The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild

by Miranda J. Banks

  May Robson, an Australian-born actress who began her career as a Vitagraph star in 1916, rose from her chair and declared with great aplomb, “As the oldest person in the room, I will take the cut.” As if working from a script, eight-year-old child star Freddie Bartholomew took his cue and piped up, “As the youngest person in the room, I’ll take the cut.”14 It was then, when Mayer had the full attention of his audience, that he called for a vote to show a declaration of allegiance and a willingness to accept the salary reduction. Frances Goodrich, screenwriter for The Thin Man, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Father of the Bride, remembered, “Everyone got pious and scared.” The vote was cast with tears of solidarity, and the employees agreed to accept the loss in pay. Mayer promised that he would personally see to it that every penny was reimbursed someday. The tone was solemn as the room was rocked by the new reality of Hollywood economics. But walking back across the iron bridge to the front office buildings, Samuel Marx overheard Mayer gloating to his right-hand man and talent expert Benny Thau, “So! How did I do?”15 Albert Hackett, Goodrich’s husband and writing partner, said of the meeting, “Oh, that L. B. Mayer, he created more Communists that day than Karl Marx.”16

  As at other studios, there was economic necessity behind Mayer’s appeal to his talent for retrenchment. Across Hollywood, creative workers took pay cuts and ensured their studios’ safe financial grounding. Lester Cole, writer of Objective, Burma!, remembers how forty employees of Paramount Pictures were invited into a projection room to hear that the Depression gave the studio no choice but to cut the salaries of actors, directors, and writers by 50 percent.17 The dramatic slashing of incomes was later cited in part as a pretense, a subterfuge play-acted by moguls in front of employees to foster fidelity in a time of economic crisis. After six weeks, Mayer and other executives restored workers’ pay to their full salaries. But the deducted sums for those six weeks were never reimbursed. And there was more to this story than Mayer let on.

  While teary-eyed directors, actors, and writers voted to give back half their salaries to save the company, not everyone working at MGM or other studios was forced to make this financial sacrifice. What became apparent to the creative workers over the ensuing weeks was that two groups of personnel were never asked to cut back: the studio executives and the below-the-line (craft) employees who were covered under the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) union contract. That the studio executives did not dock their own salaries came as little surprise; but the durability of the IATSE’s contract, even in the face of budget cuts, provided insight and inspiration to embryonic creative talent unions.

  Only a few weeks before the MGM meeting, IATSE workers, angered at the possibility of pay cuts, considered a strike across the studios and flatly refused the reductions. The union argued that its members were not paid well enough to be able to afford the cuts and still feed their families. At MGM, Thalberg’s biographer wrote, most employees were performing “backbreaking work with few guarantees, little protection, and no rights.”18 Though they were paid little, their jobs were vital. Studio heads Jack Warner of Warner Bros., Harry Cohn of Columbia, Carl Laemmle of Universal, Winfield Sheehan of Fox, and Mayer gathered and ultimately agreed not to cut the earnings of those who made fifty dollars or less a week. Cognizant of the critical role these workers played in the daily functioning of the production machinery, the moguls bent to this massive union. For the first time, a union held its ground against the industry. Although word of this victory did not reach the talent in time, writers, directors, and actors agreed that from this point forward they would never be swindled by the studios again. As Philip Dunne remembers, Mayer’s cuts and the creatives’ realization of their mistreatment were “what kicked off all of the so-called talent guilds.”19 It was clear to Hollywood talent that the best way to ensure their power was to stand up to the studios as unions. For many writers, the newly formed Screen Writers Guild now looked like a necessity if they wanted to protect their wages and basic labor rights.

