The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild

by Miranda J. Banks

  Blinn lamented the decline of the television film in the 1980s: “We lost a lot when television lost movies of the week. Movies of the week meant two nights a week and sometimes three nights a week there would be a story you hadn’t seen before with characters you didn’t know about. Some of it was kind of awful and predictable and silly. Some of it, occasionally, was absolutely wonderful and heart-stopping and they were taking risks because they couldn’t say, ‘Oh, let’s do what we did last week.’ We didn’t do anything last week.”64

  In the realm of comedy, CBS stole Saturday nights in the ratings with season after season of extraordinary series in the 1970s: All in the Family, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, and The Carol Burnett Show. Fred Silverman, who was the head of programming at CBS at the time and who, with Bob Wood, scheduled the series in a block, called Saturday “probably the best night of television in the history of television. People didn’t go out on Saturday night.”65 Paramount produced M*A*S*H, but the rest of these series, like much of primetime in this decade, originated from independent television production companies.

  The rise of these production companies—and the reason for their two decades of success—was a direct outcome of the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules (Fin-Syn) established by the Federal Communications Commission in 1970. Fin-Syn prohibited networks from owning equity in the programming they aired, including syndication rights to series. These new rules allowed the Hollywood studios to invest more in television programming and encouraged the formation of independent production companies, including Lorimar, Carsey-Werner Productions, Aaron Spelling Productions, Stephen J. Cannell Productions, MTM, and Tandem/TAT.

  IMAGE 21 Opening page of the show bible for Allan Burns and James L. Brooks’s The Mary Tyler Moore Show, c. 1970.

  Allan Burns Collection, Writers Guild Foundation Archive, Shavelson-Webb Library, Los Angeles

  Great production houses made a programmer’s job easier: they had already vetted writers and series—and paid for them. They knew the character of the networks and could assess whether a series might find an audience. Fred Silverman appreciated the simpler corporate structure of the networks at the time, which made the process of greenlighting a series easier and faster. There might be challenges bringing a series to air, but once he had a hit and was working with known hyphenates or established independent production companies, he could make decisions quickly. For example, he told the story of asking Garry Marshall to pull together a test pilot (in fact, just a few scenes) for a possible Laverne and Shirley spin-off from Happy Days. “It makes a big difference to be able to do something quickly, but also to be able to recognize something that’s good. . . . That was probably the best program development.”66

  Easily the most exciting independent players in television production, especially for writers, were Grant Tinker at Mary Tyler Moore’s MTM and Norman Lear at Bud Yorkin’s Tandem/TAT Productions. John Caldwell argues that many series created under the leadership of Lear and Tinker challenged audiences’ opinions on contemporary social issues and intellectual problems but were conservative in terms of their visual aesthetic. “Although the old aesthetic standbys—liveness, character acting, and sensitive writing—increased in programming value and stature during this period, many of television’s stylistic capabilities were essentially ignored. . . . For both Tandem and MTM, then, company style was defined entirely as an issue of content, not form.”67 In part, the rationale behind high-content, low-style series was to allow the production companies to create television on a limited budget. If they saved on the aesthetic side, Tandem and MTM could reinvest their profits in more series that they loved and believed would succeed. If the series failed, they were stuck with the bills. Lear described his sense of personal and social responsibility for the programming he created and for the series that his company produced with little to no financial help from the networks. When asked about deficit financing, Lear replied, “Nobody would make Mary Hartman so I made Mary Hartman. We paid for that. I don’t think of it as deficit financing, we just fucking paid for it.”68

  These two independent companies put their money into making intelligent, content-rich, topical programming using extraordinary acting, directing, and writing talent. Pretty much every writer during the era wanted to work on an MTM or Tandem series. Susan Harris, who scripted the abortion episode of Maude and later went on to create Benson and The Golden Girls, expressed her gratitude for working with producers and executives who let her push social and cultural boundaries. “Comedy is a less threatening way to deliver messages to audiences. . . . The first job was to entertain and then I was always looking for something more, something to say, to express myself. And sometimes that comes from a very dark place.”69 Allan Burns described working with Grant Tinker at MTM: “Everybody wanted to work there because of Grant. You knew you would be backed up. The writer came first. . . . That was his modus operandi for everything that happened at MTM. He would hire the best people he could find, listen to their ideas, they would work out an idea together, and he would say, ‘Go do it.’ And, if it was good, he knew it. . . . Look at St. Elsewhere, which started with very low ratings. So did Hill Street Blues. And then when he went to NBC and started Cheers and Cosby? He protected everybody.”70

  The two companies had a friendly rivalry. Robert Schiller, who was the head writer for Maude, used to joke about The Mary Tyler Moore Show as light entertainment: “We have a two-parter on abortion and they’re going to counter with a three-parter on mayonnaise.”71 The two programs were arguably the most forward-thinking series about women that had ever been on American television. Norman Lear talked about his relationship with Grant Tinker and how they partnered in picking writers who would best fit their shows: “We actually could talk about what was best for the writer. [If both] of us wanted the same writer, where was the better opportunity? . . . That came up several times. It was easy for us because we cared about the writer.”72 The sense from many writers interviewed was that the system was less paternalistic than it was dedicated to working with writers to craft their skills and to encourage excellence.

