The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild

by Miranda J. Banks

  The diversity of articulate, witty, and heated discourses within the blogosphere was precisely what made the strike discussion compelling. The WGA offered writers suggested talking points when speaking to the media but never restricted its members from expressing individual opinions. Filmmaker Jennie Chamberlain and scholar Daniel Chamberlain note the multiplicity of voices that emerged: “Unlike the AMPTP, which made its decisions behind closed doors and then paraded its sound bites through the very mainstream media it owned, the WGA membership clamored with a cacophony of voices across a variety of Internet sources. One-way communication was broken—no longer controlled by the media or the Guild, but taken on by the membership.”90

  While the wordy and often boisterous blogs offered useful details for insiders, the WGA realized that part of this message war was about winning the support of the general public. And, not unsurprisingly, entertainment writers knew just how to tell their own story. The crucial lesson they had learned from the failed America’s Next Top Model walkout was the power of streaming media to speak to the masses. One New York Times writer called the WGA’s short videos aimed at strike watchers and supporters “creative venting,” but these image campaigns were targeted and purposeful.91 In “Sorry, Internet,” writers Frank Lesser and Rob Dubbin of The Colbert Report present the cute furry animals that dominate so many online videos, but in this one the pet stars refuse to perform their adorable antics out of solidarity for the striking WGA members.92 Work is still work, even if that work is just being cute. The reach of these videos was substantial: “The Office Is Closed,” a streaming video produced by The Office, received over 280,000 views in its first week on YouTube.93 With veteran writers creating content for the Internet, the possibilities of the medium for entertainment—and for political action—became clearer. Strike captain Peter Rader, writer of Waterworld, said, “The strike is about the Internet, so we’re using the Internet to fight back. . . . We are going to get America to recognize one way or another that the Internet is a democratic space and there need to be unions to protect those who provide its content.”94

  A month into the strike, United Hollywood released a series of higher quality videos entitled “Speechless.” Produced by Screen Actors Guild members working in solidarity with the WGA, the series celebrated the collaborative nature of media work. Without writers, the videos demonstrated, actors would have no lines. One particular video featured actors Amy Ryan and Patricia Clarkson deep in an emotionally gripping conversation with dialogue provided by the plumbing ads in the Yellow Pages.95

  Although the battle against the conglomerates—each with its own enormous advertising budget and media connections (most of them owned television stations and newspapers)—was decidedly uphill, the weight of public opinion slanted toward the writers. A Nielsen survey released after the strike reported that 100 percent of 800 respondents were aware of the strike, with 77 percent supporting the writers either strongly (55 percent) or somewhat (22 percent).96 Michael Winship said of American viewers, “They got it. They understood what the issues were. The public was incredibly supportive.”97 Paradoxically, the AMPTP’s singular voice, a result of decades of mergers and acquisitions, was less adept, less nimble, and ill suited for this battle.

  In December, the Directors Guild of America went into closed-door sessions with the AMPTP. A group of about forty writer-directors (who campaigned under the name WD-40) published a statement asking the DGA to forgo negotiations until the writers had a contract. Instead, the AMPTP essentially held out to bargain with the less demanding DGA, hoping that the WGA would eventually settle for the same contract.98 The directors, as they had done in previous strikes in the 1980s, undercut the power of the WGA by continuing negotiations with the AMPTP. Once a deal was settled with the DGA in January for less compensation for digital residuals than the WGA had asked for, the AMPTP began cutting costs by ending expensive, often unproductive long-term development contracts with certain writers. The WGA negotiators, who had already dropped their demands for jurisdiction over animation and reality series, entered into two intensive weeks of bargaining with the media moguls, led by News Corporation’s Peter Chernin and Disney CEO Robert Iger.99 NBC’s Jeff Zucker compared the strike to the wildfires that ravaged California in the fall of 2007: “Change isn’t easy, and sometimes it requires a catalyst. . . . A strike has devastating consequences for thousands of people who are directly or indirectly dependent on this industry to feed their families. . . . Fires fertilize the soil with new ash and clear the ground, often setting the stage for robust growth.”100 Many writers were tired of the strike and eager to return to work. Some showrunners who had proved a powerful force at the beginning of the strike were considering returning to work as producers. The strong ties among writers that the Guild had worked so hard to foster during the strike were starting to unravel.

  Tensions were also building among the various unions. One writer mentioned to a sympathetic friend in the DGA a conversation he had had with a DGA member who objected to directors allying with the writers. The writer’s DGA friend said, “I heard something that I didn’t think I’d ever hear. . . . It was the disdain of the house slave for the yard slave.”101 This inflammatory conversation highlights a problem the Guild had faced time and again, both internally and externally, with other unions: rather than all workers focusing on bettering their lot, they wasted time quarreling among themselves. The Directors Guild had always acted as an ally of the studios rather than of its sister unions, and this strike was no exception. Arguably, the DGA landed a better deal from the companies than it would have achieved had the writers not been on strike. The executives’ fear that the directors might join ranks with the writers gave the DGA a small amount of unearned negotiating power.

  Despite cracks in its united front, the WGA membership officially held strong until a deal was reached with the AMPTP on February 12, 2008. Many writers were devastated by the end of the strike and felt it ultimately demoralized the community and split the stalwart Guild faithful from the workaday members. Others believed that the Guild had grown stronger. To some, however, that unity mattered little. Craig Mazin’s view represented a faction of writers who felt that the Guild had been too focused on organizing and forgot that, first and foremost, writers want to write. “When they say that it brought writers together and gave them a sense of unity, all I can say is that they value that so much more than they ought to. The union’s purpose ultimately is to protect my financial interests, protect my creative rights, and to protect my health and my retirement. I don’t need a sense of unity with the people with whom I compete for jobs.”102 On the other hand, Mark Gunn praised the writers’ leaders for understanding both the demands and the limits of their membership: “David Young and Patric Verrone had a very good sense of where the membership was in terms of their patience for a deal—and they went up right to the edge of that, but they didn’t go past that edge.”103 In the end, as Ross McCall said, “We didn’t get a foot in the door so much as we got a toe.”104 Others might argue for a toenail: writers acquired compensation for streaming media and electronic sell-through, but no minimum was set.

  During the strike, the Guild leadership had attempted to present a unified front, but it also allowed for a multiplicity of voices. Del Reisman, WGA president from 1991 to 1993, was awestruck by the relative cohesion within the union he once led. As a child, he had roamed the Universal Studios back lot in the 1930s; then he wrote for live television in the 1950s, made telefilms in the 1960s, and saw his work transferred to DVD in the 1990s. The night the negotiating committee presented its final agreement with the AMPTP to the membership, Reisman was there. “I got there early and went down to the first row and turned around and . . . I recognized about ten or twelve people. And I had once been president and extremely active in the Guild. But there was a generational change. . . . Unity, unity, unity. Never experienced it before, never observed it before. . . . It was the complete openness of that meeting. The directness of it. The ability
of the negotiating committee to say, ‘We tried hard on this and we couldn’t get it’ without any attempt to cover it over.”105

  Something had changed for the Guild. Out of a fractured group came decisive action at the start of the strike. Even though the divisiveness had not disappeared, there was a movement toward unification between East and West, between film writers and television writers, and between new writers and veterans.

  Post-Strike Assessments

  That’s what I mean about using the Internet as asymmetric warfare. . . . That’s part of the reason Andy Stern [former president of Service Employees International Union] said, “It was the first strike of the 21st century.” . . . It wasn’t about steel workers or car workers. It was about intellectual property.

  —Michael Winship, interview, 9 April 2012

  The WGA, DGA, AFTRA, and SAG all signed contracts in 2008 allowing for compensation for digital exhibition. Although the direction of future digital media production is impossible to foresee, as Mark Deuze points out, it will involve a “delicate and contested balance between the creative autonomy of culture creators and the scientific management of commercial enterprises.”106 In a multinational conglomerated media landscape eager to downsize, it is easy to see why labor has had such a difficult time getting its voice heard. Finding parity between creative labor and the bottom line within the rapidly evolving, virtually unchartered territory of the digital sphere is a nearly insurmountable challenge. And although the studios had argued during the strike that their streaming of series was solely for promotional purposes, their actions immediately after the strike demonstrated something different.

  A month after the strike ended, major conglomerates began announcing their streaming partnerships. Hulu, a joint venture of NBC Universal and Fox Entertainment Group, debuted, and the popularity and accessibility of streaming television and features expanded greatly. One year after the site launched, Hulu’s audience reached 40.1 million unique users who viewed 380 million streaming videos in the month of March 2009 alone.107 Still, individual practitioners’ economic woes were heightened by the larger economic crisis within the world markets that started in September 2008.

  The DVD slowly started to disappear from the marketplace. People were buying programs online and downloading them, or simply streaming the films and television they wanted to watch, when they wanted to watch them. Streaming series like Web Therapy, created by Dan Bucatinsky, Lisa Kudrow, and Don Roos, and Childrens Hospital, created by Rob Corddry, made a successful jump from web to television series in 2010. Others, like Felicia Day’s The Guild, stayed online. A new season of Arrested Development in 2012 helped lure audiences to Netflix as an original content provider, and House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black proved to the industry that series could start on the web, find substantial audiences, and prosper there.

