The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild

by Miranda J. Banks

63. Anne-Marie Johnson on behalf of the Screen Actors Guild, ibid., http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/view?id=6518524529.

  64. Mona Mangan, executive director, WGA East, ibid., http://transition.fcc.gov/ownership/california100306/statement_mona_mangan.pdf.

  65. Patric Verrone, president of the WGA West, ibid., http://transition.fcc.gov/ownership/california100306/statement_patric_verrone.pdf.

  66. Marshall Herskovitz, on behalf of the Producers Guild of America, ibid., http://transition.fcc.gov/ownership/california100306/statement_marshall_herskovitz.pdf.

  67. Statement of Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate, Re: Promoting Diversification of Ownership in the Broadcasting Services, et al. (MB Docket Nos. 07–294, 06–121, 02–277, 01–235, 01–317, 00–244 and 04–228), 2006 Quadrennial Media Ownership Review, FCC 07–216 (2006), 120, http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-07–217A5.pdf.

  68. Dissenting Statement of Commissioner Michael J. Copps, ibid., 106, http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-07–217A3.pdf.

  69. Oshry, “Getting in the Game,” 52.

  70. Eric Bangeman, “Growth of Gaming in 2007 Far Outpaces Movies, Music,” ars technica, 25 January 2008, http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/01/growth-of-gaming-in-2007-far-outpaces-movies-music/.

  71. Anonymous, “Renaissance Scribes: Enter the Many Media Writers,” Game Writers Quarterly 1, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 4.

  72. David Young, interview.

  73. David Goodman, interview.

  74. This kind of split among membership seriously weakened the Screen Actors Guild in its 2011 negotiations.

  75. The structure proved so effective that, even to this day, the WGA East continues to hold meetings with strike captains in order to hear about the issues and concerns of its membership.

  76. Bruce Rosenblum, “AMPTP: State of Network Television,” Television Critics Association Summer 2007 Press Tour, 13 July 2007, Beverly Hills, CA.

  77. Mark Gunn, interview.

  78. Susan Kim, interview with the author, 9 April 2012.

  79. Michael Winship, interview with the author, 9 April 2012.

  80. David Goodman, interview.

  81. Roger Wolfson, “How the WGA Won: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the WGA Strike,” Huffington Post, 12 February 2008, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roger-wolfson/how-the-wga-won-a-behind-_b_86178.html.

  82. Bill Scheft, interview with the author, 6 April 2013.

  83. Michael Winship, interview.

  84. Wolfson, “How the WGA Won.”

  85. Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).

  86. United Hollywood, http://www.unitedhollywood.com and http://www.unitedhollywood.blogspot.com (sites discontinued).

  87. Dante Atkins, “It’s Not 1988 Anymore: The WGA Strike, the Internet and Media Decentralization,” Flow TV, 22 May 2008, http://flowtv.org/2008/05/it%E2%80%99s-not-1988-anymore-the-wga-strike-the-internet-and-media-decentralization-dante-atkins-founder-unitedhollywoodcom/.

  88. Courtney Lilly, interview with the author, 16 May 2009.

  89. Scott Collins, “Strike Coverage Was Hazardous Duty,” Los Angeles Times, 18 February 2008, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-channe118feb18,0,1028014.story#axzz2iPhPf6Fi.

  90. Jennie Chamberlain and Daniel Chamberlain, “We Write, You Wrong,” Flow TV, 22 May 2008, http://flowtv.org/2008/05/%E2%80%9Cwe-write-you-wrong%E2%80%9D-jennie-chamberlain-screenwriter-daniel-chamberlain-usc/.

  91. Brian Stelter, “On YouTube, Creative Venting,” Media Decoder Blog, New York Times, 7 November 2007, http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/07/onyoutube-creative-venting/?_r=0.

  92. Frank Lesser and Rob Dubbin, “Sorry, Internet,” YouTube video, 2007, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npqx8CsBEyk.

  93. Greg Daniels et al., “The Office Is Closed,” YouTube video, 2007, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6hqP0c0_gw.

  94. Peter Rader quoted in Ryan J. Meehan and Katherine L. Miller, “Both Sides Now,” Harvard Crimson, 15 November 2007, http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2007/11/15/both-sides-now-no-your-tivo/#.

