The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild

by Miranda J. Banks

  “I want to point out to you,” said Manky, “that in a novel a hero can lay ten girls and marry a virgin for a finish. In a movie this is not allowed. The hero, as well as the heroine, has to be a virgin. The villain can lay anybody he wants, have as much fun as he wants, cheating and stealing, getting rich and whipping the servants, but you have to shoot him in the end. When he falls with the bullet in his forehead, it is advisable that he clutch at the Gobelin tapestry on the library wall and bring it down over his head like a symbolic shroud. Also covered by such tapestry, the actor does not have to hold his breath while he is being photographed as a dead man.”41

  Some writers would try to add a few risqué scenes, hoping that one might survive the MPPDA’s vetting process and make it onto the screen.42 Writers were deeply frustrated by the limitations of censorship, as were producers: on this they could agree. But they could do little in the face of protests from organizations such as the Catholic Legion of Decency. Overall, writers had to give producers what they wanted, no questions asked. And if they did not produce what was expected of them, producers would threaten to start pulling scripts from the more than 40,000 that arrived in Los Angeles annually from aspiring writers.43

  With each studio churning out fifty to sixty films a year, studios were desperate for material. Novelists and dramatists were lured to Hollywood for their talent—and for their names. Aldous Huxley adapted Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre, P. G. Wodehouse reworked one of his short stories for A Damsel in Distress, Lillian Hellman wrote Dead End and adapted her play The Little Foxes, Nathanael West scripted It Could Happen to You! and Five Came Back, Dashiell Hammett wrote Watch on the Rhine, Dorothy Parker worked on the original A Star Is Born and Saboteur, George S. Kaufman wrote A Night at the Opera, Moss Hart adapted his play Winged Victory and wrote Hans Christian Andersen, and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote Three Comrades. Many arrived on the Santa Fe Railway’s Chief during the 1920s. However, it is worth noting that the first substantial wave left New York only after the literary market started to collapse. The migration was instigated by neither the coming of sound nor the stock market crash. Richard Fine estimates that 138 writers working in the Los Angeles film industry between 1927 and 1938 were eastern transplants, most from theater, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, and literary agencies.44 Of these, about 30 percent came before 1930; the percentage would increase to 50 percent by 1933. The rest came over the next few years. As John Schultheiss has documented, there was also a regular stream of British authors moving through Los Angeles during those years.45 Expatriate writers arrived from Europe in the mid-1930s, many of them fleeing the Nazis. Distinguished writers descended upon Los Angeles, renting out bungalows, basking in the sunshine, and trying to harness their skills for a new medium. Many considered screenwriting a sideline occupation secondary to their true profession. Some were quite successful; others found the pay and the parties more alluring than trying to work for boorish producers and studio heads.

  The famous novelists courted by producers and invited to their parties often struggled in this new industry. One of those notoriously unmoored was F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was shocked when he came to Los Angeles and realized, “This is no art. This is an industry.”46 Thinking back on his first difficulties, Fitzgerald explained that he was not so much above the industry as baffled by it. “The truth is that I got scared. I was scared by the hullaballoo over my arrival, and when they took me into a projection room to see a picture and kept assuring me it was all going to be very, very easy, I got flustered.”47 While he perfectly captured the characters of Hollywood in his novel The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald, like many other writers, could not adapt his novelistic skills to script form. Billy Wilder, who wrote Ninotchka, Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd., and Some Like it Hot, described the irony of Fitzgerald’s failure in Hollywood: “He made me think of a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job. He did not know how to connect the pipes so that the water would flow.”48 Wilder’s comment speaks to a sense of hierarchy of the two writing forms: novel writing as art, screenwriting as skilled labor. And yet no single group of writers entering Hollywood succeeded more than another in terms of their ability to translate their talent to scriptwriting. Some playwrights had great success, as their knowledge of dialogue was invaluable, and journalists had the ability to write at great speed. Virtually all of them, though, had to adjust to the rules of Hollywood, where producers controlled not just the script but also the writers themselves through a legal contrivance known as the long-term contract.

  IMAGE 7 Members of the social club The Writers. c. 1930.

  Screen Writers’ Guild Records, 1921–1954, Writers Guild Foundation Archive, Shavelson-Webb Library, Los Angeles

  Studio heads and producers were shrewd showmen and often ruthless overseers. Writers were expected to write every day on the job, as Jack Warner reminded his stable with a memo. One of their key instruments of control was the seven-year contract, which stipulated that the studio had no obligation to hold on to a writer as an employee for more than six months at a time, but that the writer was obligated to remain with the studio under the terms of the original contract if the studio chose to exercise its semi-annual options, which it had the right to do for seven years. Some successful writers, like Philip and Julius Epstein, were quite prolific; the pair wrote seven scripts in 1935, all of which were made into films. But their success did not guarantee a pay raise.49 For young writers, this was a “kind of indentured servitude,”50 because the contract also transferred to the studio all rights to a writer’s material.

