The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild

by Miranda J. Banks

  The SWG’s immediate priorities were to stop imminent pay cuts and to gain control of the allocation of screen credits. Writers wanted a standardized system that would ensure that a writer deserving attribution would get it. As it was, the studios had control. Only when they saw their films in a theater would writers know whether they would be credited for their work or whether they would have to share attribution with a producer or his pet employee of the moment. As Nancy Lynn Schwartz explains:

  For writers in Hollywood, then as now, a screen credit is the only form of identity he has. Faceless, and generally three pictures down the road by the time a film is finally made, the screen credit, whether it reads “Screenplay By,” “Original Screenplay By,” “Screenplay Based on the Novel By,” “Story By,” or “Additional Dialogue By,” tells the world the writer was there. A writer can work for years and make an exceedingly respectable living without ever seeing his name on the screen. . . . The level of income rises in direct proportion to screen credits, which prove a writer to be a good risk, and the writer with the longest and best list of credits has the safest berth.66

  Stopping the capricious allocation of credits was critical to writers and to their new guild. It was not simply recognition or acclaim that writers sought. Rather, with more film titles to their names, especially more substantial films, writers might be able to renegotiate their contracts and leverage a pay increase.

  Some writers whose personal contracts were up around this time began putting clauses into their new contracts to ensure that whatever terms they agreed to as individuals would not hurt the Guild’s collective bargaining agreement. Sonya Levien informed her studio that she was unable to sign a new contract pending the preparation of the Code of Practice and Procedure.67 In response, the studio’s lawyers suggested that if the contract met Levien’s approval, she sign it and leave it with her lawyer, to be released only after the Guild had resolved its negotiations.68 She agreed, but her lawyer sent on the contract before negotiations were completed. Sadly, she had allowed the studio to get exactly what it wanted: a signed contract that went behind the back of the Guild. Not surprisingly, this example was only the beginning. Studio heads fought the Guild with a degree of viciousness that few writers saw coming.

  Many of these writers were young, in their mid-twenties and early thirties, and were going up against the paternalistic structure of the industry. Fay Kanin, writer of Tell Me Where It Hurts, explained how many young and ambitious writers were not taken seriously: “Today a young person is very much welcomed into the industry, as you know, because they [producers] feel the audience is young and the young people have a kind of way to communicate with their contemporaries. But in that day and age, young was a dirty word in terms of getting a job in the movie industry.”69 A young writer was also much easier for a producer to push around. Although some studio heads like Harry Cohn at Columbia were willing to play along with the SWG at first, Louis B. Mayer threatened to throw out any writers under contract with MGM who joined the union.

  When the SWG suggested that writers withdraw as members from the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, the studio heads took notice. Thalberg regarded his writers’ unionization as a personal affront: “How can you do this to me?” he bellyached. He could not understand why they would ever want to organize: “Those writers are living like kings. Why on earth would they want to join a union, like coal miners or plumbers?”70 The comparison of creative workers with blue-collar employees was part of a larger strategy that the studio heads had been using for years and would continue to employ against writers. Writers would have to go up against their own egos and discard the notion that they were “artists” if they were to accept their position in the way the SWG needed to define it—as employees.

  When Upton Sinclair won the Democratic nomination for the governorship of California in 1934, a group of writers set up an “authors committee” to raise funds for his election. In response, the studio heads did everything in their power to stop Sinclair and undermine writers’ support for his candidacy. As Ian Hamilton observes, the nascent SWG adopted a resolution that condemned the studios for their tactics and “implied coercion and intimidation.”71 This early political action is significant as the Guild’s first step in speaking out on issues external to the realm of creative work, as well as in taking a position on national- and state-level politics that countered the voice of the studios. As Allen Rivkin, a founding member of the SWG and writer of Dancing Lady, remembered, “We rebelled, because we felt the man had the right to a fair campaign and that we had the right to speak for ourselves. It was democracy in action and a rebellion against the control of the studios over our non-studio lives.”72

  The national movement toward unionization was a part of this difficult era. President Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) affected not just blue-collar workers but white-collar workers as well. Under the NIRA and the authority of the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which created a Motion Picture Code, the government suggested that Hollywood’s newly formed creative guilds all coalesce under the auspices of the Academy. The government’s plan for cooperative action seemed acceptable at first, and SWG and SAG were eager to garner national support.73 But the Academy pushed back with so many provisions that it lost this opportunity for negotiation and created an angrier and more determined union movement. “Instead of gaining power by cozying up to the NRA regulators,” Tom Kemper argues, “the Academy managed to mobilize and strengthen the opposition, inspiring stronger pushes for unions by writers, directors, and actors.”74

