The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild

by Miranda J. Banks

  As the war came to an end, articles in TSW outlined work available to writers in varied genres, in other media, and in different fields of writing. Lester Koenig, who wrote the acclaimed documentary shorts Thunderbolt and The Memphis Belle, pressed the studios to support writers’ adjustment back to Hollywood modes of writing. He also encouraged the studios to produce documentaries by writers who had experienced the war firsthand.73 Koenig believed that feature film creators could benefit from the honesty presented in this most recent influx of wartime documentaries.

  A number of novelists also wrote in TSW about their impressions of writers and writing in Hollywood. For example, novelist-turned-screenwriter James Hilton, who wrote Mrs. Miniver, opined that Hollywood was a good place for novelists to expand their reading audiences. “The average successful picture of 1945 has qualities of dignity and integrity” that might also make for good reading, he wrote.74 Other articles suggested commercial film companies as another venue to consider in order to achieve an economic security unavailable to many writers in feature films. Writing-as-persuasion already came naturally to seasoned writers, and this genre harnessed those skills. Audrey Wood, a literary agent, offered guidance to writers who might be interested in playwriting.75 Writers who specialized in genres like action-adventure, animation and fantasy, or the Western contributed articles that examined and explained the particulars of their craft. There were practical articles as well, as Guild lawyers expounded on authors’ rights, tax considerations, and ownership of story ideas. Still other articles covered the economics of the new medium of television. In 1948, George Corey, writer of Mr. Winkle Goes to War, predicted that television might be the best place for screenwriters to claim ownership of their writing in a way heretofore unavailable in film.76

  Beyond analyses of the art and craft of the American screenwriter, TSW presented opportunities for rich conversations among constituents in the film and media community. Film artists and craftspeople examined the process of filmmaking in the broader scope of global film writing and reception from their unique vantage points. This kind of communication between groups had not been a common occurrence in the Hollywood studio system. Looking back on this era, George Seaton, who wrote A Day at the Races and Miracle on 34th Street, explained that “the director and the writer very seldom worked together—practically never. Either the writer would finish the script and would go on to something else or they would hire the director a couple of weeks later and you didn’t meet each other until the picture was all over.”77 Writers usually collaborated only with producers and almost never stepped onto the film set. TSW was doing something innovative by inviting all the collaborators in a film’s creation into the discussion.

  The celebrated cinematographer of The Thin Man and Body and Soul, James Wong Howe, wrote an essay in response to an earlier article about the role of the cameraman and his relationship to the writer. As he pointed out, “There are many studio workers behind the scenes whose contributions toward the excellence of a motion picture never receive credit because outsiders have no way of discovering where one leaves off and another begins.”78 Howe offered a gentle reminder that other craftspeople in Hollywood, and not only writers, can be dismissed, misunderstood, neglected, or utterly forgotten in credits, but he also presented writers with ideas for creative collaboration. In another article, playwright and screenwriter Arch Oboler provided a thoughtful assessment of film sound and how writers can best incorporate the power of sound in their scripts.79 Similar pieces looked at opportunities for collaboration between writers and composers, and others examined independent production and assessed the advantages and disadvantages of paring down—or even eliminating—the studio’s chain of command. In 1947, out of conversations that began in the pages of TSW, the SWG made a deal with Fox’s Darryl Zanuck and MGM’s Dore Schary to bring writers onto films sets so that they could learn and internalize the nuts and bolts of film practices. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson argue that the presence of screenwriters on set presaged the burgeoning trend of writers taking on multiple roles, such as the hyphenate writer-director in cinema and the writer-producer in television.80

  What began in TSW as a global perspective on the war evolved into a deepened interest in international perspectives on cinema. During World War II and in the early months of peacetime, writers filled the pages of TSW with reports on war and postwar conditions in various theaters of operation. Charles Grayson, who scripted One Night in the Tropics, described running into members of his “ink-stained fraternity” everywhere he was deployed.81 Budd Schulberg wrote about searching for archival, lost, or abandoned Nazi film footage as evidence to help the prosecution in the Nuremberg Trials. As Schulberg explained, “Motion pictures had gone to war. Now they were helping to win the peace.”82 In many ways, the TSW articles published toward the last days of the war and articles about international cinema became de facto studies of the lives of writers on the frontlines around the globe.

