by Joan Didion
“This town” is broader, and means just “the industry”, which is the way people who make television and motion pictures refer, tellingly, to the environment in which they work. The extent to which the industry in question resembles conventional industries is often obscured by its unconventional product, which requires that its “workers” perform in unconventional ways, for which they are paid unconventional sums of money: some people do make big money writing and directing and producing and acting in television, and some people also make big money, although considerably less big, writing and directing and producing and acting in motion pictures.
Still, as in other entrepreneurial enterprises, it is not those who work on the line in this industry but those who manage it who make the biggest money of all, and who tend to have things their way, which is what the five-month 1988 Writers Guild of America strike, which had become by the time of its settlement in early August 1988 perhaps the most acrimonious union strike in recent industry history, was initially and finally about. It was not about what were inflexibly referred to by both union and management as “the so-called creative issues”, nor was it exclusively about the complicated formulas and residuals that were the tokens on the board. It was about respect, and about whether the people who made the biggest money were or were not going to give a little to the people who made the less big money.
In other words, it was a class issue, which was hard for people outside the industry—who in the first place did not understand the essentially adversarial nature of the business (a good contract, it is understood in Hollywood, is one that ensures the other party’s breach) and in the second place believed everybody involved to be overpaid—to entirely understand. “Whose side does one take in such a war—that of the writers with their scads of money, or that of the producers with their tons of money?” the Washington Post’s television reporter, Tom Shales, demanded (as it turned out, rhetorically) in a June 29, 1988, piece arguing that the writers were “more interested in strutting and swaggering than in reaching a settlement”, that “a handful of hotheads” who failed to realize that “the salad days are over” were bringing down an industry beset by “dwindling” profits, and that the only effect of the strike was to crush “those in the lowest-paying jobs”, for example a waitress, laid off when Universal shut down its commissary, who Tom Shales perceived to be “not too thrilled with the writers and their grievances” when he saw her interviewed on a television newscast. (This was an example of what became known locally during the strike as “the little people argument”, and referred to the traditional practice among struck companies of firing their nonunion hostages. When hard times come to Hollywood, the typing pool goes first, and is understood to symbolize the need of the studio to “cut back”, or “slash costs”.) “Just because the producers are richer doesn’t mean the writers are right. Or righteous,” Tom Shales concluded. “These guys haven’t just seen too many Rambo movies, they’ve written too many Rambo movies.”
This piece, which reflected with rather impressive fidelity the arguments then being made by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the negotiating body for management, was typical of most coverage of the strike, and also of what had become, by early summer of 1988, the prevailing mood around town. Writers have never been much admired in Hollywood. In an industry predicated on social fluidity, on the daily calibration and reassessment of status and power, screenwriters, who perform a function that remains only dimly understood even by the people who hire them, occupy a notably static place: even the most successful of them have no real power, and therefore no real status. “I can always get a writer,” Ray Stark once told my husband, who had expressed a disinclination to join the team on a Stark picture for which he had been, Ray Stark had told him a few weeks before, “the only possible writer”.
Writers (even the only possible writers), it is universally believed, can always be replaced, which is why they are so frequently referred to in the plural. Writers, it is believed by many, are even best replaced, hired serially, since they bring, in this view, only a limited amount of talent and energy to bear on what directors often call their “vision”. A number of directors prefer to hire fresh writers—usually writers with whom they have previously worked—just before shooting: Sydney Pollack, no matter who wrote the picture he is directing, has the habit of hiring for the period just before and during production David Rayfiel or Elaine May or Kurt Luedtke. “I want it in the contract when David Rayfiel comes in,” a writer I know once said when he and Pollack were talking about doing a picture together; this was a practical but unappreciated approach.
The previous writer on a picture is typically described as “exhausted”, or “worn-out on this”. What is meant by “this” is the task at hand, which is seen as narrow and technical, one color in the larger vision, a matter of taking notes from a producer or an actor or a director, and adding dialogue—something, it is understood, that the producer or actor or director could do without a writer, if only he or she had the time, if only he or she were not required to keep that larger vision in focus. “I’ve got the ideas,” one frequently hears in the industry. “All I need is a writer.”
Such “ideas”, when explored, typically tend toward the general (“relationships between men and women”, say, or “rebel without a cause in the west Valley”), and the necessity for paying a writer to render such ideas specific remains a source of considerable resentment. Writers are generally seen as balky, obstacles to the forward flow of the project. They take time. They want money. They are typically the first element on a picture, the people whose job it is to invent a world sufficiently compelling to interest actors and directors, and, as the first element, they are often unwilling to recognize the necessity for keeping the front money down, for cutting their fees in order to get a project going. “Everyone”, they are told, is taking a cut (“everyone” in this instance generally means every one of the writers), yet they insist on “irresponsible” fees. A director who gets several million dollars a picture will often complain, quite bitterly, about being “held up” by the demands of his writers. “You’re haggling over pennies,” a director once complained to me.
