The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild

by Miranda J. Banks

  The guilds soon realized that jurisdictional control of the new medium would be critical to their future as stakeholders in the American arts and entertainment industry. An extraordinary potential for revenue and power was at stake. The various guilds that covered writers had had complicated relations before 1950, and television now had the potential either to destroy inter-guild relations or—as luck would finally have it—to bring them together.

  The Dramatists Guild argued that motion photography of a live television series was the equivalent of broadcasting a staged production. That argument persuaded some other guild leaders—at least until telefilm took over as the dominant form. At the first National Television Conference in 1951, the Dramatists Guild gained temporary jurisdiction over live and filmed television on the West Coast. Many young writers maintained simultaneous careers in the theater and in television anthology series, including Paddy Chayefsky on the The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse and Reginald Rose on Studio One.

  The SWG had viewed television first as a curiosity, then as a potent rival for film audiences; but unlike the major Hollywood moguls, who refused for many years to see television as anything other than a threat, SWG leaders decided it would be better policy to fold in the writers in this new medium. Guild writers knew about story, they knew about moving pictures, and they genuinely believed their union was best positioned to represent television writers. Although very few filmed series existed in 1949 (that year, Fireside Theater was the first), the SWG was now, five years after Kanin introduced the medium to the union, determined to control television.

  The SWG’s resolve was based partly upon an overarching concern for wider control during a historic moment when the Guild and its members were still under attack for leftist leanings. The case of Reuben Ship was only making matters worse. As a radio writer on The Life of Riley, he had not yet been granted membership in the SWG, but officially he was a dues-paying member. After HUAC declared Ship an unfriendly witness, US immigration officials had him deported to his native Canada. He had not been declared a communist, just an “undesirable alien.”34 Roy Brewer, president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, asked, “If Reuben Ship, identified communist, is not good enough for the USA, why is he good enough for the SWG?”35 Publisher William Wilkerson used the story as a basis for further attacks against the SWG in the Hollywood Reporter: “Many members of the SWG honestly feel the red danger is over. Are they aware of the infiltration into SWG of communists today through television?”36

  Ronald Reagan, then the head of the Screen Actors Guild, favored the Motion Picture Industry Council’s call for a loyalty board. SWG opinion was split on the matter. President Mary McCall Jr. stated that she was “violently opposed to Communists” but that she rejected the loyalty board because it “sets up a blacklist by inference.”37 Among workers in Hollywood, only the art directors and writers were collectively opposed to a loyalty board. Some writers believed that the only way they could improve their lot was to acquiesce to the MPIC’s wishes. Virginia Kellogg, who wrote White Heat and Caged, warned, “If we, out of the twelve guilds, reject this plan, we will, in the public eye, remain red writers.”38

  Whatever the climate among motion picture writers, the Radio Writers Guild was not ready to back down from its belief that it was the ideal guild to represent television writers. In fact, many of the first television writers had been members of the RWG, especially those who were working in television news and comedy and variety shows. They had always written for live broadcast. Moreover, the RWG was accustomed to building contracts with the networks and sponsors that included both staff and freelance writers. It approached the battle for jurisdiction with calculated fervor. The RWG encouraged its membership to learn more about television by providing updates on the market for freelancers in its monthly bulletin, recommending script registration, publishing an annual report of credits for television series, establishing a grievance committee, providing advice on contracts, and offering a series of craft seminars.39 The RWG told its members, “Since the day it was founded, your Guild has existed purely to serve its membership. Whether in Radio or Television, service to writers will continue to be its principal purpose.”40 In a tactical move, the RWG turned to the National Labor Relations Board for certification as the sole bargaining agent for all television writers.

