The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild

by Miranda J. Banks

  Others were antagonistic toward the need for equal access within the Guild. Carey Wilber berated the Guild for worrying about the representation of minority writers and issues facing international guilds when other issues, like the hyphenate-freelance debate, were, to him, foremost. “We’ve had a Board—the same old faces around that Board that were there in 1960 for Chrissakes—that sits around and they come up with equal opportunity for the n****rs? They come up with coffee klatches with the goddamn Russians?. . . Nobody is talking about the fact that maybe two years from now we have got another negotiation.”90

  During the 1970s and into the 1980s, an increasing number of series starred African Americans, including Julia, Flip, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, Sanford and Son, Get Christie Love!, Good Times, The Jeffersons, What’s Happening!!, Benson, and The Cosby Show. On many of these series, the writers’ rooms rarely mirrored the diversity of the actors on the screen. Bill Boulware, a writer on Benson and later The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, described how discrimination behind the scenes changed: “Back in the 50s or 60s, when it was a matter of discriminatory practices, it was easier to define. . . . The majority of the people in the industry [now] are used to seeing colors as definition of some things. Now that may not even be on a conscious level, but their perceptions . . . and how you come across may be colored by the fact that you are colored. . . . When there’s not a black subject or subject matter, then it’s not that you are not valid, but they just don’t tend to even connect you up with it.”91 People of color might sometimes be hired; but if they were not re-hired after a specified period of time, they would lose their voting rights in the Guild. Thus, of the 1,540 writers working in television in 1980, only 4 were black, and of 5,252 members overall, 65 were black (only 15 of whom were eligible to vote).92 Even though minority families averaged twenty more hours of television viewing per week than white families in the 1980s, representation throughout the industry remained negligible.

  Every month, the Black Writers’ Caucus and the Women’s Caucus published dispatches in the WGA newsletters, but the pace of change was glacial. Although independent studios like MTM, Tandem, and Carsey-Werner made more efforts than most to create inclusive workplaces, minority representation in the writers’ room lagged far behind the modest gains for actors. Writers of color were dissatisfied both with their Guild and with its general membership. Hyphenate writer-director-actor Robert Townsend satirized Hollywood typecasting by writers, casting agents, and directors in his 1987 film Hollywood Shuffle. But successful African American writers and hyphenates were the exception to the rule. As the 1980s wore on, and as the studios gained a stronger bargaining stance, the WGA struggled to keep its writers unified.

  The Alliance and the Strikes of the 1980s

  The history of the Guild is a history of interest groups, divided groups.

  —Elias Davis, interview, 29 September 2010

  1988 is the Guild’s Vietnam.

  —Marc Norman, interview 9 June 2011

  A sweeping trend toward consolidation overtook the media industries during the 1980s. As Jennifer Holt details in her analysis of the structural convergence of the American entertainment industries, the boundaries between formerly distinct media industries were breaking down: film and broadcast merged under Fox; vertical reintegration occurred at Universal, Paramount, and Warner Bros.; and film merged with cable at Warner Bros., MCA/Universal, and Columbia.93 The phenomenon did not end there; publishing, music, merchandising, and theme parks were part of these corporate empires, as well. The high-concept blockbuster film was Hollywood’s focus, leaving room for small independent studios and paving the way at the end of the decade for the rise of Miramax and other corporate independents. Cable was emerging as a significant new competitor to broadcast television at a time when the broadcast audience was in a dramatic decline, with shows’ average ratings plunging from 50 in 1981 to 33.9 shares in 1991.94 For entertainment unions, the progressive consolidation of the media industry meant a decline in the diversity of outlets interested in making or buying content and in the number of signatories at the bargaining table.

  The ten-week SAG and AFTRA strike in 1980 delayed the fall season of television as the unions battled with the studios and networks over compensation for original programming on pay TV and home recording devices. At the time, only 5 percent of households with televisions had a home recording device (only 1 percent of which were VCRs), but the unions understood that this market was growing rapidly.95 In 1981, negotiations between the WGA and the studios and networks broke down over residuals for pay TV exhibition, and the Guild called a strike in April. Independent producers settled quickly on a formula, but the strike continued with the majors for thirteen weeks.

