The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (41 page)

The DVD slowly started to disappear from the marketplace. People were buying programs online and downloading them, or simply streaming the films and television they wanted to watch, when they wanted to watch them. Streaming series like
Web Therapy
, created by Dan Bucatinsky, Lisa Kudrow, and Don Roos, and
Childrens Hospital
, created by Rob Corddry, made a successful jump from web to television series in 2010. Others, like Felicia Day’s
The Guild
, stayed online. A new season of
Arrested Development
in 2012 helped lure audiences to Netflix as an original content provider, and
House of Cards
and
Orange Is the New Black
proved to the industry that series could start on the web, find substantial audiences, and prosper there.

The potential applications of online media became more enticing to creatives in the years right after the strike. Television writer and actor Jason Sklar began pitching television series to media executives using a web series he and his brother Randy Sklar produced. Whether or not a pitch sells, the series could be viewed freely online. The speed and flexibility of production, Sklar says, makes his work for the new medium uniquely satisfying. “The digital platform provides a practical space to execute your vision. . . . Hollywood tends to be a fear-based business. So if anything can be proven as a success on one platform, it increases your chance that another larger platform would take a chance [on you]. In the past, you would make a pilot and it would be seen by the executives at the network and maybe 300–400 people in focus groups across the country. If it did not make it to the air, then no one ever saw it. Now . . . online, you can create something that can entertain people.”
¹⁰⁸
In 2010, the WGA added to its ranks Ruth Livier, its first member to gain admission based solely on writing a self-financed web series,
Ylse
. Streaming media has propelled careers for some writers: the assignments began flowing in, not just for one medium, but often for two or more formats (though the pay is far from equal). Erica Rothschild, a writer on
Just Shoot Me!
who had sold many scripts but rarely saw them through development, was enthusiastic about developing her first web series in 2009. “For so many years my job has been divorced from actually making content. [Laughs.] Nothing gets made. I’m excited that, even if it’s only three minutes long, we’re going to
make
something.”
¹⁰⁹

With the industrial shifts toward increased conglomeration and digital distribution came another kind of convergence: an overwhelming meeting of the minds between film and television writers in the WGA. Tom Fontana thinks that solidarity developed on the picket lines.

[What] makes the union in the East really special is that we aren’t just one kind of writer. We are a union of writers who write for television and film. Nothing brought that home more for me more than the last strike. Unlike previous strikes . . . people really started to talk to other people. So you would see Tony Gilroy [writer of
The Bourne Identity
and
Michael Clayton
] having a conversation with a daytime writer or you would see a news writer talking to an animation writer or episodic writer, or a comedy writer talking to an episodic drama writer. I was very moved by that, to see that all of these people who wrote completely different kinds of things actually came together, because the one thing we love is the writing, to be able to write, to be treated with respect.
¹¹⁰

Moreover, for the first time in a long time, the Writers Guild East and the Writers Guild West were allied. Howard A. Rodman saw this as the first step in what may be a long process. When asked whether the two branches of the Writers Guild might amalgamate, Rodman said, “If I live long enough in my lifetime I may get to see a Writers Guild of America. That would be the hope. I may not get there. I may be able to see what the top of the mountain would look like but not get there myself.”
¹¹¹

There are significant issues that make a union between the East and West branches complex—from the size of the respective guilds to disputes over jurisdiction for public radio writers, news writers, and network television writers. Walter Bernstein, a WGA East veteran who survived the blacklist and saw the worst of times for writers and for the Guild, stressed the significance of the unity writers had achieved: “This last strike was very moving because we all came together, East and West, and we’d been fighting each other for several years. And we held tough on things. It was hard for a lot of people. And we won. Much to everybody’s surprise.”
¹¹²

Only six months after the strike, the 2008 financial crisis hit. Media conglomerates began divesting selected holdings, and it was unclear whether the strike or the economy was to blame and whether this new paradigm was a trend or a correction. Writers, like others in the industry, feared the loss of audiences, an even greater concern of the studios for ensuring the profitability of content. The recession underscored the financial losses to the industry because of the strike. This was only compounded by the collapse of the DVD market. Yet, industrial and technological structures that seemingly
created fissures in the labor dynamics of creative production have in fact provided new opportunities for creative workers to change the rules and use new technologies to their advantage—not just onscreen, but behind the scenes, as well. Convergence has never been just about technological change. It is about the definitions of labor shifting, the lines between production and consumption compressing, and divisions between producer, product, and audience breaking down.

Conclusion

IMAGE 25   Last page of Vince Gilligan’s script for “Felina,” the final episode of the series
Breaking Bad
.

Writers Guild Foundation Archive, Shavelson-Webb Library, Los Angeles

Writers will often complain about being poorly treated, and I wonder, where was the book that they read where screenwriters were carried around on velvet pillows?

—Aline Brosh McKenna (screenwriter of
The Devil Wears Prada
), interview, 16 August 2012

BANKS: I’m so glad I’m not in this industry, but I love studying it.

MICHAEL WINSHIP: You’re a China watcher. You’re parked on Taipei and you are watching the mainland.

