The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (22 page)

In October 1952, SWG leaders hosted an informal meeting with the heads of the TWA and the RWG, hoping yet again to persuade the TWA to withdraw
its application to the NLRB. It didn’t work. The television writers instead used the occasion to issue a list of non-negotiable conditions. Oppenheimer, as the head of the committee on objectives, presented the following principles:

▪
No blacklist for reasons of race, creed, color, sex, or political beliefs or associations.

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All negotiations for television writers to be conducted by a representative committee, elected by and responsible to a majority vote.

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Complete ownership of material by the television writer.

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Payment [by producers] for first-use of material. Payment for each re-use.

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Ownership-participation in series by writer who has contributed all or part of the format of characters used.

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No speculative writing.

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Full payment for audition or pilot film scripts.

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Limitation on re-writes. Original author shall have exclusive right to revise his own material.

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Limitation on time for consideration of freelance scripts.

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Credits for writers on a show on a guild-established procedure.

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Arbitration machinery for the settlement of disputes.
¹⁰

With this list, television writers identified outstanding issues on which the SWG had failed film writers, most notably blacklisting and ownership, and they expected the TWA to do better by them.

Two years after the premiere of
I Love Lucy
, with his show garnering the top television ratings, Jess Oppenheimer was called to testify before the NLRB at the instigation of the SWG. Testimony that day related to Oppenheimer’s disparate roles as a producer working for Desilu Productions, as vice president of the TWA, and as head writer of
Lucy
. The attorney for the SWG insisted that Oppenheimer, as a prestigious producer and an employer of writers, had exercised unfair influence in recruiting his two writers, Madeline Pugh and Bob Carroll Jr., to join the TWA.
¹¹
That Oppenheimer was also a dues-paying member of the SWG was of no consequence. His privilege as a producer and employer overshadowed his claim as a writer.

It seems difficult today to understand why this brilliant and talented writer on a meteoric rise to the top of this newly formed media industry posed such a threat to his fellow screenwriters. One reason is that Oppenheimer had created a television series so popular that it kept audiences at home
watching
Lucy
instead of heading out to the movies. In 1953, the big studios faced significant obstacles: the 1948 Paramount Decree was forcing the studios to divest themselves of their theater chains; the seven-year contracts for all above-the-line talent were tying up key financial resources; and film audiences were dwindling at the larger city movie houses. The studios, and their employees, were anxious to stop this financial hemorrhaging. Oppenheimer
and the TWA were easier to attack than the more diffuse troubles the film industry faced.

IMAGE 17   Madeline Pugh, writer for
I Love Lucy
, with producers and stars of the series, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, c. 1953.

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

But something else about Oppenheimer that made him a concern for screenwriters: he was both a writer
and
a producer. The SWG was in the business of representing writers in negotiations and disputes with the studios, and their chief opponents were producers. Screenwriters had battled fake, studio-backed unions before, including the Screen Playwrights, and they were wary of any representative that could be aligned with management. It is not surprising, then, that after twenty years of battling with studio producers, the Screen Writers Guild leaders could not fathom the notion that an upstart writer-producer forming a new union could be good for their constituents.

While Oppenheimer was among the first writer-producers in the industry, there had been other kinds of hyphenates that had not provoked the ire of the Guild, including Ernst Lubitsch and John Huston. Writerproducer-director Billy Wilder ruled a rowdy writers table in the studio lunchroom. Dore Schary and Phillip Dunne, among others, were active members of the SWG and became producers without having to renounce their membership. Schary even rose to the stature of studio head at MGM. When Dunne became a producer at Twentieth Century–Fox, he contacted the SWG to say that he would rarely, if ever, supervise the work of other writers in his role as a producer, but he did ask for clarification: “Does my new status in any way affect my membership in the Guild? Are there any special dues and obligations I incur in this situation? Must I, for instance, grow a mustache like [former SWG and current AMPAS president] Charlie Brackett’s?” The SWG assured him that being a writer-producer did not affect an individual’s membership.
¹²
Dunne struggled with this hyphenated role: “even the writer-producer is not completely free. He is still, however glorified, an employee, subject to the directions, and, in some cases, the apparent lunacies, of the studio executives. His chain may have become a mere web of gossamer, but he is still caught.”
¹³
What was unique about hyphenates in television was that this new position was quickly becoming the rule rather than the exception.

A writer-producer of a television series, especially in the early days of television, would also quite often be the creator of the series. A creator provides the original story, builds a story world that the show’s cast inhabits, and often has a continuing role as head writer-producer.
This head writer is, at best, a benevolent dictator who oversees the consistency of voice from episode to episode, runs the writers’ room, works on set with the director, actors, cinematographer, and designers to ensure that the words on the page translate to the screen, and often sits in the editing room. Stanley Rubin, writer and producer on
Your Show Time
, explains: “In television, the power lies not in the field of direction but in the field of producing. The producer or the writer-producer in television is the strongest individual on a show. He’s the one who’s there from start to finish. He provides the continuity to a show. Not the actors and not the director. Not even the individual writer on an individual episode but the writer-producer or producer on a series. He’s the one that the network wants to know about first. When it buys a series, the network says who’s going to produce it.”
¹⁴

In both film and television, the writer-producer hyphenate straddles territory that is difficult to define in terms of labor rules. While a hyphenated writer-producer for film might work in different capacities from film to film, the hyphenated role for television usually remains consistent for many years, as in the case of serialized television series. Gertrude Berg embodied the hyphenate as a true television pioneer: she was a writer, producer, and actor on
The Goldbergs
. Unquestionably, she was a showrunner forty years before the term was conceived.

