The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild

by Miranda J. Banks

  The swiftness with which the studios accepted and incorporated the blacklist into the industry’s new modus operandi is, in retrospect, quite striking. That so little pushback occurred or is documented among studio heads seems to affirm Lewis’s argument. The studios’ collusion with HUAC provided an easy means to terminate a number of longstanding employees’ contracts, to phase out the first-generation Jewish studio moguls, to attack the unions, and to move toward a more corporatized, conglomerate model.

  Writers bore the brunt of the blacklist in Hollywood, especially at the beginning. As Nancy Lynn Schwartz explains, the censorship of writers was taking place on two fronts.155 First came the stifling of creativity through Hollywood’s Production Code and criticism from national and local organizations and media outlets on the watch for subversion. Second, self-censorship for career preservation became the norm: writers chose lighter, less controversial topics to avoid questions about their political leanings. As the number of blacklisted writers grew through the early 1950s, other types of creative and craft workers suffered as well. But unlike other industry employees, writers could work anonymously. That writers never stepped on the set was suddenly a saving grace, and they devised tactics to avoid being seen at all by the individuals signing their paychecks.

  Two expedients enabled blacklisted writers to get and keep work: using pseudonyms and asking another writer to serve as a front (signing his or her name to a script written by a blacklisted writer). Starting in 1948, the SWG allowed members to work under pseudonyms unless they were contractually obligated to use their real names. However, the Guild demanded registration of pseudonyms to ensure payment and to preclude the use of offensive names.156 Blacklisted writers were not allowed to use pseudonyms, but many disregarded the rule. Television was a slightly safer place for blacklisted writers to work: producers were desperate for content, and many new writers were getting a chance to write for series, even if they had little experience. Thus, unknown names (and the writers behind them) had a good shot of getting work, especially if someone on the set was willing to vouch for them.

  While blacklisted, Walter Bernstein, Abraham Polonsky, and Arnold Manoff (who previously scripted Man from Frisco) wrote under pseudonyms for the CBS series You Are There, with the sympathetic Sidney Lumet directing their episodes. They wrote about heroic rebellions against angry vigilantes, the Salem witch trials, and persecuted heroes like Socrates, Galileo, and Joan of Arc. Polonsky recalled: “This was a very good show on television and it was probably the only place where any guerrilla warfare was conducted against McCarthy in a public medium. . . . Every once in a while the pseudonym would be revealed, so we would just use another one, because they would blacklist even a non-existent writer.”157 Joan Scott remembered, “We did a lot of Lassies. . . . I fronted for [her husband, Adrian] on the TV show from 1955 on until 1961. I wrote some and he wrote some, but they were all under my pen name—Joanne Court. I got to be known as ‘the woman who writes like a man.’”158

  The fight to get blacklisted creatives and craft workers back to work, and for them to use their real names again, was long and hard. In 1952, Trumbo and Cole sued MGM for $350,000 in unpaid wages and canceled contracts.159 Lardner sued Twentieth Century–Fox, and Adrian and Joan Scott filed suit against RKO. Altogether, the Hollywood Ten sued the studios for $61 million in back pay.160 They were not alone in demanding compensation for the lost the opportunity to work. In 1960, Nedrick Young, who wrote Jailhouse Rock, became a plaintiff in a twelve-person class action lawsuit that claimed the MPAA had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act in its authorization of the blacklist. Young testified, “We’ve counted our losses, waited, and fought for the day when we would have not only jobs but names.”161 In a supporting affidavit John Howard Lawson explained to the court the significance of a writer’s name: “A writer’s name is his most cherished possession. It is the basis of his economic life, and the ‘trademark’ which establishes his competence and craftsmanship. It is more than the means by which he earns his bread. It is his creative personality, the symbol of the whole body of his ideas and experience.”162

