of work on the script, but the conception, the characters, the tone—I was simply enhancing them.”
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Since the Guild’s earliest days, members have called upon it to negotiate difficult credit arbitration cases.

Starting in the late 1940s, the issue of names and the naming of names during the blacklist tore apart the professional community of Hollywood and severely damaged the careers of many Writers Guild members. The Hollywood Ten were just the beginning: the blacklist destroyed the careers of hundreds of film and television workers and damaged the ability of many others to work in the United States for a decade or more. During this time, one’s name became a vulnerability. Veterans agree that the era of the blacklist is easily the most deplorable in the Guild’s history, as the Guild failed to protect its members and most members failed to stand up for one another.

Years later, in the late 1980s, the Guild finally, fully, and shamefully claimed responsibility for abandoning its members during the blacklist. Since then, the Guild’s leadership has always put policies regarding First Amendment rights front and center in the union’s political agenda, seeing issues of individual credit and of creative authorship as critical to its membership. In 2010, the Guild refused to sign on with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the DGA, IATSE, SAG, and AFTRA to a joint filing in the Senate and with the White House’s Office of the US Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator that endorsed reduced regulation of media transmission.
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The Writers Guild is emphatically opposed to piracy and copyright infringement, and yet support of independent production and openness in content production is of equal importance to the union. In the opinion of some WGA members, studio-endorsed websites with sanctioned content have better access to consumers, a backdoor that threatens to destroy net neutrality under the guise of anti-piracy. For writers, free speech is paramount—a stance that to the media industry community sometimes seems laudable and at other times aggressively contemptible.