  The most common studies were of the state of British and French cinema. Editorials commented on the attempts of British film producer J. Arthur Rank to create parity between British and American film exports.83 Legendary French writer-director Jean Renoir (Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game), who was a member of the SWG, celebrated writer-producer-director-actor Charles Chaplin’s work in Monsieur Verdoux.84 Two articles (including one from MPAA president Eric Johnston) debated the possibility of renegotiating the screen quota system with France.85 There were articles about cinema trends in the Soviet Union, Mexico, and Argentina, as well as dispatches from Venice and from the first Cannes Film Festival. One article offered an overview of contemporary West German film production. A number of articles by Chinese writers examined and explained the reception of Hollywood films in China. In a 1945 editorial, TSW predicted that “in the years to come, it is not inconceivable that the film industries in India and China may further encroach upon areas which we once held almost exclusively.”86 The scope and depth of this global lens is striking. Writers were actively engaged and eager to understand international cinema, the issues affecting writers in other countries, and how to write American films that would appeal to global audiences.

  One of the most vibrant debates that played out on the pages of TSW involved the rights of authorship, which peaked in a series of articles calling for the creation of the American Authors Authority. As discussed in chapter 1, screenwriters had been frustrated for years because they did not own the copyright to their works. They debated whether it was feasible or even proper for them to seek ownership from the studios. Not owning their work made writers feel vulnerable—especially those who came to Hollywood from long-established professions like literature and the theater where authorship and ownership were one and the same. Novelist Raymond Chandler, who wrote the screenplays for Double Indemnity and The Blue Dahlia, furnished a sharp critique of his experiences in the film industry in The Atlantic in 1945:

  The impulse to perfection cannot exist where the definition of perfection is the arbitrary decision of authority. That which is born in loneliness and from the heart cannot be defended against the judgment of a committee of sycophants. The volatile essences which make literature cannot survive the clichés of a long series of story conferences. There is little magic of word or emotion or situation which can remain alive after the incessant bone-scraping revisions imposed on the Hollywood writer by the process of rule by decree. That these magics do somehow, here and there, by another and even rarer magic, survive and reach the screen more or less intact is the infrequent miracle which keeps Hollywood’s handful of fine writers from cutting their throats.87

  Philip Dunne reviewed Chandler’s essay in TSW, celebrating his rapier wit and declaring that “he gives Hollywood—and particularly its writers—a bloodier beating than any he has ever allowed his Philip Marlowe to suffer at the hands of corrupt police. He rips the skin whole off the Hollywood system. He disembowels it and has its bones hot from its carcass.”88 But Dunne ta
kes the argument one step further, linking Chandler’s frustrations to the Wagner Act and the role of writers as employees. As Dunne explains, copyright was not guaranteed, under a union contract, as a condition of employment: “That word ‘employment’ is the key to Mr. Chandler’s argument. As long as the writer accepts a salary, as long as he does not share the producer’s financial risk, just so long, thinks Mr. Chandler, will he be a lackey, a creator constrained from creating, a second-class citizen in the Hollywood community.”89 Dunne makes clear that the notions of freedom, integrity, and independence are all secondary to employment and earning a living. He reminds readers that a writer’s sense of dignity and self-respect are not guaranteed in one’s job description; however, they are essential goals that writers must strive toward enshrining in future contracts as basic rights. As Hollywood reporter Thomas M. Pryor put it, “until such time as script writers do something to assert individual effort, the best they can hope for is reflected glory.”90 Writers, the editors of TSW knew, were living in the shadow of directors, producers, and actors. But, as they had to admit, it was a golden shadow.91

  These concerns and others prompted novelist James M. Cain to propose the establishment of an American Authors Authority (AAA) in 1946. Cain had written a few screenplays and contributed to others (notably Blockade and Algiers), and he was not always pleased with the adaptation of some of his most famous novels (The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce, and Double Indemnity) into major Hollywood films. The frustrations he experienced led him to champion an organization that would serve the Authors Guild, the Dramatists Guild, the Radio Writers Guild, and the Screen Writers Guild as a repository, recordkeeper, and legal enforcer of writers’ copyrights in all formats. Accessing information about the financial accounting of the studios was extremely difficult, if not impossible, for creatives and craftspeople. In relation to novels and adapted works, where royalties were sometimes paid, producers often modified their bookkeeping methods to create a royalty structure that best suited the studios’ needs.

  Cain brought his proposal to the board of directors of the SWG, which in many ways saw the AAA as a parallel organization to the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), but designed for writers. Ring Lardner Jr. was appointed chairman of a committee to study the plan and report back to the board and the SWG membership. On the whole, the committee was supportive of Cain’s proposal. Lardner argued that the plan would essentially provide writers 1 percent of the gross of films they wrote.92 More than four hundred writers gathered in July 1946 to discuss the plan, the largest attendance at any Guild meeting to date. At the night’s end, the members voted 343 to 7 in favor of establishing the AAA.93 The editors of TSW explained this landslide vote by saying that writers wished to control secondary rights on their writing, to control remakes of their work, and to have recourse against producers who shelved their scripts for indefinite periods.