  But radio writers were also in turmoil. They were facing scrutiny by political conservatives from without and within, and they were struggling to define the territory of their work, given the speed with which American radio listeners were evolving into television audiences. In 1950, the rightwing journal Counterattack published Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, which named 151 radio and television writers, journalists, actors, and other creative contributors it suspected were leftist subversives. Two years later, the US Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security released a 126-page report accusing more than thirty RWG writers, by name, of being “Communists or pro-Communists.”41 Though the number of blacklisted radio writers was few compared with the hundreds under attack in film, writers involved in narrative series were rapidly leaving radio. Sam Moore, who wrote for the radio version of The Great Gildersleeve and was founder and vice president of the RWG, recalled: “About 1950, ’51, ’52 radio began to die and that was the end of it. Nothing could be done. Television was taking over and radio was through. And the Guild situation began to reflect this. The Radio Writers Guild had accomplished most of the major objectives. They had staff contracts all around. They had minimum basic agreements for freelance writers everywhere—in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. Everything was down to a routine of renegotiation. And [then] television came along.”42 Seeing its imminent defeat, the RWG ultimately withdrew its petition to the NLRB. It would have to join forces with the other guilds to survive.

  The jurisdictional fight came to a head in the summer of 1952 over the issue of ownership of television content. When the Authors League of America (ALA) and the SWG called a strike against the Alliance of Television Film Producers in Hollywood, the RWG followed suit. In all, 6,000 professional writers went out on strike to demand ownership of television copyrights in the way that playwrights had control over their material, rather than the way film writers were credited but did not own their work. ALA president Rex Stout explained the significance of this strike: “Television is already a major source of income to many members of the League, and it is quite possible that before many years it may become the largest single source. It is of vital importance to all writers to establish in television practice the principle that a writer owns what he writes and that therefore he may properly claim the profits and privileges of that ownership. If that principle is not established in television now, it may never be, and the resultant loss for writers both of today and tomorrow will be incalculable.”43

  Television studios, sponsors, and networks knew the financial stakes as well and were willing to outlast the writers. They argued that the precedent for studio and sponsor ownership of programs had already been set. Many television writers who belonged to the RWG were ready to give in. In August, Richard Powell, then the pro tem head of the television writers within the RWG, advised that “no adequate remedy for the adjudication of TV writers—both live and film—exists within the confines of the ALA.”44 Television writers were increasingly interested in forming their own labor group. Robert White, who wrote for The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show and later Guiding Light, did his homework while his new guild, the Television Writers Association, got its bearings. “I started out by getting a hold of every labor constitution I could find, of all the unions—the printers, the teamsters—anybody[’s] I could get my hands on and . . . if you look at a TWA constitution I think it’s the most democratic labor union constitution that’s ever been written in the country. It was every, everything—all power went to the membership. The Board simply carried out the wishes of the membership in between very frequent membership meetings.”45
Arguably, this structure was made possible because the TWA was still a very small group.46

  Although officially the TWA was not required to strike, its members voted as a group to support the strike, in part to respond to the fears of the SWG that they would act as non-union replacements. In explaining their support of the strike, TWA members were careful to note that “neither the Screen Writers Guild nor any other existing union or guild is a true representative of a majority of television writers in the field.” Members had “agreed to withhold material from struck producers” because the “idea of violating picket lines, physical or moral, of any writers is abhorrent.”47 Though the TWA walked out, members of the SWG were still concerned that producers would exploit this two-union system.

  After fourteen grueling weeks, with little to show for their efforts, the writers broke off their strike. It was at this point that the National Labor Relations Board stepped in to mediate. Between 1952 and 1953, the NLRB oversaw fifty-seven arbitrations between film writers and producers and thirteen arbitrations mediating ownership of telefilms.48 In the meantime, SWG president Mary McCall Jr. went so far as to call the network pact her guild had signed with live television writers in October 1952 “the most forward-looking contract ever negotiated in the history of writers organizations,” while simultaneously declaring that the TWA was a “little group of impatient finks whose loyalties are not to writers but to a fanatic political party.”49 The studios agreed that writers of one-time shows and anthology series would lease their scripts to the producers for television use over a period of seven years. For added compensation, writers could lease radio and sequel rights to a studio for a fixed time period, after which rights would revert to the writer.50 But with the NLRB case moving forward, the SWG’s control was tenuous at best. After a hearing during the spring of 1953, the NLRB presented television writers with an election, asking them to vote by secret ballot for the guild they preferred to join. That summer, the Television Writers of America was declared the winner.