The SWG desperately wanted to control this new medium, but the Guild’s leaders did not yet understand what television was, what its writers’ needs were, or how television writers as members could expand the reach of the Guild. They focused narrowly on the danger of producers becoming writers, overlooking the fact that the vast majority of these hyphenates saw themselves as writers first. But in just a few years, the Guild’s perceived threat—the television writer-producer—became its most powerful asset. By 1960, film and television writers were walking the picket lines together, a display of unity and determination that, arguably, has never manifested itself so purely again. And the Guild negotiated its biggest wins. Writers gained the right to a fixed percentage from the studios’ royalties and, later, won residuals on television reruns and on the broadcasting of cinematic films on television. They also secured health and pension benefits for writers working for signatory companies.

This chapter traces this critical era of transition, from the earliest days of television, to the battle over the jurisdiction of television writing, to the
formation of the Writers Guild of America, East and West branches, and to the 1960 WGA strike and its aftermath. Though at first this brokered writers union was an uncomfortable marriage of convenience, by the mid-1960s, the members’ alliance—and their solidarity—emerged as a powerful labor force and defined the Writers Guild of America as the strongest voice for creative workers within American media industries. And by the end of this era, the voices of television writers dominated the Writers Guild.

The Coming of Television

I said, “How much will you pay me?” [And Paramount producer Y. Frank Freeman] said, “Oh, nobody has ever written a television show before. We have no idea what to pay you. . . . Maybe three years from now when the salaries are established, we will pay you the highest salary going for that kind of writing.” I said, “Fine, you will get the script in exactly three years.”

—
The Writer Speaks: Mel Shavelson
(three-time president of the WGAw), 1996

In 1944 the appeal of the little screen was simply its novelty. When Michael Kanin first saw a television set that year, he wasn’t exactly clear about what it was or what it would become, but he was sure that he had see something significant:

One day a friend took me to someone’s house. . . . They took us into the back room where in a corner was a box. On the box was a picture. That was the first time I had ever seen a television set. The programming at that time was all very experimental and cursory. There were no regular programs of any kind. But I stared at this damned thing and it fascinated me because there it was: the future before my eyes. And it was so obvious that it had to be an important thing. The following night there was a Screen Writers Guild board meeting. . . . When the subject of New Business arose, I raised my hand and I told them of this experience . . . and I said, “You know, I don’t claim to be a prophet but obviously anybody can see that this is going to be a new development of great importance to all of us and I suggest that we investigate it.” And I don’t know why that touched the funny-bone, but there was a
big, big laugh. But at any rate, as a kind of half-joke, I suppose, I was appointed a committee of one to investigate television.
¹⁵

While its aesthetics were inchoate, Kanin and others saw the possibility of a medium that would broadcast image and sound into homes as professionally and economically exciting. Realizing that other guilds were interested in studying television, Kanin began talking with them. What emerged was the Affiliated Committee for Television, a coalition of fifteen guilds and unions in Hollywood—including writers, directors, cartoonists, and cameramen—all working together to “investigate television.”
¹⁶
The committee also collaborated with professors at UCLA to develop a curriculum for teaching the technical aspects of television to students who wanted to master the new trade.

These film workers were not altruistic in their pursuit of information about television. They were hoping, as one journalist reported, to harness television to the needs of the motion picture industry. They claimed that “the coming of television has reduced the unemployment problem to a remnant of what it was. . . . Television film production affords a picture professional work of the kind he knows how to do when he can’t find it in the studios; for less money, to be sure, but work. . . . Bit by bit, evidence piles up to indicate . . . that television’s ultimate place . . . will be one of an advertising medium and training school, maybe a proving ground, experimental laboratory. Could be a pretty good thing.”
¹⁷
But much to Hollywood’s dismay, television was not going to slow its pace in order for film practitioners—never mind the film studios—to keep the medium under its control. Soon this device moved beyond the experimental stage to become a legitimate commercial medium. It beamed its mercurial pictures into American homes with tinny jingles as exuberant actors peddled products to anyone listening. The small screen was rapidly becoming a big medium, and with such wealthy corporations behind it, from radio networks to national product sponsors, television was a powerful new force in entertainment. The question not yet answered for writers was how television would transform their craft.

Even in its earliest iterations, television desperately needed writers. Young hopefuls flocked to television writing positions, and television studios and their deep-pocketed sponsors attracted some exceptional talent from the New York stage and vaudeville. Among the new challenges for the guilds in organizing television writers, first and foremost was basic geography.
Television writers were scattered across studios, agencies, networks, and independent production houses primarily in, but not restricted to, New York and Los Angeles. In an age of telegrams and postal mail, any attempt to organize this group would not be easy.