The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild
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By 1940, the writers were virtually the only employees at the studios working without the protection of a contract or bargaining rights. The Guild made some concessions in the MBA negotiations and gave producers the first right of refusal, whether or not a writer was working for the studio at the time of creating a particular script. In addition, the Guild waived rights to material from members who wrote during periods of unemployment—so long as the writer was paid for the time if the script was eventually purchased.126 In turn, producers agreed to a 90 percent closed shop after three years at an 85 percent closed shop. This six-month agreement was voted on and ratified in June 1941 as the first Screen Writers Guild contract.
This working agreement would be structured as a seven-year contract open for negotiation after three years and then every two years thereafter. It included Guild control over the determination of screen credits, with an arbitration committee to handle any disputes, a minimum wage of $125 per week, and a mandatory termination notice for independent writers after eight weeks of employment (or status as employees after eight weeks). The contract prohibited flat fees for scripts under $1,500 ($1,000 for Westerns and action-adventure films). Also, writers had the right to find out whether other writers had been assigned to the same project. Some expenses were allowed for out-of-town writing work, and writers were required to be notified of sneak previews.127 Another issue on the table was speculative writing. Sheridan Gibney, president of the SWG from 1939 to 1941 and from 1947 to 1948, remembered:
The one thing that we did stress in our initial contract with the producers was that there would be no writing on speculation. This became a hard and fast Guild rule. But as we know now this rule has been subverted and everybody writes on speculation for television and it is one of the basic things in any contract with the producers that the Screen Writers Guild fought for and won and now it has been abandoned.128
Even though speculative writing would not become an issue for several decades, the clarity of the rule at that time—and the level of import placed on it—is worth noting. While negotiating the details of a contract with the studios, the Guild membership also voted to start collecting money to save toward a strike fund. The studios had previously required at least some of their employees to show a viable strike threat in order to be moved to agree to a final contract. The writers, therefore, had to be ready for another showdown.
IMAGE 10 Philip Dunne (right) was a founder of the SWG and later served as vice president from 1938 to 1940. Here he reads through the script for How Green Was My Valley with director John Ford (left) and actor Roddy McDowall, c. 1941.
Writers Guild Foundation Archive, Shavelson-Webb Library, Los Angeles
While writers prepared for a strike, the producers started to listen. They were paying attention not just to the growing power of the writers’ labor force, but also to the sounds of war. This was not a time for internal battles. Once the Nazis invaded, Europe rapidly shut down studio productions. Hollywood moguls saw a unique opportunity to make films for audiences craving information and entertainment, not just in the United States but also overseas. Sheridan Gibney posited, “I think that if Pearl Harbor hadn’t occurred we probably would not have gotten any kind of contract at all unless we’d actually gone on strike.”129
When the United States entered the war, the writers convened to discuss their upcoming meeting with the producers. Many in the room felt the war effort was paramount and voted to cease negotiations toward a contract until peace was declared. Harry Tugend, shocked at the idea that all that had been gained by the union could be lost in a moment, urged the writers to let the producers speak first at the meeting, hoping perhaps that the studios would see the need for solidarity within the industry in service toward the country. A few days later at the Brown Derby, the producers committee, the negotiating committee of the SWG, and their respective lawyers gathered. Tugend remembered,
Eddie Mannix, the head of their committee, took the floor. “Okay, you guys. There’s a war on. We don’t know what’s ahead of us. But we do know this. We ain’t got time for any more screwing around. . . . Let’s get this goddamn thing settled. We’ll give the writers a contract. We’ll give ’em as little as we can get away with, but whatever we have to give ’em, let’s get it done!” . . . That’s how we got our contract. It still took months. Factions within the Guild heckling each other, producers whittling down our demands for reasonable minimums. But we finally had a signed contract.130
The fractious contract negotiations were resolved in the early months of 1942. The Guild signed its first contract, the Producer–Screen Writers Guild Inc. Minimum Basic Agreement (MBA) of 1942 with the eight major studios—MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., Columbia, RKO, Twentieth Century–Fox, Universal, and Loew’s Inc.—that controlled 95 percent of first-run exhibition in the United States. Three independent producers also signed: Republic Pictures, Hal E. Roach Studios, and Samuel Goldwyn.