  Although altercations between studios and employees had been common earlier, a revolution in the employment structure of the American film industry truly began in the 1930s. The below-the-line craft union’s successful stand against the studio heads catalyzed the above-the-line creative talent to organize across the studios. Writers recognized that although individual contracts and salaries were manageable, protection by a union contract was more secure. The studio heads used every trick at their disposal to prevent the talent guilds—in particular the Writers Guild—from unionizing. But the transformation of the Screen Writers Guild from a social group to a trade organization was already happening, starting with a substantial increase in its membership. Two months after its first meeting in February 1933, the Guild had 173 charter members. By April, studios began to pay full salaries again and, apart from MGM, even offered retroactive pay. Guild membership had climbed to 343 active members by February 1934, far exceeding total membership during its days as a social club. In July 1934, with 640 members, the Guild started publication of the Screen Guilds’ Magazine, a joint venture with the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). At this point, 90 percent of all screenwriters working in the industry were members of the Guild.20 But by the end of 1936, only two years after membership reached 750, the Guild was nearing extinction. A bitter three-year jurisdictional battle ensued, ending with the US Supreme Court interceding to name the Screen Writers Guild the sole organization sanctioned to negotiate with the studios on behalf of the writers. It took another two years, until 1941, before the Guild started its first negotiations with the studios. Finally, after many twists and turns, the Guild secured its first contract with the Hollywood studios in 1942, nine years after the creation of Screen Writers Guild as a union.

  This chapter reviews the state of labor for Hollywood writers in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and traces the evolution of the Screen Writers Guild from a social club into the critical era when writers battled bitterly with studio heads for jurisdiction over a screenwriters’ union and for a minimum basic agreement (MBA). During this period, writers gained significantly more power within the industry, as the new technology of sound made their services markedly more critical to the success of Hollywood films. The Hollywood studios used a series of tactics to subvert the Guild’s efforts to gain recognition as the sole entity allowed to represent writers in collective bargaining, that is, a system of negotiations between the studios and the writers regarding wages, terms of employment, rights, and so on. The studios’ initial strategies included the formation of the Motion Picture Academy and then support of an ersatz guild, the Screen Playwrights. The battle for an MBA played out not only on studio lots but also in the US Supreme Court. Studios stalled contract talks until an MBA—and World War II—seemed inevitable. Although individual writers’ contracts can exceed the provisions established in the MBA, this first agreement set the precedent for standards of treatment and payment for screenwriters and provided a foundation for the system of contract negotiations still used today. The final achievement for the Guild out of this battle, namely, jurisdiction over screenwriters and a Guild contract with signatories, forever redefined the relationship between studios and writers.

  Professionalization and the Status of Writers and Writing in Early Hollywood

  In those thoughtless days, none of us ever associated movies with art; such “easy money” placed them in the category of striking oil.

  —Anita Loos (writer of Intolerance and The Women), Kiss Hollywood Goodbye (1974)

  In the early days of Hollywood, writers—or, as they were known at the time, film scenarists—were in a bind. Those who found success, like Anita Loos, were paid well for their labor. But recognition, by way of screen credits, control of authorship, and respect on the set, was decidedly harder to come by. A standard clause in writers’ contracts appeared some time in the 1910s, stipulating that all literary material composed, submitted, or produced by a writer during the terms of an agreement with a particular
studio “shall automatically become the property of the producer who, for this purpose, shall be deemed the author thereof.”21 In other words, during the term of the contract any work written by a screenwriter, even though it may be credited to that person, is held under corporate authorship by the studio. Since companies began adopting this language over a century ago, producers have controlled copyright. But the clause takes possession one step further: studios are legally defined not just as the owners but also as the authors of a writer’s work. In 1916, the New York Times quoted an Authors League statement that the “conditions in the motion picture industry are more unsatisfactory than in any other field in which an author is active. The author is practically at the mercy of irresponsible and dishonest producers. Piracy is rampant and redress uncertain, copyright questions are obscure and contract matters are chaotic.”22 The article listed long and varied complaints by screenwriters, including underpayment, outrageous delays in returning scripts, butchering of scripts, plagiarism of stories, and ambiguous contracts.