  95. George Hickenlooper, Alan Sereboff, Kamala Lopez, and Jill Kushner, Speechless #16, United Hollywood video, November 2007, http://www.deadline.com/2007/11/speechless-16-amy-ryanpatricia-clarkson/.

  96. John Eggerton, “Nielsen: Cable, Internet Benefited from WGA Strike,” Broadcasting & Cable, 2 April 2008, http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/113129-Nielsen_Cable_Internet_Benefited_from_WGA_Strike.php.

  97. Michael Winship, interview.

  98. The final deals the two unions made with the AMPTP were similar, with one important exception. Members agreed to a fixed payment for content streamed online for three years, but in the third year writers were promised 2 percent of distributors’ gross in all years that the content is streamed. See the Nielsen Company’s publication Television in Transition: The Impact of the Writers’ Strike (New York: Nielsen, 2008).

  99. Dave McNary, “No Edits on WGA Strike,” Variety, 24 August 2008, http://variety.com/2008/scene/news/no-edits-on-wga-strike-1117991065/.

  100. Jeff Zucker, “A Time For Change,” keynote address, National Association of Television Programming Executives Conference and Exhibition, Las Vegas, NV, 29 January 2008.

  101. Anonymous, interview with the author, 26 April 2012.

  102. Craig Mazin, interview with the author, 12 June 2011.

  103. Mark Gunn, interview.

  104. Ross McCall, interview.

  105. Del Reisman, interview with the author, 2 April 2009.

  106. Deuze, Media Work, 51.

  107. Robert Seidman, “Hulu Growth Stalling Already?” TV by the Numbers, 3 June 2009, http://tvby thenumbers.zap2it.com/2009/06/03/hulu-growth-stalling-already/19992/.

  108. Jason Sklar, interview with the author, 19 May 2009.

  109. Erica Rothschild, interview with the author, 16 May 2009.

  110. Tom Fontana, interview.

  111. Howard Rodman, interview with the author, 15 February 2011.

  112. Walter Bernstein, interview with the author, 16 July 2009.

  CONCLUSION

  1. In earlier research I have interviewed other media practitioners.

  2. Examples of this kind of lay theory can be found in John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

  3. In particular, see articles by James Schamus (The Wedding Banquet, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), Howard A. Rodman (Joe Gould’s Secret, Savage Grace), José Rivera (a.k.a. Pablo, The Motorcycle Diaries, The 33), Sydnye White (Detroit S.W.A.T.), John Auerbach (Stepfather II), and Jan Oxenberg (Once and Again, Parenthood, Pretty Little Liars) in “In Focus: Writing for the American Screen,” Cinema Journal 45, no. 2 (Winter 2006).

  4. Catherine L. Fisk, “The Role of Private Intellectual Property Rights in Markets for Labor and Ideas: Screen Credit and the Writers Guild of America, 1938–2000,” Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law 32, no. 2 (2011): 228n59.

  5. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Television Diversity Hearings, 29 November 1999, Los Angeles, CA. For further discussion, see National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Out of Focus—Out of Sync, Take 4: A Report on the Television Industry (December 2008); accessible at http://naacp.3cdn.net/b7cf63e85b9742c1c6_w4m6vqs00.pdf.

  6. Kimberly Myers, interview with the author, 30 August 2013.

  7. Aline Brosh McKenna, interview with the author, 16 August 2013.

  8. Chris Levinson, interview with the author, 14 August 2013.

  9. Willa Paskin, “David Simon: Most TV Is Unwatchable,” Salon, 23 September 2012, http://www.salon.com/2012/09/23/david_simon_most_tv_is_unwatchable/.

  10. Matthew Weiner, “Series Showrunners” (panel discussion, Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Foundation Faculty Seminar, North Hollywood, CA, 9 November 2010).

  11. Aline Brosh McKenna, interview.

  12. Philip Dunn
e, Take Two: A Life in Movies and Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980), 43.

  13. Brett Martin, “Inside the Breaking Bad Writers’ Room: How Vince Gilligan Runs the Show,” The Guardian, 20 September 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/sep/20/breaking-bad-writers-room-vince-gilligan?CMP=twt_fbo.