  Though Cain did not bring the issue directly to the journal, the editors of TSW staked out a role in this discussion of authorship by using its pages for debate and opinion pieces about the purpose and the proper purview of the AAA. For the better part of a year, TSW featured articles and collected statements from Hollywood insiders and selected clips from national newspapers and journals about the idea. They even devoted an entire special issue to it. As Cain explained it, the AAA as an organization would regard the writer as “the creator of properties.”94 In some ways, this re-envisioning of ownership was a simple act: it ensured that writers would be compensated every time their work was used. But in other ways, the AAA meant a radical redefinition of film authorship and therefore was perceived by the studios as a fundamental and significant threat to their power as the legally recognized creators of media properties. Perhaps more disturbing, if writers could secure this level of control over their work, might directors and actors soon demand their fair share?

  Writers could predict that the studios would be hostile to the notion of returning copyright to them and that producers would dismiss their demands as “outlandish.”95 But many studio heads, Hollywood executives, and media insiders chose a different tack. They declared the AAA proposal to be a leftist plot. William Wilkerson, founder and publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, addressed the Hollywood community in the summer of 1946 with an editorial equating a vote for the AAA to the title of his tirade, “A Vote for Joe Stalin.”96 In this fateful screed, Wilkerson named a number of screenwriters who would later turn up on the blacklist: Dalton Trumbo, Maurice Rapf (Song of the South), Lester Cole, Howard Koch (Casablanca and Sergeant York), Ring Lardner Jr., and John Howard Lawson. It was the first of a long series of Red-baiting editorials that ran in the Hollywood Reporter. Wilkerson went on to attack Cole in particular, posing to him the two questions that would later become the core queries in HUAC’s interrogation: Are you a member of the Writers Guild? Are you a member of the Communist Party of the United States? Trade journals held power in the Hollywood community, and these words burned. As columnist Ezra Goodman well knew, “Hollywood is narcissistically sensitive about the printed word. . . . As a result, the Hollywood press has become something more than a press corps. It is an integral part of the social and business life of the community. The Hollywood press does not merely chronicle the show. It is part of the show itself.”97

  The vehement opposition of the Hollywood Reporter toward the writers and the AAA turned public opinion, ultimately on a national level. The Los Angeles Examiner called the proposal “Stalinist.” The Chicago Tribune described the AAA as a “sly scheme,” “communist inspired,” and “certainly totalitarian,” and it cautioned “real writers” like former Screen Playwrights members John Lee Mahin, Howard Emmett Rogers, and James K. McGuiness, as well as Fred Niblo Jr. (who wrote The Fighting 69th) and Ayn Rand (who wrote and adapted The Fountainhead), that they must fight this despicable attack on their livelihood, their community, and their country.98 A group of nine writers, including Marguerite Roberts (True Grit), David Hertz (The Devil Is a Woman), Howard Estabrook, and Waldo Salt, wrote to SWG members to remind them that an attack on writers at this moment was, in many ways, an implicit attempt to shut down the AAA and to foment disunity within the SWG: “Remember that the French authors have for decades controlled the French stage, and the French authors were moving in the direction of royalties on motion pictures when the war intervened and demolished the French picture industry. Remember that British writers long ago instituted the leasing of literary properties instead of outright sale. Remember that the American dramatists control the American stage. Remember that American film writers, through their Guild, have been moving steadily toward a greater protection for writers and their work.”99 These SWG board members hoped to impress upon the membership that the movement toward authorial control for writers was a universal concern in democratic nations and that opposition to this idea amounted to an attack on unionization in Hollywood.

  TSW welcomed readers to decide for themselves how to respond, and the amount of space devoted to the AAA debate illustrates how important the editors thought the topic was to their community. The majority of TSW readers, most of whom were writers, were sympathetic to the plan. Soon, the plan itself—and the writers who backed it—were increasingly the targets of right-wing attacks. Studios and legislative committees like HUAC saw conversations about the AAA and anyone who wished to debate this issue as leftist and liberal and, therefore, dangerous. Ring Lardner Jr. saw several reasons behind this guilt by association: “Partly, perhaps, through my identification with it, [the AAA] became thought of as kind of a left-wing plan. Although Jim Cain who had started it was anything but left wing. But the same people in the Guild who had originally worried about the Guild being under the domination of Eastern writers in the Author’s League . . . became concerned about this 1 percent of the gross. [Some], I don’t know quite how, saw a very sinister implication through all this that it was somehow going beyond our status as salaried employees, or independent contractors, to demand a s
hare of the take.”100 As Lardner explained, many of the writers on the SWG board were interested in getting the AAA approved; however, some saw the AAA as an important cause that, while worth supporting, would never win. As allegations of communist infiltration in Hollywood intensified, the writers used their journal as a site for political expression and public outrage.