  Writers debated the issues among themselves at a series of heated meetings prior to and during the 1981 strike. Some found the gatherings as exasperating as they were entertaining. In describing them, Cheri Steinkellner found an apt analogy: “It was like High Holidays. If there was going to be a strike, that’s when everybody shows up to temple. . . . It was hilarious. Heated. Nobody is more political or opinionated than writers. And articulate. [Arguments were] brilliantly stated. Not always eloquently—and not always succinctly—but [it was] fascinating to hear people state their case passionately. . . . Writers are not really equipped for a physical brawl. As a subset of humanity we have not been trained in street fighting. Those aren’t the skills that got us to that particular career.”96 That many of the writers were Jewish was a fact never formally documented by surveys, but it was always a part of the collective understanding of writers as a community. David Isaacs picked up on this notion of separateness: “It’s not a classic work action because people are pulling up in their Beemers and Mercedes and sports cars and we’re going to walk, and we’re writers so food is very important, so after two hours . . . [y]ou go off with a bunch of friends to a deli or another restaurant, Italian, and you’d eat.”97 Although the writers’ concerns over compensation were completely valid, the presence of mostly privileged, educated, upper-middle-class white males on the picket line made it abundantly clear why questions continued to arise about who in Hollywood was getting writing jobs in the first place.

  IMAGE 22 WGA members and Academy Award–winning writers on strike in 1981. Left to right: Robert Carson, Julius Epstein, Daniel Taradash, Sidney Sheldon, and Frank Tarloff.

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

  In July 1981, the Guild and the studios hammered out a deal, a percentage of gross for writers, ending the strike after a brutal forty-week walkout. Soon after, in 1982, the loosely federated Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers changed its name to the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) and became the single bargaining agent and trade organization representing the signatories in their collective bargaining with the entertainment labor unions: DGA, SAG, AFTRA, IATSE, American Federation of Musicians, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Laborers Local 724, Teamsters Local 399, and the East and West branches of the WGA.98 The hope for the networks and the studios was in bringing their disparate interests together as one voice. When Nicholas Counter III took over as president of AMPTP, he suggested that perhaps the 1981 WGA strike could have been averted or quashed: “Certainly . . . by having a unified position in the industry, we have less chance of that kind of disruption.”99

  What became clear to WGA negotiators was that creative workers were vastly underpaid based on what they thought the AMPTP was dispersing in residuals. Talent was not receiving 1.2 percent of the worldwide distribution of the gross receipts for video; rather, they were paid 1.2 percent of 20 percent of the gross, a drastically lower percentage.100 The AMPTP had found a way to inject into the contracts its claim that studio costs ate up 80 percent of the gross, especially the expenses associated with copying and distributing the pricy new medium of VHS. The DGA accepted this new financing structure in its next collective bargaining agreement.101 With
its next round of negotiations, the WGA wanted to renegotiate the 80/20 split, but the AMPTP responded that it could not give the WGA something better than it had given the DGA and, ultimately, the SAG.

  When the contract expired in 1985, the AMPTP and WGA struggled over demands on ancillary profits from prerecorded films and television series sold on videocassettes. Writers demanded that their share of residuals come from the total wholesale revenues rather than from the 20 percent defined as the producers’ share.102 At the time the “tape issue,” as the press called it, seemed to be a larger concern for screenwriters than for television writers. Home video was the driving new technology, with ancillary revenues rising to over 50 percent of the film industry’s income and domestic theatrical revenue dropping to 36 percent.103 The bulkiness of VHS tapes—and the fact that they could hold only about two hours of programming in standard play mode—made them an illogical choice for a season’s worth of hour-long television programming. Given that television production was now outpacing film production in New York and Los Angeles, the WGA membership was more focused on the burgeoning cable market than on screenwriters’ percentage of VHS profits.104