  14. John August, interview with the author, 6 August 2013.

  15. Craig Mazin, interview with the author, 12 June 2011.

  16. Dave McNary, “WGA West Earnings Up 4% for 2012; TV Earnings Up 10.1% While Screen Work Continues to Slide,” Variety, 1 July 2013, http://variety.com/2013/film/news/wga-west-earnings-up-4-for-2012–1200503571/.

  17. Ibid. McNary notes that employment for features went down to 6.7 percent, the third year in a row of declines at the major studios.

  18. Frank Pierson, interview with the author, 15 February 2011. Pierson himself started in television, then wrote for film, but returned to writing television at the end of his career, scripting episodes of both The Good Wife and Mad Men.

  19. Ronald Bass, interview with the author, 13 June 2011.

  20. Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, and Richard Maxwell write, “Hollywood is assuredly operating on a global scale. The impact may be visible on screen, but it is also felt at a bodily level by the labour that makes it happen.” Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, and Richard Maxwell, Global Hollywood (London: BFI, 2001), 219.

  21. Editorial, The Screen Writer, July 1945, 38.

  22. Hal Kanter, interview by the Writers Guild Oral History Project (Los Angeles: Writers Guild Foundation, 21 June 1978), 8.

  23. The Writer Speaks: Fay Kanin, DVD, 18 May 1998, Writers Guild Foundation Shavelson-Webb Library, Los Angeles.

  24. The Writer Speaks: David Dortort, DVD.

  APPENDIX B: METHODOLOGY

  1. Hortense Powdermaker, Hollywood: the Dream Factory (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1950); Leo C. Rosten, Hollywood: The Movie Colony, the Movie Makers (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1941).

  2. William T. Bielby and Denise D. Bielby’s yearly statistical Hollywood Writers’ Report series (West Hollywood, CA: Writers Guild of America, West); Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time (New York: Pantheon, 1983); John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Denise Mann, “It’s Not TV, It’s Brand Management TV: The Collective Author(s) of the Lost Franchise,” in Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries, ed. Vicki Mayer, Miranda J. Banks, and John T. Caldwell (London: Routledge, 2009), 99–114.

  3. Horace Newcomb and Robert S. Alley, The Producer’s Medium: Conversations with Creators of American TV (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).

  4. Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988); Jennifer Holt, Empires of Entertainment: Media Industries and the Politics of Deregulation, 1980–1996 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011); Alisa Perren, Indie, Inc.: Miramax and the Transformation of Hollywood in the 1990s (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012).

  5. See Nancy Lynn Schwartz, The Hollywood Writers’ Wars (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982), 257; Ian Hamilton, Writers in Hollywood, 1915–1951 (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1990); Joan Moore and Burton Moore, “The Hollywood Writer” (unpublished ms., c. 1970, Writers Guild Foundation Shavelson-Webb Library Archives, Los Angeles); Marc Norman, What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting (New York: Three Rivers Press/Random House, 2008); Christopher D. Wheaton, “The Screen Writers’ Guild (1920–1942): The Writers Quest for a Freely Negotiated Basic Agreement” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1973).

  6. Editorial, “Guild History Starts,” WGAw Newsletter (February 1978).

  7. Mark Williams, “Considering Monty Margetts’s Cook’s Corner: Oral History and Television History,” in Television, History, and American Culture: Feminist Critical Essays, ed. Mary Beth Haralovich and Lauren Rabinovitz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 52.

  8. Craig Mazin, interview with the author, 12 June 2011.

  9. Gitlin, Inside Primetime, 14.

  10. Felicia Henderson has done fascinating research on television production by studying writers and the writers’ room. See Henderson, “The Culture Behind Closed Doors: Issues of Gender and Race in the Writers’ Room,” Cinema Journal 50, no. 20 (Winter 2011): 145–152.

  11. Paul Veyne, Writing History: Essay on Epistemology, trans. Mina Moore-Rinvolucri (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984): 235; cited in Robert Sklar, “Does Film History Need a Crisis?” Cinema Journal 44, no. 1 (2004): 135.

  12. James Schamus, “In Focus: Writing for the American Screen,” Cinema Journal 45, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 85.

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