  It quickly became clear to the two guilds that the code openly favored studio employers. As Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund note, the guilds “soon discovered, along with other newly formed unions around the country, that the NIRA was not a silver platter, but a brass bell opening round one of a violent struggle over union recognition and industrial reform in America.”75 Ceplair and Englund detail how the NIRA failed to recognize the authority of the newly founded guilds and lacked a mechanism to improve the status of writers and actors. The guilds quickly went to work to stop the NIRA. SWG president Lawson said, “We’re going to fight. We won’t allow them to place the burden for all their waste and inefficiency on the creative talent which is responsible for every dollar brought into the box office.”76 Using every social tie they had in Washington, the two guilds held off the controversial provisions of the Motion Picture Code of the NIRA. In May 1935 the NIRA itself was declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court, which at the time was extremely hostile to Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation. Rather than place power in the hands of the Academy, Roosevelt’s administration suggested five-by-five committees (five writers paired with five producers, or five actors paired with five producers), which would oversee disputes regarding wages and hours for their respective constituencies. Variety prematurely reported that the Academy was “about to fold up completely and fall into the ash-can of oblivion,” but the moguls would not give up so easily.77

  Intimidation and control were the moguls’ first line of defense. The studio heads countered writers’ efforts by instituting a series of measures that restricted their rights. Writers were allowed to work only with particular producers on specific projects; as a result, the total number of writers employed at any time by the studios declined.78 As Ceplair and Englund detail, MGM dropped ten writers in one week, and more writers were finding themselves on week-to-week contracts or per-picture deals. They also document how some blacklisting occurred at the major studios against a few of the more active heads of the SWG. These acts did not amount to much, as most of the writers were quickly scooped up by competing studios, but it was “a taste of what was to come.”79 Everyone observing these changes in the behavior of the front office was on edge. Frances Marion recalls in her autobiography, “We would not have blinked had L.B. [Mayer] roared out a threat to close the studio unless we gave up the [Guild] idea, but when Irving Thalberg made this threat in chilling tones we were
shocked into a dread silence which revealed his enormous power over us.”80

  The moguls’ second line of defense, the Academy, was still the organization through which they tried to wield their power. First they stalled the five-by-five committees for as long as possible. Then, when Academy negotiators finally did show up for meetings, they rejected every proposal the writers and actors placed on the table. When the NIRA was declared unconstitutional in May 1935, the five-by-five committees dissolved.81 The moguls argued that the Academy was the only trade organization that was needed. But Guild writers and the actors who had joined SAG knew that the Academy was really a sweetheart organization for the studios disguised as a mediatory union. The SWG and SAG thus banded together in these early years, sharing legal counsel as they worked against the Motion Picture Code and the constraints of the Motion Pictures Producers Association. As Harry Tugend, writer of Pocketful of Miracles, remembered, “The membership meetings were more frequent, louder, until they woke up the news media.”82

  The crisis between the Guilds and the Academy peaked on Oscar night in 1936 with the national news media in attendance.83 Outside the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, members of the SAG and the SWG protested the event, insisting that the Academy Awards did not fairly represent all members of the motion picture community. Inside the hotel, when Dudley Nichols won for his adaptation of Liam O’Flaherty’s novel The Informer, he stood up and declared that he refused to accept the award. Nichols’s shaming of the studio heads on their most self-congratulatory night made clear to the studios that any guise of the Academy as a mediating unit between management and employees had disappeared. The curtain had lifted on their union-busting scheme.

  Though the NIRA was lost, the Wagner Act of 1935 brought new hope for the SWG. This piece of legislation guaranteed collective bargaining for trade unions with jurisdiction over a particular industry. It outlawed company unions and prohibited coercion and blacklisting. The act established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which adjudicated disputes regarding which union might represent a group of workers as well as union violations. The key for mobilized writers was to establish the Screen Writers Guild as the one-and-only trade organization with jurisdiction over all screenwriters. But studio heads had other plans. First, the moguls spent almost two years challenging the constitutionality of the Wagner Act; second, when that tactic failed in 1937, they argued that the motion picture industry was outside of the jurisdiction of the Wagner Act because the vast majority of its work took place in California and should not be considered by the US government as interstate commerce.84

  IMAGE 9 Telegram from Sonya Levien to Dudley Nichols, after Nichols refused the Academy Award for The Informer in 1936.

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

  Despite these actions, the SWG kept fighting, and writers became hopeful not just about jurisdiction within the industry but also about the possibility of increased power through amalgamation with the more established Authors League of America. Here was the chance to become a professional organization that would carry weight with other forms of writing outside Hollywood. The SWG executive board listed for its members thirteen potential benefits of amalgamation, including control of credits, fair arbitration, a prohibition on blacklists, a prohibition on general salary cuts, a prohibition on speculative screenplay writing for any producer, a requirement that producers purchase rights before adaptation, and notification to writers when others are hired to write on the same project for the same producer.85 Sound made great writers invaluable to producers, since tight scripts ensured speedy production. But with so many people eager for good work, a strike, though it might affect the quality of work, would have little effect on production schedules. Amalgamation promised to give the Guild power in a strike: if all writers were unified in a syndicate, no dramatists or novelists would be available as strikebreakers if Hollywood writers went on strike. Joining a national federation was a bold endeavor that would propel the industry into a direct confrontation between producers and talent. But the writers did not stop there. They had an ace in the hole.

