The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild

by Miranda J. Banks

  By 1994, the WGA leaders realized they were gaining little ground in the bargaining space of the Contract Adjustment Committee (CAC), created in 1992 by WGA West executive director Brian Walton, as discussed in Chapter 4. Walton then began to promote pattern bargaining with the DGA and SAG and warned the companies that if the CAC meetings in June 1994 did not yield reasonable increases, the Guild would insist on returning to traditional negotiations—which could, at some point, trigger another strike. This ultimatum worked for a month, but then negotiations with the companies and the other guilds became contentious. At the time, the WGA was in a difficult battle with the DGA over the possessory credits, and pattern bargaining fell apart.

  The Guild worked out a collective bargaining agreement with the networks that was signed in December 1994, but an agreement with the AMPTP was not completed until February 1995. Walton’s original plan, designed to save time and energy, had turned into an exhausting nine-month-long deliberation that inched forward piecemeal. Grace Reiner, WGA counsel at the time, knew that the membership felt disengaged from the process and that, for them, the ends could not justify the means. “We said, ‘This really got you a better deal than you were going to get.’ . . . But they just didn’t see the value of it because they hadn’t lived through it. When you don’t see what’s behind the curtain, you don’t see how much work is being done.”43 The membership preferred traditional negotiations along with membership meetings, opportunities for input and discussion, and last and final offers. For them, more transparent results were better than closed-door meetings.

  Walton’s idea for the 1998 negotiation cycle was to make sure that industry management followed through across the board on the terms that had been agreed to in earlier cycles and to align Guild members solidly behind their leadership. Walton went into writers’ rooms, talked to many major screenwriters, and started meaningful, deliberate negotiations early. He implemented stronger arbitration provisions to protect writers’ interests and added more arbitrators. Unfortunately, by then, WGA the West membership had already chosen Walton as the scapegoat for all their frustrations with the union. In 1997, Mona Mangan announced that the East was breaking with the West on a joint contract, and the WGA lost leverage on that round of negotiations. In the end, the WGA returned to traditional arbitration.

  In September 1998, after a year of protracted debate regarding the MBA, WGAw president Daniel Petrie Jr. (writer of Beverly Hills Cop) and vice president John Wells (showrunner for ER) called for a poll among the membership to determine what they wanted from their leadership and for a referendum vote to preserve the early termination clause in Walton’s contract.44 Voter turnout was quite low, only 1,742, with 52.9 percent voting against a poll on strategic goals and against a modification of Walton’s employment contract.45 The matter was taken to the Board of Directors, which reached a fair settlement with Walton and terminated his contract. For six months, an internal three-person committee composed of Paul Nawrocki, Ann Widdifield (both assistant executive directors), and Grace Reiner (director of contract administration) ran the WGA West.

  After the 1997 negotiations, ill will between the East and West branches made upcoming negotiations increasingly difficult. Members in the East considered themselves union people, and for almost ten years they had been a part of the AFL-CIO, whereas the West branch had no such affiliation. Elias Davis only part jokingly believed his eastern counterparts considered him and the other members in the West “a bunch of Hollywood dilettantes.”46

  John McLean, a former industrial relations executive at CBS who was well-versed on labor and contract law, was hired to replace Walton in May 1999. Presuming that someone who had worked for management might prove a smarter player in negotiations, Guild leaders thought they would now have a strategic edge with the studios. But members almost uniformly recalled McLean’s tenure as disastrous. In 2001, WGA members took a strong stance as they went into negotiations, threatening a strike. But the companies were not convinced of the threat. McLean’s focus was entirely on establishing News Corporation as a signatory, effectively ignoring a chance for negotiations with cable networks. As one writer recalled, “Basically his plan backfired and we got nothing, or nothing to speak of. Let’s put it this way: we started out by asking for $225 million over four years for the improvements in the contract. We got $5 [million].”47

  Although the contract McLean brokered was helpful in some areas, the deal was structured around Fox. Grace Reiner saw that choice as personal rather than tactical. “I said, ‘I want to tell you something, John. You’re making Fox a network will get $600,000 a year. . . . I want to focus on HBO and Showtime and get those people more than a million dollars a year.’ His was a personal thing. It was about Fox.”48 McLean’s tendency to push his personal goals to the forefront did not end there. He was a central player in the increasingly tense relationship between the West and the East.