This resentment surfaces most openly in contract negotiations (“We don’t give points to writers,” studio business-affairs lawyers will say in a negotiation, or, despite the fact that a writer has often delivered one or two drafts on the basis of a deal memo alone, “Our policy is no payment without a fully executed contract”), but in fact suffuses every aspect of life in the community. Writers do not get gross from dollar one, nor do they get the Thalberg Award, nor do they even determine when and where a meeting will take place: these are facts of local life known even to children. Writers who work regularly live comfortably, but not in the houses with the better N/S courts. Writers sometimes get to Paris on business, but rarely on the Concorde. Writers occasionally have lunch at Hillcrest, but only when their agents take them. Writers have at best a provisional relationship with the community in which they live, which is precisely what has made them, over the years, such convenient pariahs. “Fuck ‘em, they’re weaklings,” as one director I know said about the Guild.
As the strike wore on, then, a certain natural irritation, even a bellicosity, was bound to surface when the subject of the writers (or, as some put it, “the writers and their so-called demands”) came up, as was an impatience with the whole idea of collective bargaining. “If you’re good enough, you can negotiate your own contract,” I recall being told by one director. It was frequently suggested that the strike was supported only by those members of the Guild who were not full-time working writers. “A lot of them aren’t writers,” an Alliance spokesman told the Los Angeles Times. “They pay their one-hundred-dollar-a-year dues and get invitations to screenings.” A television producer suggested to me that perhaps the answer was “another guild,” one that would function, although he did not say this, as
a sweetheart union. “A guild for working writers,” he said. “That’s a guild we could negotiate with.”
I heard repeatedly during the strike that I, as a member of the Guild “but an intelligent person”, had surely failed to understand what “the leadership” of the Guild was doing to me; when I said that I did understand it, that I had lost three pictures during the course of the strike and would continue to vote against a settlement until certain money issues had been resolved, I was advised that such intransigence would lead nowhere, because “the producers won’t budge”, because “they’re united on this”, because “they’re going to just write off the Guild”, and because, an antic note, “they’re going to start hiring college kids —they’re even going to start hiring journalists”.
In this mounting enthusiasm to punish the industry’s own writers by replacing them “even” with journalists (“Why not air traffic controllers?” said a writer to whom I mentioned this threat), certain facts about the strike receded early into the mists of claim and counterclaim. Many people preferred to believe that, as Tom Shales summarized it, the producers had “offered increases”, and that the writers had “said they were not enough”. In fact the producers had offered, on the key points in the negotiation, rollbacks on a residual payment structure established in 1985, when the WGA contract had been last negotiated. Many people preferred to believe, as Tom Shales seemed to believe, that it was the writers, not the producers, who were refusing to negotiate. In fact the strike had been, from the Alliance’s “last and final offer” on March 6, 1988, until a federal mediator called both sides to meet on May 23, 1988, less a strike than a lockout, with the producers agreeing to attend only a single meeting, on April 8, which lasted twenty minutes before the Alliance negotiators walked out. “It looks like the writers are shooting the whole industry in the foot—and they’re doing it willfully and stupidly,” Grant Tinker, the television producer and former chairman of NBC, told the Los Angeles Times after the Guild rejected, by a vote of 2,789 to 933, the June version of the Alliance’s series of “last and final” offers. “It’s just pigheaded and stupid for the writers to have so badly misread what’s going on here.”
What was going on here was interesting. This had not been an industry unaccustomed to labor disputes, nor had it been one, plans to hire “journalists” notwithstanding, historically hospitable to outsiders. (“We don’t go for strangers in Hollywood,” Cecilia Brady said in The Last Tycoon; this remains the most succinct description I know of the picture business.) For reasons deep in the structure of the industry, writers’ strikes have been a fixed feature of local life, and gains earned by the writers have traditionally been passed on to the other unions—who themselves strike only rarely—in a fairly inflexible ratio: for every dollar in residuals the Writers Guild gets, another dollar goes to the Directors Guild, three dollars go to the Screen Actors Guild, and eight or nine dollars go to IATSE, the principal craft union, which needs the higher take because its pension and health benefits, unlike those of the other unions, are funded entirely from residuals. “So when the WGA negotiates for a dollar increase in residuals, say, the studios don’t think just a dollar, they think twelve or thirteen,” a former Guild president told me. “The industry is a kind of family, and its members are interdependent.”
Something new was at work, and it had to do with a changed attitude among the top executives. I recall being told, quite early in this strike, by someone who had been a studio head of production and had bargained for management in previous strikes, that this strike would be different, and in many ways unpredictable. The problem, he said, was the absence at the bargaining table of “a Lew Wasserman, an Arthur Krim”. Lew Wasserman, the chairman of MCA-Universal, it is said in the industry, was always looking for the solution; as he grew less active, Arthur Krim, at United Artists, and to a lesser extent Ted Ashley, at Warner Brothers, fulfilled this function, which was essentially that of the consigliere. “The guys who are running the studios now, they don’t deal,” he said. “Sid Sheinberg bargaining for Universal, Barry Diller for Fox, that’s ridiculous. They won’t even talk. As far as the Disney guys go, Eisner, Katzenberg, they play hardball, that’s the way they run their operation.”