—Interview, 9 April 2012

It should come as little surprise that writers speak about themselves and about their community in lucid, articulate terms; nor is it any wonder that throughout the process of interviewing writers of all generations for this book, I turned to their knack for encapsulating their own history.
¹
I found that writers offered much more than a simple vocabulary of agency and professional identity.
²
Writers’ memories of the Guild, of their professions, and of themselves were structured more like well-crafted essays. Their self-disclosures provided A and B plotlines. As the interviews came to a close, many of my subjects presented thoughtfully constructed readings of my research, of the story of the Guild, and of themselves as a community. Many have even written their own accounts of this story in some of media studies’ most respected journals.
³
I did not see their versions of history as the truth, but as one truth among many I verified and examined with other data points. Rather than trying to theorize about their labor, I decided instead to use their expertise as confirmation of the history I had begun to uncover. My subjects became sources in this cultural history of the American entertainment industry.

Inevitably, innovative screen technologies lure audiences in directions that demand original approaches to storytelling and new structures of
compensation. No matter the medium, writing creative content, telling stories, and crafting characters will be central to the work of screenwriters. As this book details, the industry has always been in flux, and the Guild has adapted, whether or not its positions corresponded with writers’ individual hopes for their community. While the details have changed, the central demands that emerged in the 1920s are still critical concerns for writers today: their unique role as outsiders on the inside of the production community; questions of authorship, ownership, and control; and the significance of the writer’s name.

Insider/Outsider

In my research, I found that most writers articulated with candor and humor their dissatisfactions with studio bosses, network heads, directors, and conglomerates for stifling talent and creativity. These writers were generally grateful for their own lot, but they believed strongly that writers deserve more credit than they get for their contribution to the final media product. As a group, many shared a sense of belonging to an industry of heroes and stars, in which they were typecast in the role of the antihero. There is no question that my sample of writers is skewed in that it includes a great number of acclaimed and successful members of the profession. They are not an average cross-section of Guild members, nor are they necessarily representative of all writers who have come into the industry with hopes of building a career. But each saw his or her career as one story among many in a difficult trajectory for a community of creative laborers. Their worry was less for themselves than for the plight of
the writers
. My subjects talked of unnamed writer-protagonists grappling with industry bottom lines and suffering the indignities of unfair compensation structures, attribution and credit restrictions, and—in comparison with producers, directors, and actors—relative obscurity.

The stories they recalled from their own careers stood in marked contrast to the screen stories that they have crafted about writers more generally. Other characters from the production world may be satirized, but the character of
the writer
is almost always stereotyped. He or she is neurotic, self-centered, or loveless—sometimes all three. A short list of the many films and series featuring writers illuminates this overwhelming trend:
Sunset Blvd
., by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett;
The Dick Van Dyke Show
, by Carl Reiner;
My Favorite Year
, by Dennis Palumbo and Norman Steinberg;
Barton
Fink
, by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen;
It’s Garry Shandling’s Show
, by Garry Shandling and Alan Zweibel;
Adaptation
, by Charlie Kaufman and his fictional brother Donald Kaufman;
30 Rock
, by Tina Fey;
The Comeback
, by Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King;
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
, by Aaron Sorkin; and
Episodes
, by David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik. These types of scripts are more often comedies, dramedies, or black comedies. This is not to say that writers do not take themselves seriously. Rather, they understand that they are among the least lucky members of an extremely lucky community and that they are outsiders within a community of insiders.

When writers spoke about their present-day community, they parceled the less fortunate among them into two groups: professional screenwriters who have been barred from organizing because of jurisdictional disputes and minority writers (writers of color, women). Those lucky enough to be under Writers Guild protection said that a critical aspect of the Guild’s work is to widen its jurisdictional umbrella to include all writers who are paid by companies to script words for the screen, no matter the genre or platform. As Catherine Fisk notes, under current labor laws, writers who are not on regular staff are defined as independent contractors and consequently denied the right to residuals, health benefits, and pensions, even though “they perform functions that are an essential part of the employer’s business.”
⁴
In moving forward, it is critical for writers to consider not only jurisdiction but also the terms of employment and definitions of work within an industry that rarely employs writers in large numbers. The WGA is having more success when it hammers out these terms with companies in the early stages of production development. Its agreements with Netflix and Amazon, for example, were groundbreaking, not because they guaranteed lofty residuals, but rather because they established residual structures in these formats for the first time.

The issue of who gets hired is central to the Guild. And yet, since its inception, the Guild as an organization has never had a voice in determining whom a signatory hires as a writer. Only in extreme cases can the Guild bar people from the union (for example, during the blacklist or, more recently, warnings to individuals who work during a strike). Many of its efforts focus on employment of current members and jurisdiction over potential new members.

As discussed in
chapters 4
and
5
, the WGA has tried over the years to help more writers of color get work and become members of the union.
Some prestigious diversity and development programs have emerged since 1999, when the networks signed a memorandum of understanding with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People after the group issued a scathing report on the lack of diversity in front of and behind the camera in Hollywood.
⁵
These programs were designed to help new or young writers of color hone their skills, meet executives, and start their careers. Nevertheless, the percentage of people of color writing for television is still nowhere near representative of the population, and the statistics in film are even more skewed. Many white writers I interviewed believed that increasing the numbers would solve the imbalance. But the number of minority writers is only part of the problem. While the numbers of writers of color working in the industry has bumped up in recent decades, particularly in television, the extraordinary income gap between white and minority writers, not at entry level work but at mid-career, is of far deeper concern for writers and for their union. This is where the Writers Guild is focusing its attention. Recent studies point to the shockingly low number of minority writers commissioned by networks and studios to write pilots.