In the end, after this exhausting nine-year battle, what the writers had gained was the formation of a union, jurisdiction over all screenwriters, and the determination of credits. As one of Rosten’s subjects described it, “This was a battle for self-respect.”131 It was as much about recognition as it was about dignity. Yet, in order to get the contract signed, the Guild had to sacrifice two issues that had been critical for writers during this battle. The first was copyright control; writers had to accept that they had lost it to the studios and would never get it back. As John Bright said, “It’s a wistful problem that the screenwriters have always been concerned with and nothing important has ever been done about. It has always been a niggling problem with the Guild because in other fields writers do have that control.”132 The NLRB had determined that the SWG lacked control of copyrights, and it certainly seemed that the writers acquiesced on this point. Their choice not to amalgamate had virtually ended all chance of fighting for authorship—at least for the time being. In 1940, they tried to bar anyone but writers from having the possessory credit (“a film by”), but they were unable to include such a provision in the MBA.133 The power and dignity of authorship that the SWG had fought for in those early days was set aside in exchange for something more tangible: writers’ names established clearly and correctly in credits. That was enough for a first step, they thought.
The second sacrifice was that the new MBA did little to assure salaries beyond minimums. For the Guild’s screenwriters, it had become clear that salaries were determined less by seniority and more by a writer’s credits. Strong credits, and a number of them, would garner more job assignments and a significantly higher salary. Ultimately, having one’s name in a film’s credits was the most powerful gain in this first contract. Writers who had had their names on films had the most powerful weapon for front office salary negotiations. But as writers would soon see, a film credit was also something that could be used against them.
2
Two Front Lines
IMAGE 11 “Hollywood Jabberwocky” by I.A.L. Diamond, from the June 1947 issue of The Screen Writer.
Writers Guild Foundation Archive, Shavelson-Webb Library, Los Angeles
I was a member of the Communist Party . . . and as far as I was concerned there was never, I would say, any discrepancy of any kind between what seemed to me the best interest of the Guild and what those of us in the Party felt . . . should be done in the Guild.
—Ring Lardner Jr., interview by the Writers Guild Oral History Project, 1978
The real-life spectacle and legal theatrics of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, filmed in the hallowed halls of Congress in October 1947, read like an A-lister’s screenplay. But the ending would prove too depressing a scenario for a Hollywood silver screen drama. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, American conservatives on the political right attacked Hollywood Reds, studios fired scores of writers (among other employees), and—perhaps most painful of all—writers betrayed other writers. Without question, this era was the most damaging in the history of the writers and th
eir union, and the story of faithlessness and shame continues to haunt the Guild to this day.
First, Washington politicians placed Hollywood at the center of a campaign to rid American cultural institutions of any hint of communism. Then ten individuals—eight of them writers—were tried, convicted, and jailed for contempt of court. Studio moguls and Guild members crusaded against their peers as fear-mongering and anxiety over reprisal forced Hollywood’s practitioners to take sides. Thus began a long, drawn-out period of studio executives and employees naming names and destroying hundreds of their fellow employees’ careers. Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund consider the period from 1947 to 1953 the most shameful time in the SWG’s history: “The Guild had been weak in the past, but the price of its weakness was never so high nor exacted so completely from its own membership.”1
In May 1947, key members of House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC or “the Committee”) boarded a plane to Los Angeles, bound for a strategy session with studio heads. Eric Johnston, then president of the Motion Picture Association of American (MPAA), greeted HUAC’s new chairman, J. Parnell Thomas (Republican of New Jersey), and promised full cooperation. Johnston even went so far as to suggest to studio heads that MPAA members terminate employment for any worker “proven” to be a communist, but the executives, though willing to work with the Committee, struck down this proposal. Still, members of HUAC visited each of the studio heads, leaning on them to assist the Committee. Just before the hearings began, Ronald Reagan, then president of SAG, declared his organization’s full willingness to cooperate with HUAC.2 He would subsequently be revealed to have been an informant for the FBI since 1943.