  The leaders of the SWG proposed an addition to the amalgamated guild’s bylaws. Article XII called for prohibiting contracts or options for services or the sale of any material to a studio after May 2, 1938, unless the studio was a signatory of a Guild contract. Under this provision, long-term contracts would be null and void without a Guild contract for all writers working at the studios. Producers were quick to remind writers that these acts of defiance—amalgamation, Article XII, or a possible strike—would lead to dire consequences. Thalberg reportedly told his writers, “If you wish to put all these people out of work, it is your responsibility. For, if you proceed with this strike, I shall close down the entire plant, without a single exception. Make no mistake. I mean precisely what I say. I shall close this studio, lock the gates, and there will be an end to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer productions. And it will be you—all you writers—who will have done it.”86 As early as 1938, Charles Brackett, in his role as president of the SWG, asked the NLRB to ensure that the Guild’s membership list would remain private. If producers got hold of lists, Brackett argued, they could strong-arm or, worse, fire writers who belonged to the Guild.87 Studio lawyers declared that amalgamation would destroy the studios and make them vulnerable to federal antitrust law as well as California’s antitrust legislation, the Cartwright Act.88 Though they accepted plenty of Wall Street money, the moguls refused to imagine making deals with a trade union of writers that was “being governed from New York.”89 This accusation, of course, made some writers bristle: they feared losing their negotiating power to playwrights and novelists.

  Some highly successful screenwriters who were politically more conservative and also sympathetic to the producers—people like John Lee Mahin (Captains Courageous), Howard Emmett Rogers (Libeled Lady and For Me and My Gal), and James K. McGuinness (A Girl in Every Port, A Night at the Opera, and Rio Grande)—started to express distaste for the Guild’s agenda. They declared that the leadership was going too far and might put the Guild in the hands of eastern Reds, a prospect they found intolerable.90 Others found themselves wavering, wary of amalgamation but not willing to walk away from the Guild.

  The primary targets of the producers’ attacks were Article XII and the writers’ proposal for a closed shop. The newspapers came at the Guild at full throttle, most notably William Randolph Hearst’s papers and the conservative trade journal The Hollywood Reporter. An April 1936 editorial in Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner described the SWG as a self-serving group that was threatening the heart of the industry: “The beneficiaries of the industry generally should not allow greedy and selfish cliques to kill the prolific geese which have laid such marvelous golden eggs for all. There are no such other golden eggs to be found in the world.”91 A few days later an editorial in the Los Angeles Times asked, “Why do you want to turn over your independence to a group of men who have continuously expressed nothing but contempt for you as artists and to whose dictation the producers would never and could never submit?”92 The public attacks were unrelenting. On May 2, the producers issued a statement: “There is not the slightest change in the position of the motion picture producers with regard to proposals to establish a closed shop for screenwriters. Any attempt to cripple the industry by invoking Article XII will be fought to the limit; any effort to curb the free and independent relationship between producer and writer will be resisted at any cost.”93

  The SWG chose to respond to its own constituency through the Screen Guilds’ Magazine. To the question posed by W. R. Wilkerson, owner and editor of The Hollywood Reporter, as to why writers would want a closed shop, Dudley Nichols replied with a list of benefits: “Fairness. Honesty. Genuine friendship with producers. A more courageous stand against foolish censorship. More integrity as craftsmen. Abolish fear. A stronger industry and a better art. Pride and self respect. In fact they are too man
y to enumerate. Better just to ask, ‘What have producers to fear?’ Nothing. ‘What has the dishonest producer or writer (assuming that the human race is fallible) to fear?’ Everything!”94

  Even as the SWG battled with the press and the producers, there was cause for concern within the Guild. Devery Freeman called it a time of tremendous polarization among writers.95 Some writers expressed frustration with the liberal leadership of the SWG. Samson Raphaelson, writer of The Jazz Singer, Trouble in Paradise, and Suspicion, recalled feeling that SWG president Ernest Pascal was overly combative in his tone against the producers:

  I got a letter saying we were going to organize, we were going to have a big meeting and it was a letter full of defiance terminology. “We will defy the producers.” It had a kind of class war inflection that I felt was not needed. I felt this is . . . going to unduly create a fear that we’re Communists, that we are going to destroy the system instead of organizing. . . . I called him and I said, “God almighty, why did you have to use inflammatory language? The battle has not started. You know, you’re sounding as if you are waving a flag and saying, ‘Let’s all come girded to the loins.’ . . . You just scared the hell out of the studios when all you want to do is have a stronger Guild.”96