  David Isaacs and his writing partner Ken Levine mapped three distinct schools of writing in the era: Norman Lear’s “socially aware comedy”; MTM’s “more sophisticated and smarter and character-based” formula; and “the Garry Marshall school [then Miller-Milikis-Boyett Productions], which was silly and fun and really well written.” A comedy writer who could get into one of those companies would be “well-served, you’d learn a lot.”73 Isaacs and Levine were both talented and lucky enough to land sought-after staff writing jobs. Increasingly, during the 1970s and 1980s, there were far more writers looking for work than film and television studios could absorb. And not everyone felt that the playing field for employment was level.

  Representation in the Room

  Four or five years ago, I was in that woman-writer trap. If it was a show about Army, Navy, business, or war, I had no chance at all. Babies, crying, love, or an ovarian cyst—then I was your writer.

  —Lila Garrett (writer on Bewitched, All in the Family, and The Nanny), quoted by Martha Humphrey in Fade In 1 (Summer 1979): 34

  Even though women writers had been working in Hollywood since the earliest days of the film industry, their representation in the WGA and among writers of produced films and television series was scant at best in the 1970s and 1980s. Alvin Sargent recalled that in the 1960s and 1970s the number of women writers was so small that they stood out in the room: “What I remember most about meetings was there were mostly men and then little by little women started [appearing]. You’d say, ‘There’s a woman!’ And then more and more women, until now it doesn’t make any difference.”74 Sargent is not entirely accurate. The percentages of men and women are still uneven, and the number of minorities is still meager.

  The WGA has tracked the employment of women and minorities in television more diligently than in film, both because the overall employment numbers are higher
and because the turnover of employees is faster (television writers are sometimes rehired for subsequent seasons). In April 1974, the Guild sent signatory companies a report on how many men and women were writing for television series. Although 13 percent of the Guild’s members were women, only 6.5 percent of the current season’s television series had hired at least one female writer on staff or as a freelance writer.75 Of the sixty-two primetime series identified in the survey, twenty-six of them had never hired a female writer. Even more telling, only 1.5 percent of pilots on the air in 1973 were written by women. The Guild emphasized that, “[w]hile we do not favor the employment of one writer over another and we do not and will not recommend any particular writer for employment, we do want all of our members to have an equal chance at employment.”76 WGA Executive Director Michael Franklin signed this letter, but his commitment to the general cause was less than fervent. “I had meetings with several women, four or five women, who had formed a group. And I tried, and we had little gains. We made all kinds of threats to the studios, and we filed suit for the women, and got something, but it was still bad. But with the women writers from the Guild there wasn’t anything done. We ignored them [laughs]. There were a number of women that were successful writers, but it was obvious there should have been more.”77 Franklin’s letter did some good, at least for a while. Veteran soap opera showrunner Jean Rouverol Butler recalled “a sudden rush of—at least—tokenism on the part of producers.”78

  That is not to say that women were not involved in the production of television series. A good number of women worked as script supervisors (then known as “script girls”) and producers. When asked about women and minorities in the writers’ room, Norman Lear argued that women were critical to the functioning of the production. “For me, it has nothing to do with color or sex. That was true of everybody in our little club. Most of the people could have been in the writers’ room. There was never a show that was produced by men. They were all women. The people who held it together—kept the schedules, kept everybody on time—were women. They carried the script, they knew every word, and they had every schedule, and they had every relationship that mattered, that the director didn’t have. They were all women. The glue. The glue was all women.”79 But the “glue” that was holding the production together was not leading it on the set or in post-production.

  The statistics had not improved much by the end of the year, when the WGA Women’s Committee reported that among 106 production companies it surveyed, sixty-one had posted no writing credits at all for women.80 Chaired by Noreen Stone (writer on Amy and later Dynasty), Joyce Perry (writer on Room 222 and Land of the Lost), and Howard Rodman, the group tallied the genders of all writers paid by the networks to write primetime series during the 1973 season. The gender ratios for top-rated series were remarkably skewed (see table 4.1). The report stressed the dismal representation of women writers at the three major networks: 10.8 percent at ABC; 8.2 percent at NBC; and 8.4 percent at CBS.81 Yet women were scripting some of the most impressive shows on the air. In 1974, Fay Kanin and Treva Silverman (The Monkees) were singled out at the Emmy Awards with special awards for Writer of the Year in the categories of Special and Series, Kanin for Tell Me Where It Hurts and Silverman for The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

  . . .