  Young’s case was settled out of court for $100,000, far less than the $7.65 million demanded by the plaintiffs. But in many ways, the lawsuits had a more fundamental, far-reaching impact: they forced the studios to face the blacklisted writers in the courtroom. Around this time, a number of writers started getting work in Hollywood again. Still, the return to work was slow and not at all certain. The blacklist had started in 1947, but for some it did not fully end until the middle of the 1960s. For a small group, blacklisting stretched well into the 1970s.163

  Writers often took extraordinary steps to continue writing or to help friends and colleagues who wanted to keep writing. Some screenwriters were lucky enough to find advocates who fronted for them, and some of the films written under these conditions became box office hits and are among the most celebrated of the 1950s. Young was a front for Alvah Bessie on Passage West before being blacklisted and writing The Defiant Ones and Inherit the Wind under the pseudonym Nathan E. Douglas. Michael Blankfort fronted for Albert Maltz on Broken Arrow. Dalton Trumbo sold scripts for Gun Crazy, Roman Holiday, The Brave One, and Spartacus using fronts and pseudonyms. In 1957, Hollywood had to face the absurdity of this blacklist in a most embarrassing way. At the Academy Awards that year, Robert Rich won Best Motion Picture Story for The Brave One. Not only was Rich not in the audience, he did not exist. Jesse Lasky Jr. rushed onto the stage to accept the award from actress Deborah Kerr, telling the audience that his good friend Rich was in the maternity ward with his wife, who was about to deliver. In reality, Rich was Trumbo’s pseudonym. At that same ceremony, the screenplay for Friendly Persuasion, by blacklisted writer Michael Wilson, was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, although no writer had been listed in the film’s credits. Wilson did win the SWG award for Best American Drama that year. Groucho Marx told guests at the awards dinner that although Moses was originally given credit for The Ten Commandments, the producers had removed his name when they found out he had crossed the Red Sea.

  After these incidents, the Academy’s board of governors passed a bylaw prohibiting the presentation of Academy Awards to witnesses who had been “unfriendly” before HUAC. (Strangely, such individuals could still be nominated.) Trumbo began a letter-writing campaign, declaring that he was “Robert Rich” and demanding that the studios end the blacklist. The Academy agreed to rescind the 1957 bylaw against blacklisted writers so long as they agreed not to embarrass the Academy publicly. A year later, the script written by Wilson and fellow blacklisted writer Carl Foreman for The Bridge on the River Kwai won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. However, at the ceremony the statuette was handed to the French author of the novel, Pierre Boulle, who could not speak or write English. After Ned Young agreed in 1959 not to embarrass the Academy by revealing his identity as the writer of the Oscarwinning screenplay for The Defiant Ones, the board of governors rescinded the bylaw. In 1960, Otto Preminger publicly announced that he had asked Trumbo to write the screenplay for Exodus. Soon afterward, Kirk Douglas declared that Trumbo had authored the script for Spartacus. By 1968, the Guild had slowly begun to reinstate credits. However, to this day, many blacklisted writers remain uncredited or miscredited.

  IMAGE 15 Dalton Trumbo finally getting his 1957 Academy Award for The Brave One in 1975, delivered to him by the then Academy president, producer Walter Mirisch.

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

  The Legacy of the Blacklist

  The blacklist was a time of evil, and no one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil. . . . It will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because there were none; there were only victims. Some suffered less than others, some grew and some diminished, but in the final tally we were all victims because almost without exception each of us felt compelled to say things he did not want to say, to do things that he did not want to
do, to deliver and receive wounds he truly did not want to exchange. That is why none of us—right, left, or center—emerged from that long nightmare without sin.

  —Dalton Trumbo, Laurel Award acceptance speech, 1970

  Looking back on the blacklist era, Devery Freeman, one of the founders of the SWG, believed that Hollywood learned a lesson in going against its writers: “I think that what Hollywood has learned through that is that good writers are not replaceable. Certainly not that easily because . . . so many of them that were blacklisted continued to be needed by Hollywood—wrote a lot of the product and surfaced after the tension and became some of our proudest boasts—our greatest writers.”164 It took until 1970—the year that Ring Lardner Jr. wrote M*A*S*H (and a year later won an Oscar for it)—for the SWG to repeal its bylaw barring admitted communists from membership.

