As the industry has grown, the studio and network apparatuses for handling labor disputes have evolved into a highly structured, tightly monitored group of businesspeople and lawyers who manage negotiations with unions and guilds. On the other side of the bargaining table, the Writers Guild and other trade groups do hire executives, but working artists and craftspeople sit on their negotiating committees. And few of them have experience with labor negotiations or contract law. In dialogue about the 1960 strike, David Harmon explained the uncomfortable process of reintegration from being a disgruntled employee back to being a creative worker: “We thought that management was the enemy. They were not. They were businessmen. When the strike was over every one of those men across the table from us were gentlemen. They all stuck their hands out. . . . They were paid every week. It was their job one way or another to get it over with. There was no enmity. They didn’t say, ‘We’ll get you later.’ They could not care less. . . . That is what they do for a living. That is not what we do for a living.”53 There is a residual effect for writers as they readjust from outsider to insider again.
Antagonism and frustration about outsider status can happen within the group as well. For minority communities—most notably women and writers of color—the feelings of outsider status are as exasperating as they are demeaning. In her anthropological analysis of screenwriters in Hollywood in 1994, Jorja Prover argues, “To the extent that motion picture and television writers have been overlooked, the minority writer has not even been mentioned.”54 Women who wanted to write strong female lead characters were often passed over for jobs in writers’ rooms on television series. “It’s pink and blue, in terms of assignments, as well,” said Robin Swicord, who adapted Memoirs of a Geisha and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button for the screen. “All women who work in the film business are swimming in a soup of gender bias, and it is invisible to many people, unacknowledged by many people.”55 Betty Ulius, who wrote for film and television for more than twenty years, explains that the issue was never about barring women from participating. Rather, there was a disconnect between men and women within the community:
Up until 1971, women were almost totally disregarded in the Writers Guild . . . But there was absolutely no feeling that women were left out of the Writers Guild. This was not a big masculine conspiracy. When I came out from New York in 1959, I would go to the few meetings a year that we would have and see maybe two or three women. Women were absolutely not talked to. This was not, again, because of a conspiracy, but because writers are generally shy people. The men would talk to the men and unless you were built like Farrah Fawcett-Majors you were absolutely ignored. . . . We were not asked to play golf or tennis. We never got jobs the way most men get jobs by knowing other men . . . [who would invite] you to come in and tell a story.56
Although some of the difficulty that women experienced in finding work within the industry could be attributed to sexism, data on writers’ employment follow documented trends in hiring practices at the time. Writers and producers—like many involved in employment—traditionally tend to feel most comfortable hiring people with backgrounds, interests, and experiences similar to their own. And given that most film and television producers are white and male, the discrepancy in numbers is substantial. In 1973, 13 percent of the Guild’s members were women—many of whom were underemployed. Thirty years later, in 2003, the percentage had grown only to an average of 24 percent (27 percent for television, 18 percent for film).57 That same year, the employment of minority writers hit a low point of 10 percent in television and 6 percent in film.58 These figures say nothing about the substantial gender and race gaps in median earnings over the decades.
Other writers feel that diversity in script writing can be an advantage. Ronald Bass, screenwriter of Rain Man and The Joy Luck Club, has found great success partnering with women on writing projects. He believes that women and men often focus on different aspects of a story:
In my experience, there is a big gender difference. Men are result-oriented. Fuck the girl. Win the prize. Beat up the guy. Get the money. Close the deal. Win the game. And they do not want to know, they do not want an inner life. . . . Women are process-oriented. They have to have an inner life. . . . That is why I like to write about women. We did Rain Man . . . and I said to Tom [Cruise] at one point, “This is about your character becoming more like a woman.” He said, “Thanks very much.” I explained . . . “It has nothing to do with the character becoming effeminate. It is with your character learning that he has an inner life . . . Dustin [Hoffman] cannot make that change. He cannot have an inner life. So the access character is you, Tom. You are going to be developing through the course of the movie. You are the person who is going to go on the journey. . . . We are going to focus on Dustin and be obsessed with Dustin but we are going to identify with you.”59
Bass’s comments highlight the necessity not just for male and female writers, but also for male and female characters and for masculinity and femininity to be expressed in creative work. While many women write action and many men write process, this drive to tell compelling stories that lure in wide audiences is part of a push for diversity among writers.
When minority writers, whether women or men, discuss experiences working within the industry, they describe the struggle not just to land a job but also to present an alternative thought or opinion to executives and other creative personnel. Susan Kim told of the surprisingly difficult time she had getting one producer to understand the character of the central boy in “The Princess and the Pea” episode of the HBO animated children’s series Happily Ever After. Kim wanted the boy to be spacey, but the producer was eager to give him thick glasses, a bad haircut, and a pocket protector. Kim responded that she did not want him to be an Asian geek. The producer fought back: “‘But nerds are funny.’ I said, ‘Yes, but Asian nerds—you don’t want to go there, trust me on this.’” Happily Ever After has been lauded by the industry and parents’ groups alike for its representation of minorities and its forward-thinking, reimagined versions of classic fairy tales, but here was a Korean American writer working with a Caucasian producer who could not conceive that the direction she was suggesting invoked a derogatory stereotype. Kim virtually had to plead with her producer: “‘Please. You have to believe me when I say that it’s an offensive stereotype. Trust me. It is. Trust me. Trust me. That’s why you hire diverse writers, so we can bring some of our experience to it. My experience is that it’s a really offensive stereotype.’ So I like to think that it was an informative discussion for this executive. She didn’t press it. I did manage to do what I wanted with the character, but it was eye-opening. Thinking: why do I have to keep repeating this?”60 The amount of back-and-forth discussion of what was considered a stereotype provides a compelling example of the difficulties minority writers have often faced when trying to put stories on the screen.