  Studios even looked ahead, adding into contracts new technologies that were still in the development phase but might prove profitable down the road. For example, when the first television sets appeared in the late 1920s, even though telecommunication would not be a viable delivery system on a popular level until the late 1940s, the studios included clauses regarding television in writers’ contracts. Devery Freeman, who wrote Ziegfeld Follies and for The Loretta Young Show, remembered:

  This was a time when . . . studios took the philosophy that when they hired a writer they were buying his ideas, they owned them forever in perpetuity. . . . My first contract . . . you would see that they would throw in everything but the kitchen sink in terms of the future. The future that they didn’t know about. They were tying up television rights. . . . Now [when I signed that contract,] television didn’t exist. . . . Perhaps a picture was being sent experimentally, but television didn’t exist. It was just a remote long-range billion-to-one shot theatrically to most of our way of thinking, yet, just on the off chance, it was put into contracts. I know it was in my contracts.51

  With control of content and of contracts, studio heads monitored writers, their writing, and, in many ways, writers’ ability to move up in status in Hollywood. Producers could change scripts at will without the writer’s agreement or even knowledge. Thalberg regularly had a series of writers working on the same script, not only to ensure that he could get the story he wanted, but also to guarantee that his stars would not be idled by a script delay. Thalberg’s biographer explained: “In a deadline situation, he often sought the inspiration of two or more writers. He reasoned that he couldn’t afford to wait for one writer to come up with a solution he so sorely needed.”52 William Ludwig described the frustrations attached to this common practice: “You never knew who else was working on your material. There could be six, eight, ten, twelve [writers] working on the same thing. You didn’t know whose script was eventually going to be used or if any one script was going to be used. They might say they wanted my first scene and your second scene and somebody would patch it together and you had no way of determining it.”53

  IMAGE 8 After getting this letter from Jack Warner, writers Julius and Philip Epstein called a meeting with Warner to tell him they finally found the perfect ending to Casablanca. They came up with it at 8:30 A.M.

  Screen Writers Guild Records, 1921–1954, Writers Guild Foundation Archive, Shavelson-Webb Libr
ary, Los Angeles

  For this reason, writers had great difficulty in securing credits, even when they were deserved. Sometimes one writer would redraft another’s script entirely. Others became experts on endings, on love scenes, or in punching up comedy. Still, producers often assigned writers because they were available rather than because they were good at a particular type of script.54 Carey Wilson, who wrote Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ and Mutiny on the Bounty, was one of those writers Thalberg depended upon for last-minute rewrites. Whether Wilson’s changes were substantive or not, Thalberg always compensated him not just with pay but also with his name in the credits. Donald Ogden Stewart, who adapted The Philadelphia Story and Holiday for the screen, argued, much like Frederica Sagor, that the best way to ensure credit was to be the last writer before the start of production: “It became a game to be the last one before they started shooting so that you would not be eased out of screen credit.”55 Those writers who learned to work the system used their success to demand solo credits, to affiliate with a particular producer or director who appreciated their skills and respected their writing, or to become directors or producers themselves.56 Preston Sturges wrote and directed Sullivan’s Travels and The Lady Eve; Nunnally Johnson wrote and directed The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and The Three Faces of Eve; Ernst Lubitsch wrote or co-wrote many of his films before coming to the United States and continued the tradition when he arrived in Hollywood; and Billy Wilder co-wrote and directed The Lost Weekend, Sunset Blvd., and The Apartment. Among those who became producers were Charles Brackett, who co-wrote and produced The Lost Weekend and Sunset Blvd.; Joan Harrison, who wrote Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent and produced Alfred Hitchcock Presents; and Dore Schary, who wrote Boys Town and later worked for many years as head of production at MGM and was eventually made president of the studio.

  It was in this environment that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was formed in May 1927, with a dinner party for thirty-six in the Crystal Ballroom of the Biltmore Hotel as its first event. The Academy was Louis B. Mayer’s brainchild: he intended it to be a mediating agency that ideally could curb any talk of further creative or craft organizing. The Academy would bring together prominent producers, directors, actors, writers, and technicians. Potentially anyone “who had contributed in a distinguished way to the arts and sciences of Motion Picture Production” was eligible to be voted in as a member.57 This vague terminology was precisely what the studio heads liked best: it allowed them to exclude possible troublemakers. Officially, the Academy was designed to arbitrate between concerned parties, but in actuality it was a mock company union intended to repress further unionization. For five years, by rallying around the Academy, the studios were able to keep talent from mobilizing through the start of the Depression.

  Even though the Guild and the Academy offered some arbitration, there was no codified method to adjudicate credits when a dispute arose about whose name should appear on a film. Attribution is critical to a writer’s ability to build a reputation, and a writer with a good reputation could garner better writing assignments and better wages. Under the seven-year contract, writers struggled to make a name for themselves within the profession, whether or not they came to Hollywood with previous success. Many writers were ultimately just cogs in the wheel of the studio system—or, as Aldous Huxley remarked, prisoners to it. At every studio, he wrote, there were “rows and rows of hutches, each containing an author on a long contract at a weekly salary. You see their anxious little faces peering through the bars. . . . There are authors on some lots whom nobody has seen for years. It’s like the Bastille.”58 The cultural myth of Hollywood as a place that ruined literary and theatrical writers is a common one. As Richard Fine argues in his study of 138 writers who came to Hollywood, “The members of this group . . . lie at the heart of the Hollywood-as-destroyer legend, for it is their experience which initially provoked complaint about the studios’ treatment of its imported writing talent. . . . Not all writers came to sad ends in Hollywood, then, but virtually every writer was disquieted or unnerved by the experience.”59