  In 1976, when Carl Foreman introduced Michael Wilson as the winner of the Writers Guild Laurel Award, he reminded the audience, “our bloody Oscar has been sitting in Pierre Boulle’s living room, and I suppose that by now he’s given up wondering how the hell it ever got there.”165 Wilson, in his acceptance speech, implored the younger generation of writers never to forget the story of the blacklist and reminded the Guild of its responsibility to defend mavericks and dissenters.166 In 1985, nine years after this event, Foreman and Wilson were awarded posthumous Oscars for Bridge on the River Kwai.

  The legacy of the blacklist, for writers, Guild members, and the Guild as an institution is something individuals still grapple with. In many ways, the blacklist battles continued to define the politics and the policies of the Guild as it matured, a topic to be explored in the following chapters. Since the 1970s, but particularly since the fiftieth anniversary of the blacklist in 1997, the Guild has trained its focus on authors’ First Amendment rights and authors’ rights overall. In 1982, Al and Helen Levitt, both of whom had been blacklisted in the 1950s and then wrote for That Girl in the 1960s, convinced the Guild leadership to issue supplementary benefits to writers who were unable to contribute to their pension funds as a result of their forced unemployment. In the 1990s, persuaded by Paul Jarrico, the Guild created an official Credit Restoration Committee. In 1997, at an enormous star-studded event, the AMPTP and the presidents of SAG, WGA, DGA, and AFTRA officially apologized for their organizations’ complicity in the blacklist.167

  For the individual writers, survivor status came at a complicated cost. Are these individuals first and foremost writers—or blacklisted writers? Joan Scott questioned how much she should hold on to her name and thus the identity and memory of her past experiences: “[T]here is something romantic about dead Reds, but not necessarily about the live ones who are trying to get writing assignments. . . . The whole question of the blacklist, the whole question of identity. Should I have kept my maiden name—should I have taken another name? Do I have [three] lives: one as Adrian Scott’s widow, another as a writer, another as a woman who tries to work for what I believe in. It’s very confusing . . . even trusting [people] today. Wondering what the neighbors know. Wondering if there are more phone tappings and more FBI stakeouts.”168 The next chapters will explore the transformations in the industry that Scott pointed out here and will examine how these shifts, in turn, altered the work of writing.

  3

  The Infant Prodigy

  IMAGE 16 Frank S. Nugent’s notes on a draft of The Searchers, c. 1955.

  Writers Guild Foundation Shavelson-Webb Library, Los Angeles

  BANKS: Did you think about the potential for reruns when you created The Dick Van Dyke Show? It still feels fresh. It is a series with longevity.

  CARL REINER: I’m so happy you say that, because I was aware that it could be. I realized I was writing about human relationships, and I was very aware . . . that it could be a classic. I was not saying it to people—they would think you were crazy. But I assiduously told every writer . . . no slang of the day . . . a gun is a gun, not a gat or a rod. Use words. . . . And I get letters from people who are kids seeing it for the first time and they are digging it.

  —Interview, 29 August 2013

  By the late 1940s, television sets were quickly becoming the most coveted accessory for the modern American home. Media historian Lynn Spigel has masterly documented the installation of television into American families’ daily lives.1 The simultaneous process of integrating television writers into professional writing communities provides an important lens for viewing the evolving nature of screenwriting and of labor’s voice within the media industries. Television was new territory for professional writers, and, during the early 1950s, three of the four writing branches of the Authors League of America—the Dramatists Guild, the Radio Writers Guild (RWG), and the Screen Writers Guild (SWG)—were eager to claim jurisdiction over television in labor negotiations.