Roger Fisher, the Williston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, suggested, in an analysis of the strike published in the Los Angeles Times, that what had been needed between management and labor in this case was “understanding, two-way communication, reliability, and acceptance”, the very qualities that natural selection in the motion picture industry had tended to eliminate. It was in fact June of 1988, three months into the strike, before the people running the studios actually entered the negotiating sessions, which they referred to, significantly, as “downtime”. “I talked to Diller, Mancuso, Daly,” I was told by one of the two or three most powerful agents in the industry. He meant Barry Diller at Twentieth Century-Fox and Frank Mancuso at Paramount and Robert Daly at Warner Brothers. “I said look, you guys, you want this thing settled, you better indicate you’re taking it seriously enough to put in the downtime yourselves. Sheinberg [Sidney Sheinberg of MCA-Universal] and Mancuso have kind of emerged as the point players for management, but you’ve got to remember, these guys are all prima donnas, they hate each other, so it was a big problem presenting a sufficiently united front to put somebody out there speaking for all of them.”
In the context of an industry traditionally organized, like a mob family, around principles of discretion and unity, this notion of the executive as prima donna was a new phenomenon, and not one tending toward an appreciation of the “interdependence” of unions and management. It did not work toward the settlement of this strike that the main players on one side of the negotiations were themselves regarded as stars, the subjects of fan profiles, pieces often written by people who admired and wanted to work in the industry. Michael Eisner of Disney had been on the cover of Time. Sidney Sheinberg of Universal had been on the cover of Manhattan, inc. Executive foibles had been detailed (Jeffrey Katzenberg of Disney “guzzled” Diet Coke, and “sold his Porsche after he almost killed himself trying to shift gears and dial at the same time”), as had, and this presented a problem, company profits and executive compensation. Nineteen eighty-seven net profit for Warner Communications was up 76.6 percent over 1986. Nineteen eighty-seven net profit for Paramount was up 130 percent over 1986. CBS was up 21 percent, ABC 53 percent. The chairman and CEO of Columbia, Victor Kaufman, received in 1987 $826,154 in salary and an additional $1,506,142 in stock options and bonuses. Michael Eisner was said to have received, including options and bonuses, a figure that ranged from $23 million (this was Disney’s own figure) to more than $80 million (this was what the number of shares involved in the stock options seemed to suggest), but was most often given as $63 million.
During a season when management was issuing white papers explaining the “new, colder realities facing the entertainment industry”, this last figure in particular had an energizing effect on the local consciousness, and was frequently mentioned in relation to another figure, that for the combined total received in residual payments by all nine thousand members of the Writers Guild. This figure was $58 million, which, against Michael Eisner’s $63, made it hard for many people to accept the notion that residual rollbacks were entirely imperative. Trust seemed lacking, as did a certain mutuality of interest. “We used to sit across the table from people we had personally worked with on movies,” I was told by a writer who had sat in on negotiating sessions during this and past strikes. “These people aren’t movie people. They think like their own business-affairs lawyers. You take somebody like Jeff Katzenberg, he has a very ideological position. He said the other night, ‘I’m speaking as a dedicated capitalist. I own this screenplay. So why should I hand anybody else the right to have any say about it?’ “
In June of 1988, three months into the strike, it
was said around Los Angeles that the strike was essentially over, because the producers said it was over, and that the only problem remaining was to find a way for the Guild negotiators to save face—”a bone”, as Jeffrey Katzenberg was said to be calling it, to throw the writers. “This has largely come down to a question of how Brian will look,” I was told that month by someone close to management. He was talking about Brian Walton, the Guild’s executive director and chief negotiator. “It’s a presentation problem, a question of giving him something he can present to the membership, after fifteen weeks, as something approaching win-win.” It was generally conceded that the producers, despite disavowals, were determined to break the union; even the disavowals, focusing as they did on the useful clerical work done by the Guild (“If the Guild didn’t exist we’d have to invent it,” Sidney Sheinberg said at one point), suggested that what the producers had in mind was less a union than a trade association. It was taken for granted that it was not the producers but the writers who, once the situation was correctly “presented”, would give in. “Let’s get this town back to work,” people were saying, and “This strike has to end.”
Still, this strike did not end. By late July, it was said around Los Angeles that the negotiations once again in progress were not really negotiations at all; that “they” were meeting only because a federal mediator had ordered them to meet, and that the time spent at the table was just that, time spent at a table, downtime. Twenty-one writers had announced their intention of working in spite of the strike, describing this decision as evidence of “the highest form of loyalty” to the Guild. “What’s it for?” people were saying, and “This is lose-lose.”