  Many writers came to Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s for the money and not for the status or for the recognition. However, once they became a part of the industry, they realized the tremendous injustices toward workers within the studio system. Edmund North, who wrote In a Lonely Place, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Patton, described their treatment: “I don’t want to suggest here that the life of a screenwriter in those days resembled that of a galley slave. What I am trying to say is that management treated writers with a high-handed disdain that made possible, if not inevitable, the creation of a Writers Guild.”60 Still, some groups in Hollywood had succeeded in coming to terms with the studios. In 1929, the American Society of Cinematographers negotiated a five-year contract guaranteeing a minimum wage of $50 a day or $200 a week, along with basic working conditions, such as a fifty-four hour maximum work week, and a closed shop agreement, meaning that the studios would hire only union members in good standing. But the cinematographers were the anomaly within the industry, and they also settled their negotiations the summer before the stock market crashed.61 As writers soon learned after Louis B. Mayer’s performance in the spring of 1933, most employees were without recourse. The position of Hollywood workers was clear: those with unions and collective bargaining agreements behind them refused the cuts; those without negotiated contracts had little, if any, choice. After the lies they were told by their bosses about the state of the studios, writers decided to reestablish their former social club and create a labor union under the same name.

  Formation of the Guild and the Academy Battle

  In April 1933, the Screen Writers Guild drafted its first contract for the studios to sign. The intention of the document was basic: to establish uniform working conditions for all writers within the motion picture industry. Salary cuts like those instituted by Mayer had strengthened writers’ determination to fight back against this manipulation of compensation. They also considered other demands, such as control over the allocation of screen credits and restoring some authorial control to writers, but decided against them. As Christopher Wheaton explains, part of what made the Hollywood unions unique at this moment was that they were not fighting for better wages or better working conditions; rather, their primary goal was to keep the status quo in the face of studio rollbacks during the Depression. Above all, the Hollywood talent guilds were defensive entities.62

  The first Screen Writers Guild union meetings crackled with excitement as writers debated plans for unionization. John Howard Lawson, who had come to Los Angeles five years earlier after a successful career as a playwright on Broadway, became the Guild’s first president. Frances Marion was elected vice president, and Joseph Mankiewicz was voted in as secretary. Marion’s position among the elected officials was no surprise. At the time, many women had successful careers as screenwriters, including prolific veterans like June Mathis (writer of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse), Jeanie Macpherson (Male and Female), and Sonya Levien (The Hunchback of Notre Dame). In the early days of the Guild as a labor organization, female screenwriters played a fundamental role in ensuring its success. Lizzie Francke argues that female screenwriters volunteered for the Guild in its earliest days as a way to channel their varied frustrations with their profession. The organization rewarded some for this hard work, and these women rose to positions of power within the union.63

  Each new member promised to bring other writers as guests to the meetings, with hopes that these visitors would soon join the Guild. Membership was available based on a merit system. Active membership required meeting one of three criteria: three months of studio employment as a staff writer, a screen credit for a feature film, or three screen credits on film shorts. Writers who had not yet received credit on a film but were being paid by a studio were given junior status. Working with fellow writers, members courted new members, explaining their plan to end the tyranny of the long-term contract. Fran
ces Marion remembers tackling this task with Anita Loos and Bess Meredyth, writer of The Mark of Zorro: “Anita, Bess, and I drew into these meetings other writers who had long-term contracts like ours [who] felt as we did toward the newcomers who had been fighting for credits on movies to which they had contributed, and for protection against being dismissed without cause. The contracts given to these potential scenarists abounded in clauses, and many [writers] had been let go before they had had an opportunity to prove their worth.”64 That desire to support younger, less experienced, or lower-paid employees was something writers continually mentioned in these conversations about the establishment of the Guild as a trade union. Lawson contacted Louise Silcox, head of the Dramatists Guild, to tell her of the screenwriters’ newfound success, mentioning how writers on top were looking out for writers at the bottom of the pay scale: “You will be glad to hear that the re-birth of the Screen Writers Guild is being accomplished with tremendous success and enthusiasm: in fact, a more immediate response than we had even dared to hope . . . the rush to sign and pay at last night’s meeting, and the solid support of the Screen Writers Guild was so heartening that I have not quite recovered from the excitement: many people spontaneously offered two and three hundred dollars [to cover dues] for those writers who could not afford the payment.”65 Writers were not as keen on unionization as they were on opening up lines of communication and negotiation between themselves and studio heads. The reorganized structure of the Screen Writers Guild became the model for the formation of both the Screen Actors Guild and the Directors Guild of America. With President Roosevelt in the White House and labor leader John L. Lewis spearheading the new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), it was a time of increased interest in unionization. Labor was on the rise across the country, and the climate in Hollywood was such that its creative workers were interested.