As both a showrunner (Soul Food) and a media scholar, Felicia Henderson is a uniquely astute analyst of the industry. In her scholarly article on race and gender in the television comedy writers’ room, Henderson provides ample evidence of the difficult role women and minority writers play as they try to negotiate the sixty-year-old traditions of a private and highly protected workspace. Even as much has changed (there are more women and minorities than before), much has stayed the same (the rules of engagement and the impulse toward homogeneity). Henderson writes, “Humor is generated within this space through a process of inclusion and exclusion, familiarity and othering, and humor is derived from social categories such as race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, which become the means by which the performative space is homogenized.”61 This desire for sameness—in humor, in creative abilities, in background—marginalizes women and minorities within the writers’ room.
The creative crafts of the entertainment industry have historically been less difficult environments for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) workers than other professions. That said, integration has not been easy. Jas
mine Love, writer on The District, opted for the term heterosexism rather than homophobia when describing her experiences working in television. She saw institutional bias play out when producers assumed that she could not write heterosexual stories.62 Dava Savel, who was showrunner on Ellen when the character and actor came out, was fired just before receiving an Emmy for writing on the series. Soon after coming out, the star decided to let go of the whole writers’ room and repopulate it with gay and lesbian writers.63 As Henderson deftly argues, homogenization is of primary import for many in positions of power in the industry.
Some minorities arguably have an upper hand in the industry, most notably Jewish writers, especially in the comedy genre. As Neal Gabler details in An Empire of Their Own, every studio head in Hollywood during the studio system was Jewish,64 and even today the number of Jews in the entertainment industry is disproportionately larger than national figures. Ring Lardner Jr. remembers being asked by Paul Jarrico whether the close ties between Lardner, Hugo Butler, Dalton Trumbo, Ian McClellan Hunter, and Michael Wilson resulted because they were all gentiles in a largely Jewish community. Hunter replied that in fact their friendship was based on their proclivity toward hard drinking.65 Although some of my interviewees discussed the usefulness of being conversant in cultural Judaism, race and gender were much more significant markers in defining writers’ experiences of identity within the industry and their feelings of insider or outsider status.
The Story Begins
In 1978, the Writers Guild established a committee to preserve the memories of its members as part of a vast oral history project.66 A bulletin in the monthly newsletter encouraged writers from the East and West branches of the organization to be interviewed at the WGAw branch headquarters about salient moments in Guild history they remembered. Had they witnessed the Guild’s formation? How did they feel about the blacklist? The notice beckoned: “However memory serves you, rightly or wrongly, the object is to capture, not the dry recounting of absolute fact or dates, but the vibrancy and texture of the times as lived by the membership through the various period of the Guild. . . . This is your history as you lived it. The brickbats and bouquets.”67 Erna Lazarus, writer on The Donna Reed Show, was one of the ninety-four professionals who answered this call. Her recollections of her adventures as a founding member of the SWG and one of the first women to build a steady career in the Hollywood studios bridged more than three decades of turbulence and triumph. At the end of her interview, Lazarus struggled to find words to express her gratitude for the Writers Guild. Not surprisingly, this veteran screenwriter conjured a film that could tell the tale of the writers:
I just wish that all the new writers could have a complete motion picture to view of what it was like from the 1930s until [the] present time, and I think then they would really appreciate what they have got. Our kids do not know what it means to [have] electric light. We do not know what it means. Our mothers, perhaps our grandmothers, knew what it was like to turn on a gaslight. So we take it all for granted. Do not take the Writers Guild of America for granted. It is a very important part of our lives and of the industry.68
Few historians or screenwriters today know Lazarus’s name. She is one of hundreds of extraordinary writers—some legendary, others mostly forgotten—who enrich the remarkable history of an industry. So, as Margo Channing warned in razor-sharp words by Joseph Mankiewicz in All About Eve, “Fasten your seatbelts . . .”
1
The Artist Employee
IMAGE 5 Illustrated script and storyboard for the film that would become Alice in Wonderland, c. 1933. Screenplay by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.
Writers Guild Foundation Archive, Shavelson-Webb Library, Los Angeles
INTERVIEWER: Now we look back at . . . the 1930s, as the Golden Age of Hollywood—
JULIUS EPSTEIN, writer of Casablanca: We didn’t think so at the time. We did not think it was Golden at all. Maybe a little Bronze here and there, but far from Gold [laughs].
—The Writer Speaks: Julius Epstein, 1994
[David O. Selznick] even gave me a screen test, which, after he saw it, he said I was definitely going to be a writer.