  While each guild made its case for jurisdiction, television writers themselves were not convinced that affiliation with any of these organizations would help them to gain better pay and solid benefits.2 Many of the writers were already dues-paying members of either the RWG or the SWG, or both. The SWG represented approximately 70 percent of the 375 writers on contract to write for television shows at this time—but many of those writers were members of the SWG based on their filmed works.3 The SWG claimed that only 11 percent of television writers were in the RWG.4 But the newest entertainment labor group, the Television Writers Association (TWA), claimed sole jurisdiction over all television writers, given that only a handful of series were even being recorded on film.5

  In August 1952 some of the biggest names in television writing came together to express their concerns about how the production studios and agencies creating live-action series were treating them. This group, made up of approximately thirty-five men and women who were writing the bulk of all scripted series on television at the time, united to form the TWA. In a press release, the new organization announced its purpose and declared itself necessary because no existing union was capable of supporting the unique needs of this group. The SWG and RWG, it claimed, “are concerned with other media, radio and pictures, and working television writers believe that the only answer to their problems is a union which will be concerned solely with television.”6 The TWA established itself under the umbrella of the Authors League of America and set up headquarters in New York. It filed for certification with the National Labor Relations Board, requesting that TWA serve as the bargaining agent for all labor negotiations involving professional television writers, whether they worked for live or filmed series. The group appointed Charles Isaacs, writer on The Colgate Comedy Hour, president; Jess Oppenheimer, the creator of I Love Lucy, became vice president, and Richard Powell, later a writer on Hogan’s Heroes, publicity director.

  Many television writers were justifiably concerned about joining any guild that could, and did, turn against its own during the blacklist era. Nate Monaster, a writer on The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, was among those who were uncomfortable with the SWG: “The Screen Writer’s Guild had entered into this NLRB election and wanted to be the union for television writers. Now we resisted this because a lot of us felt, I know I felt, that the role of the Guild in the entire Blacklist was not a noble one.”7 Despite these concerns, the SWG was determined to win jurisdiction. It continued to add members from the television world over the next few months and demanded that the TWA withdraw its application for NLRB certification.8 But the TWA kept signing new writers, and by the end of August 1952, it had 125 members.9

  In October 1952, SWG leaders hosted an informal meeting with the heads of the TWA and the RWG, hoping yet again to persuade the TWA to withdraw its application to the NLRB. It didn’t work. The television writers instead used the occasion to issue a list of non-negotiable conditions. Oppenheimer, as the head of the committee on objectives, presented the following principles:

  ▪ No blacklist for reasons of race, creed, color, sex, or political beliefs or associations.

  ▪ All negotiations for television writers t
o be conducted by a representative committee, elected by and responsible to a majority vote.

  ▪ Complete ownership of material by the television writer.

  ▪ Payment [by producers] for first-use of material. Payment for each re-use.

  ▪ Ownership-participation in series by writer who has contributed all or part of the format of characters used.

  ▪ No speculative writing.

  ▪ Full payment for audition or pilot film scripts.

  ▪ Limitation on re-writes. Original author shall have exclusive right to revise his own material.

  ▪ Limitation on time for consideration of freelance scripts.

  ▪ Credits for writers on a show on a guild-established procedure.

  ▪ Arbitration machinery for the settlement of disputes.10

  With this list, television writers identified outstanding issues on which the SWG had failed film writers, most notably blacklisting and ownership, and they expected the TWA to do better by them.

  Two years after the premiere of I Love Lucy, with his show garnering the top television ratings, Jess Oppenheimer was called to testify before the NLRB at the instigation of the SWG. Testimony that day related to Oppenheimer’s disparate roles as a producer working for Desilu Productions, as vice president of the TWA, and as head writer of Lucy. The attorney for the SWG insisted that Oppenheimer, as a prestigious producer and an employer of writers, had exercised unfair influence in recruiting his two writers, Madeline Pugh and Bob Carroll Jr., to join the TWA.11 That Oppenheimer was also a dues-paying member of the SWG was of no consequence. His privilege as a producer and employer overshadowed his claim as a writer.