  SWG leaders were not willing to back away from the overall battle for television jurisdiction. The Guild published a full-page ad in the trade papers declaring that the NLRB election did not pertain to most television writing because the SWG and ALA already had collective bargaining agreements with 90 percent of active telefilm production companies in Los Angeles and New York, with independent producers of live packaged programs, and with staff writers at all of the networks. The SWG and ALA reminded writers, “you do not have to be a member of TWA until TWA negotiates contracts with these employers, and unless such contracts contain a Union Shop clause requiring membership in TWA as a condition of employment.”51 In November 1953, the SWG boasted of thirty-six new full members, twenty-four of them from television, and thirty-five new associate members, fourteen from television.52

  In its twentieth anniversary year, the SWG was anxious to demonstrate its relevance, in part by looking past its struggles with HUAC, right-wing politicians, and industry moguls. A puff piece by SWG president Richard L. Breen interpreted its role during the difficult years of the late 1940s with a breezy tone that placed blame on the studios rather than on the Guild for any communist members among its ranks.

  The Guild next turned its attention to a necessary cleaning of its own house. . . . The great majority of SWG members had long been disgusted with the maneuverings of a Communist or Communist-inclined minority. The majority, moreover, was increasingly alarmed at the way the best interests of writers were being shunted aside for the furtherance of the minority’s political and ideological purposes. A Guild or Union does not choose its membership, a fact little understood, and sometimes it seems deliberately misunderstood, outside the Industry. A Guild is not a private club with the luxury of the blackball. Under law, it is and must be open to all who meet the working qualifications for membership. Actually, the employers choose the Guild’s members.53

  Despite this attempt to move on, the issue of requiring loyalty oaths was still a contested topic among SWG members. Less than a week before he was elected as the Guild’s new president, F. Hugh Herbert, who wrote The Moon Is Blue, was reported to have said that “while he will sign all non-Commie pledges required by law he is still philosophically opposed to them” and that “I do not believe that loyalty can be attested by a signature on a dotted line. By the same token, I would resist any attempt to impose on the SWG the function of screening its members for political or other affiliations.” Herbert’s opponent, Ranald MacDougall, on the other hand, stated that he “favored ratification of a legally feasible non-Commie oath for writers.”54

  The TWA was simultaneously under attack from the right and from its left-leaning members. Actor and producer Dick Powell, who signed the Taft-Hartley anticommunist oath, petitioned the TWA not to bankrupt the union by expelling writers for the sake of pleasing the right. He said that “offering basically the same service as professional blacklisters, unsolicited and free of charge . . . seems to be straining the traditional function of a trade union” and that “attempts to legislate unity of thought are in themselves destructive of true unity.”55 Film and television writers were still trying to understand one another, especially in the midst of the blacklist. Unity was increasingly part of the language the TWA employed, in part because it saw its own membership losing faith in the union’s capacity to lead. Even though the TWA had won the election, it was losing the hearts and dues of its members.