—Ring Lardner Jr., interview by the Writers Guild Oral History Project, 1978
In the winter of 1933, the steady foundation under Hollywood began to crack. Quite literally, the walls started to shake when the Long Beach earthquake rumbled its way across the Southern California landscape on March 10. But it was not the first seismic shift noted that year. In the weeks preceding it, the film studios were facing the rapidly falling box office sales. Although the wild success of sound film and audiences’ desire for escapism during the dark economic times of the Depression had ensured big box office numbers for a few years, the cost of sound conversion along with a decrease in box office sales finally forced the moguls to reexamine their spending habits. This belt tightening, in turn, pushed Hollywood’s creative talent to open their eyes to the potential power of unionization.
Across the United States, the situation for working and unemployed Americans was dire. In the richest country in the world, more than fifteen million workers were unemployed and looking for jobs that did not exist.1 In the middle of this national devastation, an American president came to power who used popular media as a central means to communicate with his suffering citizens. In the first of his “fireside chats” on March 12, 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took to the radio airwaves to calm the public regarding the banking crisis, explaining clearly and in lay terms the notions of value, credit, and capitalism, and declaring a bank holiday. Roosevelt emphasized his confidence in the American people and American workers, whom he valued as “more important than gold.”2 Citizens were scared, and they were looking to their leaders for inspiration and for a clear path out of financial ruin.
The same was true for individual businesses and industries, including the Hollywood studios. The studios were indebted to stockholders and to personnel and feared that it would be impossible to pay off both debts with funds so tight. In January 1933, RKO and Paramount had gone into receivership, declaring their theater chains bankrupt.3 Studios were unable to meet payroll. MGM cobbled together the funds to pay its employees in cash, but Universal suspended contracts, and Fox told its employees outright that they would not be paid. Across the eight major studios, the outlook was grim, and a shutdown looked likely.4 Employees were anxious and concerned. On February 3, 1933, ten screenwriters met informally at the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood to discuss a growing number of concerns. Writers working within studio walls had previously gathered under the moniker “Screen Writers Guild,” or “The Writers,” as a social organization. Now they gave the name “Screen Writers Guild” (SWG) new meaning and a heightened sense of urgency.5 As stirrings of unionization began among screenwriters, the studio heads were anxious to deter any talk of the Hollywood workforce organizing. Louis B. Mayer, the MGM studio boss, stood in front of his employees with a plan to counteract the effects of the Depression.
The preceding months had been difficult for Mayer. Irving Thalberg, his vice president in charge of production, had suffered yet another heart attack—though the press reported it as only a bout of influenza. Even when Thalberg was available, tension between the two executives was on the rise.6 The studio had barely made its payment to employees during the bank closure. At the last-minute the studio sold its lucrative Treasury bonds and in a dramatic—arguably cinematic—move, hired a private airplane on the East Coast to airdrop the cash to a line of grateful employees. Still, the studio’s cash flow was drying up, and selling more bonds was not possible. MGM needed bold action and got it: Mayer called an emergency meeting and gave the performance of a lifetime. Even though the SWG’s first meeting had occurred weeks before, screenwriters and historians have often seized upon this event as the moment of the Guild’s formation—a narrative that makes for a grander origin story for a union of people who tell stories. Inevitably, the event’s details may be embellished, but the actions have been do
cumented in a wide array of memoirs, press reports, and oral histories. The story goes like this:
In early March 1933, Mayer called all of MGM’s directors, actors, department heads, and writers to the executive studio projection room. After letting the crowd wait for more than twenty minutes, Mayer entered, unshaven—perhaps, as many have noted, for the only time in his life.7 He was exhausted and red-eyed. In front of a massive crowd of creative personnel, Mayer declared that the studio was broke. As producer and legendary MGM story editor Samuel Marx describes: “He began with a soft utterance. ‘My friends . . .’ Then he broke down. Stricken, he held out his hands, supplicating, bereft of words.”8 The only way to save MGM, he implored, was for everyone to take a 50 percent pay cut. Philip Dunne tells the story as he heard it: “At the time I remember [fellow writer] Donald Ogden Stewart describing to some of us what had happened at MGM. He said Louis B. Mayer got up and pointed a finger at all the people who were listening to him saying, ‘We’ve got to take a salary cut.’”9 The emphasis was on the community sharing the weight of the studio’s future on their collective shoulders. Employees were given the impression that if everyone worked together, the crisis would be averted. After a pause, actor Lionel Barrymore proclaimed in his commanding, avuncular baritone, “Don’t worry, L.B. We’re with you.”10 But they were not. Fellow actor Wallace Beery rose from his seat and stormed out.11 Ernest Vajda, screenwriter of The Merry Widow, questioned the economics of Mayer’s declaration. The pay cuts, he believed, were premature: “I read the company statements, Mr. Mayer. I know our films are doing well. Maybe the other companies must do this, but our company should not.”12 Barrymore boomed back: “Mr. Vajda is like a man who stops for a manicure on his way to the guillotine.” At this point, according to some accounts, the entire room went into peals of laughter and applause; others suggest that the chuckles were more dutiful.13 The drama continued.
The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild Page 4