  In 2003, under the leadership of Vicki Riskin, the WGA West launched a billboard campaign in well-trafficked areas of Hollywood and West Los Angeles in celebration of the Guild’s seventieth year, but also with the clear intention of bringing literal visibility to the Guild among a particular echelon of Hollywood players. The black-and-white billboards showed a close-up of a writer’s face next to a famous line of dialogue from one of his or her films, with a small WGA West insignia at the bottom. Marc Norman, the Guild member who devised the campaign, said, “We wanted to change their minds a bit: Here’s a line you know. Here’s the face of the writer. You should know who this is—and if you don’t, you oughta make it your business to find out.”49 William Goldman, one of the first writers picked for the campaign, expressed his hope for it: “Everybody always thinks that all the directors have the visual concepts and the actors make up all their lines. There is such an ignoring of the craft of screenwriting that anything that calls attention to it is a big help.”50 That the billboards neglected to include the writers’ names was yet another example of the Guild failing its membership. As noted above, a number of writers on the 2004 negotiating committee were exasperated by their experience. A group of them, some of whom had been involved during the San Francisco accords, banded together to run for office. They had a vision for what they wanted the Guild to become and a plan of action. They called themselves Writers United.

  The three key catalysts for the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike all appeared in 2005: the introduction of the video iPod, the launch of YouTube, and the formation of Writers United. To begin, the studios’ astonishing financial success in selling episodes—and whole seasons—of Desperate Housewives and Lost via iTunes commanded the industry’s attention. In March 2006, when residuals were due for digital downloads, ABC chose to pay its writers as if the electronic sell-through (the industry term for a one-time download of media content for a fee) had the same value as a DVD sale, that is, a final price that accounted for manufacturing costs. To writers, this formula made no sense. Chuck Slocum argued, “If on March 1, 2006, they had paid [the equivalent of] the TV rate, there would have been no strike two years later. Our philosophy in the strike, in the negotiation, was the Internet ought to act like TV. And it largely does.”51

  YouTube was more than just an overnight sensation. By 2006, the website’s traffic was growing at an astonishing rate of 75 percent per week, and the service reimagined, for producers and consumers of media, the potential for streaming media content.52 One of the most serious concerns for writers and media industry executives as they witnessed the switch from traditional film and television media to digital forms was that young people were becoming so accustomed to using the Internet for entertainment that industry insiders never knew for sure whether these viewers would miss television were it to disappear. Executives now asked television writers, especially those working on edgy, youth-oriented series, to “make things more YouTube-able,” as Just Shoot Me! writer Ross McCall detailed.53 They wanted scenes that could be easily excerpted and uploaded into three- or four-minute streaming vide
os for use as advertising tools for a series. But as writers witnessed, and studies subsequently quantified, the Internet diverted many audiences from traditional media. Greg Thomas Garcia, series creator of My Name Is Earl and Raising Hope, observed, “Kids today, you take TV away, they’ll say, ‘Big deal,’ and they’ll click on the computer.”54 When writers tried to calculate appropriate compensation amid the proliferation of new media outlets, they found the math more nuanced than the numbers that studio heads put forward to investors and the press about the success of digital platforms.

  The success in 2005 of the Writers United slate in the WGA West elections—with Patric Verrone as president, David Weiss as vice president, and Elias Davis as secretary treasurer—proved to be a turning point in the relationship between East and West. The group’s strategy for reorganizing the Guild had been in the works for a number of years. Mark Gunn, a member of the negotiating committee and writer of 2gether, described the leaders as “a shadow government . . . a little revolutionary faction inside the Guild. . . .”55 In the months leading up to the election, Writers United held meetings to educate the membership on its positions and to request that writers vote for its candidates as a slate, not just as individuals. The plan was to take over the leadership of WGA West, and the strategy involved a three-pronged approach. According to Patric Verrone, “We were campaigning on the concept of organize, organize, organize. We’ve got to get more members involved internally; we’ve got to get more people outside the union into the union, expand our jurisdiction; and third we’ve got to get the other unions—SAG, DGA, IATSE, Teamsters—involved in a coalition that has the power-building mechanisms that the AMPTP already has in place. That was our mantra.”56 On the day after the slate was elected, the newly formed board of directors fired McLean and named David Young interim executive director. A long-time Los Angeles union activist and leader, Young had built a reputation by organizing blue-collar workers, specifically carpenters and textile employees. When asked about his professional transition, Young was unruffled by celebrity: “Here I was doing something that I had become really good at in my second language [Spanish]. I get to do it in English. . . . This is easy, relatively speaking. . . . So now I’m in the big leagues [and] the bats are better. The dining room’s better.”57 Young’s expertise in mobilizing base membership was critical to the new slate’s overall strategy. As he came into the position, he saw a clear point of concern. If the fundamental functions of a union are to organize jurisdiction, negotiate contracts, enforce those contracts, do political work that addresses the broader labor situation, and uphold the craft, the WGA had been working hard on the latter four but had done very little to address the first—hammering out jurisdiction.