  It was in this environment in the fall of 1920 that the Screen Writers Guild established an affiliation with the Authors League of America (itself a part of the Dramatists Guild), with a short-lived eastern branch of the SWG appearing the following June. In the spring of 1921, members of the Guild bought a building on Las Palmas and Sunset Boulevard, thereby launching “the first motion picture professional club to be established in the capitol of the industry.”23 The clubhouse became a shared space for the Guild to hold its professional meetings and for the launching of a social group, “The Writers,” that summer.24 The Writers held parties, plays, and other events for members and industry insiders. But the series of goals that members laid out for themselves defined this new group as an organization dedicated to protecting the work and livelihood of writers and as a precursor to an organized union.25 Their mission was to defend the rights of screenwriters, to elevate their status, and to redefine the relationship between writer and producer. Concerns focused on ensuring copyright protection of manuscripts and film scenarios, establishing freedom from censorship, securing credits for both original author and screen author for adaptations, safeguarding fair compensation, and insisting on increased cooperation between writers and producers.26 One of the young club’s successful endeavors was the establishment of a grievance committee that provided basic arbitration between producers and writers.

  IMAGE 6 The Writers, the first home of the social club known as the Screen Writers Guild, from Blue Book of the Screen, 1923.

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

  Guild membership grew quickly for a few years, but the prosperity of the film industry, and the exorbitant salaries of many writers in Hollywood in the 1920s, ultimately made the need for membership less critical. In fact, national prosperity prevented any growth in labor groups during this period: union membership across the country declined from over five million in 1920 to three and a half million in 1924.27 The organization relaxed its dues policies, and as Ring Lardner Jr. remembers, it never even had a consistent method for questioning a member’s standing.28 Increasingly, the Guild became a social club, and during the 1920s it also became less important to writers as a policy-making organization. The leadership never brought to the fore the central issue of salary minimums. The larger desire was for the elevation of the status of the writer: writers saw their role as essential, and they wanted not just compensation but also acknowledgment of their creative labor. Writers’ early demands included equal prominence with the names of other key players (director, producer, star) in the credits as well as in marketing and advertising.29 Because of the lack of ownership over their material, some writers found themselves in a predicament if they stayed too long at one studio or went on vacation. Frederica Sagor, writer of The Plastic Age, pointed to the pressures of working in an industry where rights were minimal: “Whether you were a writer, producer, director, cameraman, actor, or actress—it was very easy to be forgotten in filmland with so much available talent to replace you. Hard work and good credits were often not enough. Even if you were an old pro like Waldemar Young [writer of The Lives of a Bengal Lancer], if you stepped too far beyond the men’s room, you could return and find someone else in your chair.”30

  The Screen Writers Guild did little to support writers’ grievances. Sagor said that credit on a script usually went to the last writer brought on to do a rewrite: “Once in a while, there might be a sharing of credit with one of the previous writers, providing he or she had sufficient clout to demand it. Otherwise, the last writer hired snatched the merry-go-round gold ring.”31 Few studios were concerned about writers. A rare exception was Samuel Goldwyn’s short-lived Eminent Authors project, which tried to use a writers-as-stars system to sell pictures. (Many of these authors did not transition well to writing for the screen, and the project proved unprofitable.32) It was the writers’ wish for a bigger role in authorship and status, a stance they would continue to define over time, that angered and exasperated producers in their dealings with these upstart employees.

  The studios controlled writers’ working conditions and the content of their scripts. Producers limited writers to stories they imagined audiences wanted to see, suggesting to writers that they stick to optimistic or cheerful scenarios. Frances Marion, who wrote The Champ and adapted Camille and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, explained: “We writers were fed to the teeth with Love and Happy Endings. But what could we do? The bosses told us that if we wanted to write bleak, realistic stories which ended unhappily we could spin our yarns for magazines or publishers of books. The movies must be heartlifting, not eyebrow-lifting.”33 Marion’s description hints at the threats of film censorship that began in the late 1920s and continued for the next two decades.