  The Guild voted to strike in 1985, but members were far from united on the matter. A vocal contingent of writers, still angry about the last strike and uninterested in this squabble over tape, was eager to continue working. At an all-membership meeting, this group of anti-strike writers, led by conservative television film writer Lionel Chetwynd (who wrote Ike), declared themselves the “Union Blues,” took control of the microphones, and called for the Guild to negotiate a resolution immediately. If the WGA would not “bring us back a deal,” their blue buttons proclaimed, they would go “financial core,” meaning that they would break the strike and not be represented by the WGA. After enduring the 1981 strike, the writers were swayed by this no-strike push, even if some knew that the stakes were incredibly high. In discussing the events years later, Larry Gelbart, writer on Caesar’s Hour and of Tootsie, said to Chetwynd, “You were the Blues, yeah. . . . Well, you made us look like the Reds, which was a very clever ploy.”105

  After a brief two-week strike, the Union Blues swayed the opinion of WGAw Executive Director Naomi Gurian, and the walkout ended. The WGA agreed to an $84 million contract and $1.25 million in pension and health benefits in return for an agreement to withdraw all arbitration regarding percentages over videocassette sales residuals.106 In a letter to the editor of the WGAw Newsletter in May 1985, Edmund Morris, writer on Lawman, described the destructive nature of the Union Blues plan.

  Those members of our Guild who believe that we have triumphed are sadly deluded. . . . Management played upon the frets of our internal division with consummate skill, infecting our negotiators with the desolation of defeat. Our negotiators carried back Management’s cynical offer and bribe with the pride of a Neville Chamberlain. . . . On the cold and sober morning of March 19, our President told the media that the contract was a lousy one and that “the issue of videocassettes” was “dead for all time.” . . . The Union Blues won a Pyrrhic victory. The tidal wave of rollbacks will drown you and the rest of us in 1988.107

  Though Morris’s tone sounds inflated, the Union Blues’ victory proved devastating. Television writers who saw videocassettes as an issue only for screenwriters may have had second thoughts. Grace Reiner, who was a lawyer for the WGA at the time, observed, “I find it somewhat telling that Paramount released the entirety of Star Trek a month after the Writers Guild strike ended. Coincidence? Maybe.”108

  Few of the writers interviewed could remember which strike in the 1980s was about which issue. Many of them felt that the issues were not entirely clear to them at the time and that perhaps there was a breakdown between the leadership and the membership about what precisely the union wished to accomplish with each successive strike. Later in 1985, outgoing WGAw president Ernest Lehman, writer of Sabrina, North by Northwest, and The Sound of Music, expressed a hope for closure on this period of Guild history. “These have been a memorable two years which a lot of us would like to forget and never will, and don’t ask me how the Guild survived the turmoil and the confusion but it did, and [it] even came up with a new contract that to an overwhelming majority of you had meaningful gains, and to a vocal minority was a big disappointment, and each of us swears that he or she knows exactly what did or did not happen and why, but it’s Rashomon all over again, with six thousand points of view, all of them equally valid.”109 Lehman’s notion of success for the Guild was survival, a low goal given the Guild’s accomplishments in the past (residuals, health care, and pensions). Writers were disgruntled with the Guild and confused by how they had been sideswiped by the AMPTP. Moreover, the financial significance of their loss was not yet apparent to them.

  In 1987, news writers at CBS and Capital Cities/ABC went on strike for six weeks. They marched in front of Television City and in Century City. Negotiations proved fruitful for the WGA, in that it expanded its jurisdiction further into news and documentary writing. It was a moment of success in the midst of a series of devastating losses. Just one year later, in 1988, the WGA again entered into negotiations with the AMPTP. The central issues were residuals on foreign sales and syndication and expanded creative rights (access to film sets, comments on casting, rights to review the director’s cut). Many writers hoped, unrealistically, to regain all that had been lost in the 1985 negotiations, but the AMPTP flatly refused to discuss percentages for residuals on VHS, much less overhaul them. Howard A. Rodman captured the mindset of many writers at the time: “When you believe that you have been screwed out of hundreds of millions of dollars, it’s not the best frame of mind to go into negotiations with because you’re trying to get reparations for past conduct rather than figure out what you can do going forward.”110 In the spring of 1988, negotiations with the AMPTP broke down, and the WGA went out on strike.