  TABLE 4.1. WGA Women’s Committee Statistics on 1973 Network Primetime Series

  Source: WGA Women’s Committee, “Women’s Committee Statistics Report,” 7 November 1974, Archives, Writers Guild Foundation Shavelson-Webb Library, Los Angeles.

  Note: Where one-half of a teleplay is noted, a woman was part of a known male-female writing team. Other writing teams may have been mixed, but that information is not clear from the data.

  . . .

  Nevertheless, many women writers were still struggling to land work. Barbara Corday described how she and her writing partner, Barbara Avedon, were treated in the years before their series Cagney & Lacey finally made it to air: “Every show we worked on, every producer we worked for, wherever we went, we were ‘The Girls.’ And Barbara was fifteen years older than me, so I was not only part of ‘the Girls,’ I was always referred to as ‘the Kid.’”82 Corday noted that rarely would there be more than one woman or a team of women on a writing staff and that often when she and Avedon went out for jobs, they would be in competition with other women. Corday recalled pitching an episode of Maude with Avedon to hyphenate Rod Parker. Parker loved the idea, hired them, and walked them out of the office and down the hall. “And as the elevator doors were closing, he said, ‘This is great. We’ve started a lot of secretaries on this show.’ He made the immediate assumption that up until 8 o’clock that morning, we had been secretaries and we just happened to come up with that idea.”83

  In the 1980s, there was a concerted effort to end discrimination against women in the writers’ room. The way things played out, effectively, access improved for only white women. The Women’s Committee of the WGA sponsored events and addressed key issues in its monthly newsletter. Responding to a 1983 article in the Los Angeles Times in which WGA West President Frank Pierson stated, “I don’t know any good writer not hired because she is a woman,” Leonora Thuna, who wrote on Family and Lou Grant, chose a letter to the editor of the WGAw Newsletter as her platform. Pierson had missed the point, she observed. When story editors and producers fail to consider women for writing assignments, women writers cannot “build up credits and they remain a minority in the writing world.”84 In 1987, the WGA West commissioned sociologists William Bielby and Denise Bielby to study the Guild’s membership. The statistics they gathered were staggering. From 1982 to 1985, males represented almost 80 percent of employed WGA West writers, whereas women constituted just under 20 percent, with minorities of both genders representing approximately 2 percent of employed writers.85 Among the WGA West’s entire membership, minorities made up 2.9 percent of the total. White male writers had an earnings advantage across the board in the industry (at studios, independents, and networks), with women and minorities often making only 60 to 70 cents for every dollar white men earned.86 Bielby and Bielby continued to conduct regular studies of the Guild, providing detailed numbers and analyses of the representation of women, minorities, and older writers in the Guild until the early 2000s. The Guild attempted to address inequalities in hiring and unequal pay through the MBA, requiring producers to read scripts by women and minorities. But because the Guild was not a hiring agency, members had little power over the signatories.

  Despite the skewed gender ratio, some white female writers claim to have experienced no difficulty in getting hired or running a writers’ room. Cheri Steinkellner never felt she was treated differently in the writers’ room while working on Cheers.

  Because I did not know there was a difference, there was no difference—for me. . . . There were times when I was in an authority position . . . with my two male partners where I would be the lightning rod for controversy and I would not understand why. . . . I think if I had known that there might have been some gender differences, it would have been a lot harder to do the job. . . . I not only went in, I went in with a baby. I was a nursing mother in a room full of men.87

  Whether other women were fortunate enough to be among those treated fairly or whether they adopted an oblivious attitude toward the institutional sexism that so many other women experienced is impossible to say, but important to consider. Dava Savel had her own take: “Cheri was . . . protected from a lot of that” because she co-wrote and co-ran the Cheers writers’ room with her husband, Bill Steinkellner. For women working in male-female writing partnerships the situation has historically been different.

  Professional opportunities for men of color were limited, and for women of color they were almost nil. Minority writers were an anomaly in Hollywood during the 1970s, and they made up just a tiny percentage of the workforce in the 1980s. In 1969, James Webb, a white writer who scripted Pork Chop Hill and Cape Fear and who served as WGA West president from 1962 to 1963, c
ategorized all black writers in Hollywood into three factions: (1) writers who saw the industry as the “perpetuation of White Power”; (2) those who were willing to work for the industry “until a black industry can be created”; and (3) “true integrationists.”88 Webb essentially argued that African American writers might be better served as novelists; any success one might have would depend on whether a writer was “basically an integrationist or a separatist.”89 At the time, Webb was writing the script They Call Me Mr. Tibbs! for Sidney Poitier. His argument failed to account for the long history of independent African American writer-directors in the United States, from William Foster’s The Railroad Porter in 1912 to William Greaves’s Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One in 1968. Webb’s naïve assessment probably mirrored the perceptions of many, mostly white, writers within the industry and the Guild at that time.