The Committee chair called one big-name witness after another as a phalanx of newsreel cameras captured the Hollywood pageant—produced and directed on this occasion by Washington politicians on location in opulent hotel rooms. Appearing in this drama were studio heads Jack Warner, Louis B. Mayer, and Walt Disney, actors Ronald Reagan, Robert Montgomery (the past head of SAG), Adolphe Menjou, Robert Taylor, and Gary Cooper. Their testimony helped the Committee members narrow the focus of their attack. Assessing the inquiry in Los Angeles, Thomas flatly declared to the press: “Ninety percent of Communist infiltration in Hollywood is to be found among screenwriters.”3 Two screenwriters, James K. McGuinness and Rupert Hughes, gladly volunteered information as so-called friendly witnesses. Notably, both men a decade earlier had served as leaders of the reactionary Screen Playwrights group. These two, along with screenwriter Howard Emmett Rogers, were members of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPAPAI), a right-wing organization of high-profile film industry conservatives based, like the Screen Playwrights, at MGM. Philip Dunne later argued, “In a way . . . the Committee hearings were offshoots of the battle between the Screen Writers Guild and the Screen Playwrights. . . . It was being fought on a new field now. They called in the Congress of the United States on their side.”4 Hughes declared that the Guild he had once helped create (meaning the social group from the 1920s) was now “lousy with Communists.” “They began to take over the Guild in 1937,” he claimed. “They’ve been powerful in Hollywood for years, both secretly and openly. They’ve attacked me and anyone else that ever opposed them.”5 Anti-left vitriol, which had quieted during the war years, returned with a vengeance. The publicity HUAC achieved beginning in May assured its members that the campaign against so-called Reds in Hollywood was a powerful vehicle for spreading their anticommunist message. By June, Congress had overcome President Harry S. Truman’s veto and enacted the Taft-Hartley Act to limit the power of and monitor the activities of hundreds of labor unions within the United States, retracting much of the protection the unions had gained with the Depression-era Wagner Act. Taft-Hartley added a special clause that required affidavits of non-communist affiliations from all officers of a union before they could request an NLRB hearing or certification election.6 In September, HUAC demanded that the storymakers of Hollywood come to Washington and essentially stand trial.
HUAC issued forty-five subpoenas, this time not to “friendly” witnesses, but instead to Hollywood practitioners who were suspected of having communist affiliations or sympathies.7 Witnesses were not briefed on what they were alleged to have done wrong or what evidence was to be presented against them, as required in a typical courtroom trial. A good number of the witnesses were young and just starting out in Hollywood. Ring Lardner Jr., thirty-two at the time, recalled that his bright pink subpoena arrived just a week after he had signed a $2,000-a-week deal with Fox Studios and purchased a home on the beach in Santa Monica.8 Of those called, nineteen publically denounced the Committee’s agenda; the Hollywood Reporter referred to them as the “Unfriendly Nineteen.”
Ceplair and Englund explain that four dozen other names could have been added to the list if it had been based solely on long-term dedication to the Communist Party, to the guilds, or to other Communist-controlled or -influenced organizations. But several characteristics of the Nineteen were particularly relevant to HUAC’s agenda: all of them lived in Los Angeles and were employed in the film industry; all were actively involved in pro-Soviet activities; and sixteen were or had been screenwriters.9 Only one was a veteran of World War II, all of them were men, and ten of them were Jewish. The Committee’s first eleven targets were John Howard Lawson, Dalton Trumbo (writer of Kitty Foyle and Tender Comrade), Albert Maltz (writer of Pride of the Marines), Alvah Bessie, Samuel Ornitz, writer and director Herbert Biberman (who had written The Master Race), director Edward Dmytryk, producer and writer Adrian Scott (who had written Mr. Lucky), Ring Lardner Jr., Lester Cole, and playwright Bertolt Brecht, who had adapted Hangmen Also Die! (Brecht denied he had ever been in the party and then fled the country only hours after his congressional testimony.) Waldo Salt, who later wrote Midnight Cowboy, Serpico, and Coming Home, was to be next in line.