  Soon after TWA won its certification election, the National Labor Relations Board dismissed a TWA petition to bargain collectively on behalf of the writers at Desilu Productions.56 Since Jess Oppenheimer was a producer-executive and therefore not qualified to speak for his writer-employees, Desilu did not have to recognize the TWA. The future looked dim for the new union. As Charles Isaacs remembers, “Since we were neither backed by Communists, nor were we backed by anyone else either, we were barely able to pay the rent on our tiny office or even our typewriter, which was also rented. The long fight had taken its toll.”57 Many of the writers who had founded the TWA or had served in its leadership began to defect to the SWG, including Isaacs, Oppenheimer, John Fenton Murray (later a writer on McHale’s Navy), Benedict Freedman (writer on The Red Skelton Hour), regional vice president Irve Tunick (later a writer on East Side/West Side), national president Arthur Stander (writer on Make Room for Daddy), and ten members of TWA’s East Coast office. Robert White mourned, “We ran out of money. We ran out of strength. We couldn’t hold on. TWA went out of existence. . . . It simply withered away. TWA was gone.”58

  In 1954, after years of rancor, screenwriters finally came to see what each of the other associations had also come to realize: television was already too big to be simply folded into an existing writers’ union. At the same time, there was a great deal of overlap in membership. Of the 1,200 members of the SWG, 503 had written for television.59 If the SWG wanted television, it would have to agree to a merger that would serve not just film writers but television and radio writers as well. Hy Freedman, writer on You Bet Your Life, wanted it on the record that no one union had won out over the others: “TWA didn’t collapse. TWA forced screenwriters to come into a guild together. That’s what happened. It was an amalgamation actually of the three guilds. While we were in TWA we were also still members of our Radio Writers Guild. So it forced the amalgamation of the Screen Writers, the TWA, and Radio Writers. So we didn’t lose any more than screenwriters lost.”60

  The SWG devised a merger that allowed all parties to save face and declare victory. The alliance was announced in the entertainment trades in 1954: writers in the fields of motion pictures, radio, and television—previously represented by separate organizations—would all be under the jurisdictional umbrella of the newly formed Writers Guild of America. The Screen Writers Guild and the Radio Writers Guild would separate from the Authors League as part of the new merger.61 The writers filed a petition for certification with the NLRB to become the Writers Guild of America, with separate branches for the West and East
.

  On October 30, the new guild issued its first bulletin under the masthead of the Writers Guild of America.62 In November 1954, the two branches of the WGA began negotiating on a national scale on behalf of approximately 1,000 screenwriters, 800 television writers (400 on each coast), and 700 radio writers (400 on the East Coast, 300 on the West Coast).63 Writers saw the advantage of being a part of one guild that had history and experience with negotiations—but they needed a new title.64 Current contracts that were previously held by the SWG, the RWG, and the TWA were all organized separately but under the umbrella of the WGA. Film and television maintained separate minimum basic agreements with unique boards and officers until the early 1970s.

  The resources that each writers group brought to the union varied widely. The Radio Writers Guild was penniless, with $32 in its coffers and a deficit of $2,980.65 The TWA had exhausted its funds.66 The SWG leaders were willing to take on these insolvent groups, but they were not altruistic. When the Screen Writers Guild dissolved and became the Writers Guild of America, the SWG’s reserves of $135,000 were placed into a newly established Writers Guild Foundation, so that radio and television writers could not profit from screenwriters’ previously pooled membership dues.67 In other words, the SWG had found a way to start off this new guild penniless as well. Its members would hold on to their own funds through the foundation while taking full advantage of their new partners’ earning potential.

  At the time the new union was formed, it made some logical sense to create two branches. Writers were assigned to the East or West branch according to their location of employment in relation to the Mississippi River; a writer who worked on the other coast for a significant period of time was expected to switch affiliations. East members were primarily radio and television writers working in live broadcasting, whereas West members were primarily film writers and telefilm writers. Tensions between the two branches of the Guild, as well as between film and television writers were evident from the moment the new guild was founded. Regional writers’ needs from their union varied greatly. Ernest Kinoy remembers that the tensions “certainly got more obvious as television developed because the difference between what was going on in the East and what was going on in the West in terms of the industry became marked.”68 He argued that writers for comedy variety series—whether they were based in the East or West—had more in common with each other than with the “continuity” scripters on fiction series, who were salaried weekly employees, or with the hourly wage earners who worked in news writing.69