  The walkout lasted 155 days (March 7 to August 7), the longest strike in Guild history, and it did not end well for the writers. In May, the WGA signed contracts with sixty-four independent companies, including a number of late-night series. In June, the AMPTP came to negotiations with an offer that acquiesced only on expansion of creative rights—no foreign residual increase, and continued percentage-based domestic residuals. The membership voted by 74.9 percent to refuse the deal, and the strike continued. Cheri Steinkellner remembered the bitterness and deep sense of defeat the membership felt: “Just three years earlier we’d had a big loss that we had not yet recovered from. Those wounds were still so fresh. And so to lose again—it wasn’t even a possibility. And yet, there wasn’t any winning.”111

  Brandon Tartikoff, president of NBC Entertainment, issued a two-part ultimatum: if the strike did not end by July 1998, the network would refuse to program series from studios that settled independently with the WGA, and it would begin developing “writer-proof” shows, including reality television.112 In circumventing the requisite costs of unionized laborers—actors, directors, writers, cinematographers, editors—production companies and studios were able to make shows cheaply and hold on to their profits completely.113 Some shows, like Fox’s COPS, emerged out of a plan to counter future strikes. Other networks and studios declared their own plans to punish independent studios that negotiated outside the AMPTP.

  In July, the WGA pushed back by filing an antitrust suit against eighteen studios and networks. It was at this point that twenty-one writers filed a charge with the NLRB against the WGA. They declared that they would resign from active membership if the strike was not settled by the end of the month. The WGA and AMPTP jockeyed back and forth for another three weeks, with emissaries working behind the scenes. The membership called a stop to strike actions, and the strike finally ended.114 Not a single writer interviewed who went through the 1988 strike did not feel angry, defeated, and exhausted by the experience.

  In the following years, Brian Walton, the WGA West’s executive director starting in 1985 and a witness to the worst of the 1988 negotiation
s, was determined to find an alternative approach. In 1992, he helped establish the Contract Adjustment Committee (CAC). The CAC offered writers, producers, and the companies the opportunity to sit down once or twice a year to discuss contracts and make adjustments to the MBA. As a preemptory bargaining space, the CAC pleased writers and management, neither of whom had any interest in letting negotiations reach a breaking point. In reality, the Guild’s agenda during these years was modest; while little was gained, there were no rollbacks. Some members then, and many more members in hindsight, realized that the CAC placed the Guild in a passive position in terms of negotiating power. Existing agreements were extended in 1992 (a four-year contract that was negotiated early) and 1995. That said, almost a decade of labor peace with no rollbacks was perhaps, as WGA Executive Vice President Chuck Slocum stated, the biggest gain of the 1988 strike.115 For the next ten years, Guild members were not particularly interested in stirring up controversy. This was the case not only in terms of contract negotiations, but also in terms of questions of public policy or conglomeration of the media industries. It would be twenty years before the membership would vote for another strike.

  Corporatization and the “Me” Generation of Writers

  The WGA’s defeats in the 1980s were not just the result of a lack of consensus among different communities of writers or a failure to read industry trends regarding residuals from ancillary markets. The merger mania discussed earlier changed not only the structure of the media industries but also the way that executives were doing business. The new type of executive, Marc Norman said, “basically brought business school ethics into the movie business.”116 George Axelrod agreed: “The producers are no longer colorful. They’re lawyers and accountants and business people.”117 The first executives running studios had emerged mostly from the exhibition branch of the industry and understood movie-making as a gut industry. The next generation of studio heads worked their way up through the ranks and learned on the job. The executives emerging out of law schools and business schools had little knowledge of the film industry except at the level of viewership and contract law. Moreover, the concerns of the larger parent company focused entirely on immediate profits. “The confusion over market share with profitability is really enormous,” noted writer-producer Ronald Bass, using a baseball analogy. “So there’s no such thing as a single or a double anymore. It has to be a home run because you have to open it in 3,500 theaters, because if you don’t, you can’t be first.”118 The growing corporatization, in turn, tended to nurture the cult of star power in both films and television. It was the rise of the “Me” generation in America, and writers and their union were both products and perpetrators of that navel-gazing bias. This was the dawning of era of the million-dollar screenplay and the showrunner.