In October 1947, HUAC reconvened in Washington to hear again from “friendly” witnesses Ronald Reagan, Walt Disney, and several others. Their testimony served as confirmation of a premise the Committee already believed to be true: that there were “communist infiltrators” in Hollywood who were systematically taking over the unions. As the proceedings began, Chairman Thomas declared: “It is only to be expected that Communists would strive desperately to gain entry to the motion picture industry simply because the industry offers such a tremendous weapon for education and propaganda.”10 Reagan testified about his experiences in SAG, and Disney told stories of his battles with the Screen Cartoonists Guild. The Committee then called the men now known as the “Hollywood Ten,” one by one. Chairman Thomas sat balanced atop two phone books and a cushion, lording over the witnesses, an oversized gavel at the ready. John Howard Lawson was the first to come to the table. Though Lawson tried to make a speech, Parnell interrupted him with two questions: “Are you a member of the Screen Writers Guild?” and “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?” The juxtaposition of the questions was designed to imply that membership in the SWG was just as sinister as membership in the Communist Party.
Although no Committee member offered a chance to do so, each man attempted to speak, only to be immediately silenced by Parnell’s gavel. From their extensive reading of the records, Ceplair and Englund report that “the words ‘pounding gavel’ stud the transcripts of the hearings and indicate the frequency and relish with which a contumacious witness’ words were drowned out.”11 Only Albert Maltz was able to read his statement in full. When asked about his membership in the SWG, Maltz replied, “Next are you going to ask me what religious group I belong to?”—thereby tying the treatment of the Hollywood Left to the persecution of Jews.12 Trumbo brought copies of his screenplays and challenged the Committee to locate subversive material in their pages. But not one of the Ten was allowed to introduce evidence or ask questions of the Committee members.
Parnell’s treatment of the Ten was so contemptuous that some mainstream newspapers, eve
n ones that had toed a patriotic line thus far, briefly expressed some sympathy. An editorial in the Washington Post charged that Thomas “may pretend that his supercolossal Hollywood investigation is aimed not at interference but merely exposure. Its effect, nevertheless, is to intimidate and coerce the industry into an even more rigid acceptance of Mr. Thomas’ concepts of Americanism.”13 The New York Times was equally repelled by Thomas’s behavior: “The Thomas committee and others may do well to remember that respect for individual rights and constitutional processes of law is one of the marks which distinguish a democracy from a totalitarian state; and that one of the best ways to fight communism is to show such respect at all times and places—even on Capitol Hill.”14 As Ceplair notes, the radical difference in the treatment of the unfriendly witnesses in comparison to the earlier treatment of the friendly witnesses by a purportedly neutral legislative body amounted to a blatant violation of due process.15
A month later, on November 24, Eric Johnston, as head of the MPAA, chaired a private meeting at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. He included all eight major studio heads as well as the independents and a few of the studios’ East Coast financiers. The next day, in Washington, the House of Representatives cited the Hollywood Ten for contempt of Congress for refusing to say on record whether they were members of the Communist Party. The Ten, who had already been suspended without pay by the studios, were now ordered by the government to serve jail time.
Later that day in New York, the Association of Motion Picture Producers, the Motion Picture Association of America, and the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers released a statement from their closed-door meeting. The studios called the behavior of the Ten deplorable and promised not to rehire any of them until the Committee cleared them of culpability or wrongdoing. The document, known thereafter as the Waldorf Declaration, read in part: “We will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group [that] advocates the overthrow of the Government of the United States by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional methods. In pursuing this policy, we are not going to be swayed by hysteria or intimidation from any source. . . . [We] will invite the Hollywood talent guilds to work with us to eliminate any subversives, to protect the innocent; and to safeguard free speech and a free screen wherever threatened.”16