  In the summer of 2006, the WGA stood in solidarity with the striking writers of America’s Next Top Model (ANTM). Holding picket signs decrying “the ugly side of a beautiful show” were its twelve young, articulate writers, an ideal group to serve as a test case for the WGA in reality television. The series was enormously successful, the writers loved their jobs, and all twelve wanted to become unionized under the WGA. Past modeling contestants on the series were even game to walk the line in solidarity with the writers, making coverage by the press much more likely. The Guild and the reality writers strategically organized a large rally of Hollywood writers to coincide with the launch of ANTM’s new parent network, The CW. Knowing that this campaign was as much about public perception as about industry politics, the ANTM writers also took their grievances to the forums most visible to fans of the series, MySpace and YouTube. Befriending thousands of fans and posting updates via the Internet and social media, the ANTM writers made their case—for health benefits, residuals, regulated wages, and a pension plan—visible not only on the streets of Los Angeles but also in virtual communities.

  The reality show’s producers removed the striking writers from their payroll in November. In turn, the WGA filed unfair labor practice charges against them with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that the writers had been fired because of their union activity. Verrone chastised the show’s producers in broader terms: “This is illegal strikebreaking, an insult to the Hollywood talent community and an embarrassment to this industry.”58 By focusing on the individual professional craftsperson as the symbol of labor suffering from the effects of corporate greed, the Guild tried to make reality television a central economic issue for the industry. Ultimately, the writers were replaced by peers willing to break the strike, talks ended, and the series went on. Without the unified support of all reality writers under the umbrella of the Guild, each labor struggle carried immense significance. With the ANTM writers, the WGA had lost a key battle. And yet, the lessons learned from this campaign helped the WGA leadership prepare for the 2007 negotiations. The following fall, the Writers Guild East and West joined forces across guilds and associations to bring a compelling case to the FCC against further media conglomeration.

  Eight representatives from entertainment’s creative labor force—a panel that included producers, writers, directors, actors, and composers—faced the FCC commissioners in a large hall on the campus of the University of Southern California in October 2006. Hundreds of concerned citizens, media workers, and independent media company owners looked on. Even though these vastly different organizations representing diverse interests had been at odds about a myriad of issues over decades, on that day the voice of the American entertainment industry spoke as a unified whole against the conglomeration of the media industries. Stephen J. Cannell, creator of The Rockford Files, The A-Team, and 21 Jump Street, representing the Caucus of Television Producers, Writers, and Directors, spoke first. Not surprisingly, he began with the story of an unlikely hero, a thirty-year-old man who tried to sell the character Jim Rockford to ABC. ABC bought the idea but hated the iconoclastic protagonist of the first script. Cannell and Universal Television took that script to NBC, where the series became a five-year Emmy-winning television sensation. Cannell went on to become the third largest supplier of television in Hollywood; but by 1994, after repeal of the Fin-Syn regulations, he could not get a pilot greenlighted by the networks without forfeiting ownership.59

  Taylor Hackford, screenwriter of Ray and third vice president of the Directors Guild of America, presented data that his guild had tracked over the previous decades. In the 1992–1993 television season, independent producers created 66 percent of network primetime programming. Only six years later, the numbers had reversed: the networks and their affiliated producers were responsible for 62 percent of primetime. By 2006, programming by the networks and their affiliates dominated 76 percent of primetime.60 During that thirteen-year period, the number of independent studios creating scripted programming for networks had decreased from twenty-three to two—and those two so-called independents were actually part of major conglomerates, Warner Bros. and Sony.

  Mike Mills, bassist for the rock band R.E.M., representing the Recording Artists Coalition, explained how regionalism had disappeared in radio: “The bond between a local station and its local listening audience has largely evaporated. . . . Playlists have been corporatized, nationalized, and sanitized.”61 On behalf of actors, John Connolly, president of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA), spoke of catastrophic job loss, salary compression, a paucity of roles for minority actors, and the loss the of localism in news reporting.62 Anne-Marie Johnson, first national vice president of the Screen Actors Guild, informed the FCC commissioners about the strain that media conglomeration had placed on her membership: “The days of an independent producer taking his or her creative vision of a series or movie of the week to fruition are a thing of the past.” Johnson made her point clear: with increased consolidation of media ownership, viewers could no longer tap into a diversity of viewpoints and a diversity of representation. “As a union, and a vital part of the American labor movement, we are gravely concerned that the continued consolidation of our employers will result in the exclusion of the issues and cha
llenges facing workers.”63

  Mona Mangan, executive director of WGA East, addressed the loss of localism in news, the massive cutbacks in the numbers of news writers, and the retrenchment of news writing.64 WGA West President Patric Verrone then laid out figures for the commissioners: “Twenty years ago, when I entered this business there were twenty-nine dominant entertainment firms, with $100 billion in annual revenues. Today, there are six, making nearly $400 billion. Fifteen years ago, less than a third of writing employment was controlled by these firms. Today, they control over 80 percent of it. . . . Homogenization is good for milk, but bad for ideas.”65

  Marshall Herskovitz, president of the Producers Guild of America and creator of thirtysomething and My So-Called Life, echoed the concerns that talent had expressed since the earliest days of unionization: