The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild

by Miranda J. Banks

  Insider/Outsider

  In my research, I found that most writers articulated with candor and humor their dissatisfactions with studio bosses, network heads, directors, and conglomerates for stifling talent and creativity. These writers were generally grateful for their own lot, but they believed strongly that writers deserve more credit than they get for their contribution to the final media product. As a group, many shared a sense of belonging to an industry of heroes and stars, in which they were typecast in the role of the antihero. There is no question that my sample of writers is skewed in that it includes a great number of acclaimed and successful members of the profession. They are not an average cross-section of Guild members, nor are they necessarily representative of all writers who have come into the industry with hopes of building a career. But each saw his or her career as one story among many in a difficult trajectory for a community of creative laborers. Their worry was less for themselves than for the plight of the writers. My subjects talked of unnamed writer-protagonists grappling with industry bottom lines and suffering the indignities of unfair compensation structures, attribution and credit restrictions, and—in comparison with producers, directors, and actors—relative obscurity.

  The stories they recalled from their own careers stood in marked contrast to the screen stories that they have crafted about writers more generally. Other characters from the production world may be satirized, but the character of the writer is almost always stereotyped. He or she is neurotic, self-centered, or loveless—sometimes all three. A short list of the many films and series featuring writers illuminates this overwhelming trend: Sunset Blvd., by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett; The Dick Van Dyke Show, by Carl Reiner; My Favorite Year, by Dennis Palumbo and Norman Steinberg; Barton Fink, by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen; It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, by Garry Shandling and Alan Zweibel; Adaptation, by Charlie Kaufman and his fictional brother Donald Kaufman; 30 Rock, by Tina Fey; The Comeback, by Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King; Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, by Aaron Sorkin; and Episodes, by David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik. These types of scripts are more often comedies, dramedies, or black comedies. This is not to say that writers do not take themselves seriously. Rather, they understand that they are among the least lucky members of an extremely lucky community and that they are outsiders within a community of insiders.

  When writers spoke about their present-day community, they parceled the less fortunate among them into two groups: professional screenwriters who have been barred from organizing because of jurisdictional disputes and minority writers (writers of color, women). Those lucky enough to be under Writers Guild protection said that a critical aspect of the Guild’s work is to widen its jurisdictional umbrella to include all writers who are paid by companies to script words for the screen, no matter the genre or platform. As Catherine Fisk notes, under current labor laws, writers who are not on regular staff are defined as independent contractors and consequently denied the right to residuals, health benefits, and pensions, even though “they perform functions that are an essential part of the employer’s business.”4 In moving forward, it is critical for writers to consider not only jurisdiction but also the terms of employment and definitions of work within an industry that rarely employs writers in large numbers. The WGA is having more success when it hammers out these terms with companies in the early stages of production development. Its agreements with Netflix and Amazon, for example, were groundbreaking, not because they guaranteed lofty residuals, but rather because they established residual structures in these formats for the first time.

  The issue of who gets hired is central to the Guild. And yet, since its inception, the Guild as an organization has never had a voice in determining whom a signatory hires as a writer. Only in extreme cases can the Guild bar people from the union (for example, during the blacklist or, more recently, warnings to individuals who work during a strike). Many of its efforts focus on employment of current members and jurisdiction over potential new members.

  As discussed in chapters 4 and 5, the WGA has tried over the years to help more writers of color get work and become members of the union. Some prestigious diversity and development programs have emerged since 1999, when the networks signed a memorandum of understanding with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People after the group issued a scathing report on the lack of diversity in front of and behind the camera in Hollywood.5 These programs were designed to help new or young writers of color hone their skills, meet executives, and start their careers. Nevertheless, the percentage of people of color writing for television is still nowhere near representative of the population, and the statistics in film are even more skewed. Many white writers I interviewed believed that increasing the numbers would solve the imbalance. But the number of minority writers is only part of the problem. While the numbers of writers of color working in the industry has bumped up in recent decades, particularly in television, the extraordinary income gap between white and minority writers, not at entry level work but at mid-career, is of far deeper concern for writers and for their union. This is where the Writers Guild is focusing its attention. Recent studies point to the shockingly low number of minority writers commissioned by networks and studios to write pilots.

  Success is not just a matter of producing an exemplary or marketable script but having the access to the critical steps of being commissioned to write a script, selling a script, or having a script produced. In television, if a pilot by a minority writer is not produced, there is no chance that the series will be picked up by a network. As Kimberly Myers, WGA West director of diversity, explained, “You have got three stages to go through and they are not even getting into the first stage.”6 To this end, the WGA has created the Writer Access Project, which is designed to help showrunners identify talented minority writers who have been hired at least once and have at least one credit for writing a television episode. Though many writers think that the issue is initial access to the industry, the Guild is learning that the critical link for minority writers is getting beyond the first job.

  Minority women writers have had more of their own new series brought to air with them at the helm than minority men over the last few years, including Shonda Rhimes with Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, and Scandal, Veena Sud with The Killing, which she developed for American television, Mindy Kaling with The Mindy Project, Mara Brock Akil with The Game and Being Mary Jane, and Nahnatchka Khan with Don’t Trust the B—in Apartment 23. Even a series created by and staring two minority men, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele’s Key and Peele, is currently run by two Caucasian men, Ian Roberts and Jay Martel.

  Equal access and frequency of work for women writers is improving, far more swiftly in television than in film, though progress is slow in both. Still, some writers feel a sense of encouragement; with more women in film programs, they reason, more will make it through the entry gate and become career writers. In earlier decades, the names of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who adapted A Room with a View and Howards End, Callie Khouri, scripter of Thelma and Louise and creator of Nashville, and Diablo Cody, who wrote Juno and Young Adult, were on the tip of every producer’s tongue as new voices in unique genres who succeeded in capturing audiences’ attention. More recently, Aline Brosh McKenna pointed to Lena Dunham’s meteoric success with her series Girls: “It’s changing. It’s going to change. Lena Dunham has done more for women in film than every Women in Film panel combined.”7

  Authorship/Ownership

  Since the end of long-term contracts, writers and studio signatories have agreed to a legal subterfuge regarding authorship that benefits both parties. A writer crafts a script, for which he or she holds copyright. If a signatory buys the script, then the writer and signatory sign paperwork transferring ownership and authorship and retroactively deeming the script a work-for-hire project. The signatory attains ownership, and the writer is protected under a WGA employee contract that assures such rights as minimums for compensation, residuals, and health
and pension benefits. Though it is clear why this kind of legal wrangling—relinquishing authorial rights to secure workers’ rights—occurs, many of the screenwriters who campaigned in the 1940s for an American Authors Authority would find it counterintuitive, if not downright absurd.

  Debates over media ownership are critical at the level of industry, networks, and corporations. As can be seen in the rise and fall of the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules, the effects of ownership trickle down to determine which individual films and series are commissioned and produced. While it once was useful to work with a studio or independent production company, most cable outlets now are interested only in buying series that can be produced entirely in-house—and then controlled vertically as media properties.8 David Simon, creator of The Wire, finds much of television unwatchable because of the industry’s narrow focus on maximizing audiences rather than investing resources in telling stories that reflect the real world: “A lot of it is about sustaining the franchise. You know, looking for the hit.”9 Simon experienced the frustrations of trying to appeal to a mass audiences when he wrote for the NBC series Homicide: Life on the Street. There are still some smaller outlets where writers can sell stories they believe in, but these companies are increasingly subsidiaries of major conglomerates.

  Writers expressed frustrations with the increased corporatizing of the industry and its detrimental effects on the production process. Story notes from an executive are common, but too many layers at the top can weigh heavily on a project. Matthew Weiner, creator of Mad Men, recalled a production conference call with forty people on the phone—so many, that the conference telecommunications system broke down in the middle of the production meeting.10 This corporate conglomerate model changes not just the language of production but ultimately the perspective of an industry that focuses less on content and more on asset management. Aline Brosh McKenna gave an example: “When I started, people would take a flyer on a smaller movie just because they thought it was interesting and thought, ‘Well if I think it’s interesting, maybe other people will think it’s interesting.’ Now, movies have to be more justified as a piece of business. You hear that phrase, ‘piece of business,’ more than you did.”11 And when films or series do not follow conventional models to reach success—whether Bridesmaids or Breaking Bad—major companies are less likely to gamble on them.

  When an atypical script does succeed, it is celebrated as the work of a singular visionary, a situation that raises another common theme. On the one hand, writers demand fair credit, while on the other they refuse notions of authorial exceptionalism. In 1980, Philip Dunne lamented that many people forget that the writer even exists—including critics, whom he calls the worst offenders. “These critics credit the director with the construction, the selection of scenes, the suspense, the dramatic progression, and even, in some cases, the dialogue; in other words, precisely the things a screenwriter does to earn his or her living.”12 Until the 1970s, writers were never considered celebrities and were rarely mentioned in the press, unless they had done something morally reprehensible. Until the 1990s, only a handful of writers had the experience of being recognized in public.

  While writers have campaigned for their place of importance as authors of the script, they will downplay the role of the television showrunner or the synergy of a strong writer-director relationship in film production. Lauded for his work as creator and showrunner of Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan said at the end of the show’s run, “The worst thing the French ever gave us is the auteur theory. It’s a load of horseshit. You don’t make a movie by yourself, you certainly don’t make a TV show by yourself. You invest in people, in their work. You make people feel comfortable in their jobs; you keep people talking.”13 Writers want to be acknowledged—sometimes even celebrated—for their contributions, but they also recognize that they are part of a collaborative production process.

  A recent shift in the role of the film screenwriter follows from the showrunner model in television. The industry has many models of successful hyphenates in television but few examples of cross-discipline work in film. However, the slow economy has made studios less inclined to hire additional writers to rework a script since they can usually keep the original writers for much less money. These writers can assist with the preparation for the film and work with the director, actors, and editors. They can help the marketing division clarify the story and keep a production on track. In their industry podcast Scriptnotes, John August, screenwriter of Charlie’s Angels and Big Fish, and Craig Mazin refer to this work as the screenwriter-plus role. “It’s a creative partner role,” August explained in an interview. “Sometimes it is labeled as a producer role, but it’s one of the functions of producing, whether it’s labeled a producer or not. . . . Especially as these big movies become 200-day shoots, it’s really useful to have a person there to remind you of what that scene is supposed to be about.”14 The success of the television showrunner model has shifted studios’ ideas of what the writer’s role can be on a film, and some may come to believe that a film will be better served if a writer is a part of the filmmaking collaboration throughout the entire production process.

  The Name

  Since the merger of the Screen Writers Guild with the Television Writers Association, the bargaining power of the Writers Guild of America has rested on the television side of the equation. In talking about the 2007–2008 WGA strike, screenwriter Craig Mazin said, “The key to thwarting [the studios] . . . is television. Movies take forever to get made. Television is right now.”15 In almost sixty years, the WGA East presidents have always been television writers (including a few news writers). The WGA West leadership, while more balanced, has been dominated by television writers. In July 2013, the WGA West reported that writers’ earnings had risen 4 percent the previous year and that the increase for television writers was 10.1 percent.16 In contrast, the feature film employment numbers had declined, with the major studios concentrating their financial resources on blockbusters rather than middle-budget films.17

  When asked about the power of television within the Writers Guild, Frank Pierson replied, “Most of the really good writing now is being done in television, and it’s interesting to see that as the writing goes to television, so does the directing. So we’re increasingly seeing serious directors, established directors in the motion pictures business, going to do series on HBO. . . . The major [film] studios are only doing versions of Avatar. We’re going to have Avatar 1, 2, 3, up your nose.”18 Even one of the most prolific screenwriters in Hollywood, Ronald Bass, agreed: “It’s a television union. I think. I mean, that’s where all the work is, that’s where the money is, that’s where the power is.”19 Joan Didion, who adapted her novel Play It As It Lays for the screen, once quipped that screenwriters get all the respect and television writers get all the money, but now the narrative has flipped. Not only is television getting respect, but web series like House of Cards, adapted for American television by Beau Willimon, and Orange Is the New Black, created by Jenji Kohan, have redefined “television” as entertainment that does not require a television set as its primary outlet.

  As many scholars have noted, the economic and geographic structures of multiplatform global entertainment conglomerates have made transnational production the norm in what is still considered American media making.20 The visual effects community provides an example of how creative laborers in the United States are working alongside international organizations to secure the rights of fellow creative workers while also attempting to ensure that production stays local. This anxiety about international industries taking creative labor jobs is nothing new. As discussed in chapter 2, The Screen Writer in 1945 had already imagined that the film industries in India and China would challenge American dominance in the global film market.21 Although some production labor is now regularly outsourced, writing has generally stayed stateside. Still, the WGA has kept a close watch on industry trends and has started a series of campaigns to help its international co
unterparts ensure writers’ rights, secure jurisdictional control, and bargain collectively for minimum basic agreements. The WGA’s transnational call for democratic unionization serves the interests of American creative laborers as much, if not more, than the interests of its global partners.

  As writers and their Guild look forward into the future—not only for themselves, but for the American and global media industries—it will be critical to untangle and debate these questions of outsider and insider status, authorship, ownership, and credits.

  Final Thoughts

  Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.

  —Nora Ephron (When Harry Met Sally . . .), commencement speech, Wellesley College (Wellesley, MA), 3 June 1996

  Most of the writers I interviewed for this book emphasized how important it was for them to understand their own history as a creative community. They saw it as their responsibility to guide the next generation of writers entering the industry and the Guild. Writers spoke about the sacrifices of those who came before them: those who worked without a contract, those who suffered through the blacklist, those who gave up their chance for residuals in order to secure rights for the next generation. Hal Kanter, creator of the series Julia, said he felt proud to be a part of the writing profession. He firmly believed that new writers should know whose shoulders they stand upon: “People ask me what I do for a living and I say, ‘I’m a writer’ and I’m very proud of it. And I’m proud of the Guild and have supported it right down the line. . . . A lot of young members who complain about a great many things are completely unaware of the giant strides this Guild has made on their behalf and . . . possibly when this history is compiled . . . people might have some of their anger tempered by reading what we already accomplished.”22