  With the coming of sound in 1928, Hollywood needed not just stories but also spoken words. Suddenly there was a desperate call for scribes who were facile with dialogue. “It was the era where the word became the most important thing in the picture business,” said Bernard Schubert, writer of Mark of the Vampire and The Mummy’s Curse, who was under contract at RKO during this flurry of hiring for writers. “This was the era—definitely the era of the written word—the spoken word.”34 The excitement over the pleasures and the promise of the talkies was not just for audiences—or the moguls who saw dollar signs attached to every song sung or bon mot quipped by a star on the screen. Producers demanded that writers carefully develop scripts and build detail into the action. The days of vague plot outlines were over. Now, the emphasis was on the specifics of each character’s language. Dudley Nichols, who in the coming years would write Bringing Up Baby, Stagecoach, and Scarlet Street, delighted in these new creative opportunities: “In spite of its complicated mechanics, the motion picture is, in the present writer’s opinion, the most flexible and exciting storytelling medium in the world. Its possibilities are enthralling. It is a continual challenge to the writer. With talk has come character, the one phase of human existence that never palls in interest. When people talk, they reveal themselves. And once you have character, and its endless diversity and interest, you will never run out of ‘stories.’ Character itself is the best of all stories.”35 With the coming of sound, Nichols argued, cinema had become a more plastic, even a more captivating medium. This transformation was the result not simply of the technology or the inclusion of sound and words, but rather depended on how sound brought depth into character and story.

  Writers who specialized in dialogue and incorporated words and language into their work were suddenly in high demand. Screenwriters who got their start during this time included Nichols, Ring Lardner Jr., John Bright (who wrote The Public Enemy and She Done Him Wrong), Herman Mankiewicz (writer of Dinner at Eight and Citizen Kane), Laurence Stallings (writer of The Big Parade and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon), Nunnally Johnson (who wrote The Grapes of Wrath and The Woman in the Window), and Alvah Bessie (who wrote Objective, Burma!). After Mankiewicz arrived in Hollywood in 1925, hi
s unofficial and ironically titled “Fresh Air Fund” lured a dozen more East Coast writers out to the Los Angeles sunshine.36 He famously sent a telegram to his friend Ben Hecht: “WILL YOU ACCEPT THREE HUNDRED PER WEEK TO WORK FOR PARAMOUNT PICTURES. ALL EXPENSES PAID. THE THREE HUNDRED IS PEANUTS. MILLIONS ARE TO BE GRABBED OUT HERE AND YOUR ONLY COMPETITION IS IDIOTS. DON’T LET THIS GET AROUND.”37 Julius Epstein also received a telegram from writer friends in Hollywood: “OFFER YOU A JOB AS OUR SECRETARY. $25 A WEEK. ROOM AND BOARD. HOP A BUS.” He arrived on a Friday evening in October 1933, and by midnight he was writing a scene that was due on Monday. “On Sunday they took me to the Paramount Theatre and the picture was College Humor, with Bing Crosby and Mary Carlisle. And they said to me, ‘That’s a close-up, that’s a fade-out.’ They gave me what was later to be a four-year college film school education in one afternoon.”38 By 1935, Epstein and his brother Philip were writing dozens of pictures.

  Threats of film censorship during this time were of increasing concern, for studios as well as for writers. Debates about censorship started in the 1910s with city and state film boards; demands for new laws controlling content appeared throughout the 1910s and 1920s.39 To circumvent censorship at the state and local levels, the studios created the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), which directed that all films conform to its “Don’ts and Be Carefuls” rules starting in 1927. These rules were replaced by a stricter Production Code in 1930, monitored by the newly formed Production Code Administration starting in 1934. Writers felt that these idiosyncratic mandates, though not officially censorship, were similarly oppressive. No divorces, no affairs, no representations of homosexuality.40 Ben Hecht, who scripted Scarface, Spellbound, and Notorious and was regularly called in as a script doctor, recounted the advice his friend and fellow scenarist Herman Mankiewicz gave him about writing characters according to Hollywood logic.