  The potential applications of online media became more enticing to creatives in the years right after the strike. Television writer and actor Jason Sklar began pitching television series to media executives using a web series he and his brother Randy Sklar produced. Whether or not a pitch sells, the series could be viewed freely online. The speed and flexibility of production, Sklar says, makes his work for the new medium uniquely satisfying. “The digital platform provides a practical space to execute your vision. . . . Hollywood tends to be a fear-based business. So if anything can be proven as a success on one platform, it increases your chance that another larger platform would take a chance [on you]. In the past, you would make a pilot and it would be seen by the executives at the network and maybe 300–400 people in focus groups across the country. If it did not make it to the air, then no one ever saw it. Now . . . online, you can create something that can entertain people.”108 In 2010, the WGA added to its ranks Ruth Livier, its first member to gain admission based solely on writing a self-financed web series, Ylse. Streaming media has propelled careers for some writers: the assignments began flowing in, not just for one medium, but often for two or more formats (though the pay is far from equal). Erica Rothschild, a writer on Just Shoot Me! who had sold many scripts but rarely saw them through development, was enthusiastic about developing her first web series in 2009. “For so many years my job has been divorced from actually making content. [Laughs.] Nothing gets made. I’m excited that, even if it’s only three minutes long, we’re going to make something.”109

  With the industrial shifts toward increased conglomeration and digital distribution came another kind of convergence: an overwhelming meeting of the minds between film and television writers in the WGA. Tom Fontana thinks that solidarity developed on the picket lines.

  [What] makes the union in the East really special is that we aren’t just one kind of writer. We are a union of writers who write for television and film. Nothing brought that home more for me more than the last strike. Unlike previous strikes . . . people really started to talk to other people. So you would see Tony Gilroy [writer of The Bourne Identity and Michael Clayton] having a conversation with a daytime writer or you would see a news writer talking to an animation writer or episodic writer, or a comedy writer talking to an episodic drama writer. I was very moved by that, to see that all of these people who wrote completely different kinds of things actually came together, because the one thing we love is the writing, to be able to write, to be treated with respect.110

  Moreover, for the first time in a long time, the Writers Guild East and the Writers Guild West were allied. Howard A. Rodman saw this as the first step in what may be a long process. When asked whether the two branches of the Writers Guild might amalgamate, Rodman said, “If I live long enough in my lifetime I may get to see a Writers Guild of America. That would be the hope. I may not get there. I may be able to see what the top of the mountain would look like but not get there myself.”111

  There are significant issues that make a union between the East and West branches complex—from the size of the respective guilds to disputes over jurisdiction for public radio writers, news writers, and network television writers. Walter Bernstein, a WGA East veteran who survived the blacklist and saw the worst of times for writers and for the Guild, stressed the significance of the unity writers had achieved: “This last strike was very moving because we all came together, East and West, and we’d been fighting each other for several years. And we held tough on things. It was hard for a lot of people. And we won. Much to everybody’s surprise.”112

  Only six months after the strike, the 2008 financial crisis hit. Media conglomerates began divesting selected holdings, and it was unclear whether the strike or the economy was to blame and whether this new paradigm was a trend or a correction. Writers, like others in the industry, feared the loss of audiences, an even greater concern of the studios for ensuring the profitability of content. The recession underscored the financial losses to the industry because of the strike. This was only compounded by the collapse of the DVD market. Yet, industrial and technological structures that seemingly created fissures in the labor dynamics of creative production have in fact provided new opportunities for creative workers to change the rules and use new technologies to their advantage—not just onscreen, but behind the scenes, as well. Convergence has never been just about technological change. It is about the definitions of labor shifting, the lines between production and consumption compressing, and divisions between producer, product, and audience breaking down.

  Conclusion

  IMAGE 25 Last page of Vince Gilligan’s script for “Felina,” the final episode of the series Breaking Bad.

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

  Writers will often complain about being poorly treated, and I wonder, where was the book that they read where screenwriters were carried around on velvet pillows?

  —Aline Brosh McKenna (screenwriter of The Devil Wears Prada), interview, 16 August 2012

  BANKS: I’m so glad I’m not in this industry, but I love studying it.

  MICHAEL WINSHIP: You’re a China wat
cher. You’re parked on Taipei and you are watching the mainland.

  —Interview, 9 April 2012

  It should come as little surprise that writers speak about themselves and about their community in lucid, articulate terms; nor is it any wonder that throughout the process of interviewing writers of all generations for this book, I turned to their knack for encapsulating their own history.1 I found that writers offered much more than a simple vocabulary of agency and professional identity.2 Writers’ memories of the Guild, of their professions, and of themselves were structured more like well-crafted essays. Their self-disclosures provided A and B plotlines. As the interviews came to a close, many of my subjects presented thoughtfully constructed readings of my research, of the story of the Guild, and of themselves as a community. Many have even written their own accounts of this story in some of media studies’ most respected journals.3 I did not see their versions of history as the truth, but as one truth among many I verified and examined with other data points. Rather than trying to theorize about their labor, I decided instead to use their expertise as confirmation of the history I had begun to uncover. My subjects became sources in this cultural history of the American entertainment industry.

  Inevitably, innovative screen technologies lure audiences in directions that demand original approaches to storytelling and new structures of compensation. No matter the medium, writing creative content, telling stories, and crafting characters will be central to the work of screenwriters. As this book details, the industry has always been in flux, and the Guild has adapted, whether or not its positions corresponded with writers’ individual hopes for their community. While the details have changed, the central demands that emerged in the 1920s are still critical concerns for writers today: their unique role as outsiders on the inside of the production community; questions of authorship, ownership, and control; and the significance of the writer’s name.