The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (23 page)

In addition, there were significant differences between television production on the East Coast and production on the West Coast. Ernest Kinoy, who was president of WGA East from 1967 to 1969, saw greater polarization in television than in film production.
¹⁸
Los Angeles production was an outgrowth of the film industry, and there producers controlled decision making. Most series were filmed, only a few of them in front of live audiences. In contrast, New York television programs were produced live and were simultaneously recorded on kinescope (a film capture of a television monitor) for later airings. There the industry was rooted in the work of playwrights, radio writers, and news writers, who already understood the speed, structure, needs, and peculiarities of live production.

There were other differences, as well. Writers in New York had more control of talent. David Dortort, creator of
Bonanza
, took part in the casting process for the projects he wrote in New York. The actors who came to audition were all theatrically trained. Coming out of a theater model, where the playwright is celebrated as the author of the text, writers were expected—or allowed, depending on one’s perspective—to play a more active role in television production. As Dortort simply put it, “Writers were held in more respect in New York.”
¹⁹

The issue of authorial identity and reputation became a problem in television, particularly for writers on anthology series (the leading exemplars of which included
Playhouse 90
and
Philco Playhouse
). Certain writers began gaining acclaim in this milieu. Erna Lazarus highlighted what this kind of recognition meant to television writers: “Television brought the writer’s name into prominence. Suddenly people spoke of the Rod Serlings and the Paddy Chayefskys. . . . Prior to this nobody ever knew who wrote the screenplay. Never [knew] who wrote the picture. . . . But television did bring importance to the writer, and I don’t think we would have it today if there had never been television.”
²⁰
But as Jon Kraszewski explains, the networks and advertising agencies were disinclined to promote the names of writers or highlight their identities because television writers at that time were not under exclusive contracts with the studios.
²¹
Writers were employees, and the studios, as the owners of their
writers’ words, vied for copyright control, redefining themselves as the authors of the television text.

Television was not as profitable for writers as film had been, but the probability of getting hired for repeat business was much greater. In 1952, the federal Wage Stabilization Board set the minimum salary for writers working for independent producers at $250 a week, which was made retroactive to work starting in April 1951.
²²
The board also set prices for first use, exclusive use, and reuse (via kinescope recordings) of live television stories.
²³
Signatories to the Wage Stabilization Board had exclusive use of content for up to sixteen years, as long as they used it originally and continued to reuse it. Writers would also get paid if a character they created for one series became a central character in another series. Mary McCall Jr., president of the SWG, declared to the membership in a memo, “We are determined that writers in this new medium shall retain the creators’ rights in the work of their brains and shall continue to profit from the continuing use of those works in all media forever.”
²⁴

It is difficult to compare salaries for film and television writers at the time, since a television script may be two to four times shorter than a film script. But to get some sense of the numbers, pay for live television writing was noted as approximately one-sixth of theatrical scale, with minimum compensation for a television script set at $500, and minimum for a motion picture at $3,000. Two rewrites of any script were expected as gratis unless a writer had been contractually guaranteed a better deal.
²⁵
The Independent Motion Picture Producers Association had flat fees for film writers: $2,000 (up from $1,500) for pictures budgeted under $100,000, and $3,000 (up from $2,250) for pictures over $100,000.
²⁶
Producers paid writers of telefilms (filmed television series) between $650 and $750, but writers complained that they were often spending up to three weeks in script conferences and hammering out rewrites without any additional payment. In comparison, top radio writers at the time, who often worked freelance, were paid between $400 and $450 per radio script.
²⁷

The SWG saw television’s potential for profit, but many members were more focused on the medium’s impact on film writers, the film industry, and writers’ profits. Karl Tunberg, who adapted
Ben-Hur
and who was president of the WGAw from 1950 to 1951, remembered that a number of elite film writers wished to reject any sort of professional alliance with their small-screen brethren. He and his fellow film writers suggested a calculated
compromise: “We felt we had to adopt this monster; otherwise it would come in and murder us. . . . [Although it] would not raise the standards of the craft, nor our intelligence, nor education; we needed them for two reasons: one, because we’ve got to have access into their business and two, each one of them is a potential strikebreaker.”
²⁸

The Battle for Jurisdiction

Television was viewed by many screenwriters, playwrights, and radio writers as an inviting and lucrative new space for their creative labor. The popular genres and commercial structure used in early television derived almost wholesale from the radio program model. The live audiences reminded playwrights of the stage. The combination of sound with illuminated images on a screen made television an obvious counterpart to film. Furthermore, television was desperate for stories—and writers. Historian William Boddy quotes the manager of NBC’s script department in 1948: “Television’s primary need is for material, and the one who provides that material in a suitable form may be said to be one of the most important, if not
the
most important, person in the television picture—the writer.”
²⁹

Writers who worked in live television during its first decade speak of accidents, the brutality of the work schedule, the slapdash style of writing in groups, and the pleasures of crafting material to be performed in front of a live audience. Robert Schiller, writer on
I Love Lucy, All in the Family
, and
Maude
, embraced the actors’ occasional slips and falls: “It was immediate. No turning back. I liked that. Thrilling.”
³⁰
For Leonard Stern, who wrote on
The Honeymooners
and
Get Smart
, “Live television was exhilarating. There’s nothing comparable.
The Gleason Show
was opening night every week and 3,500 people [were] in the audience. So you have got to realize, when you got a laugh, you got a
laugh
. And all of us there knew each other. There were only about twenty comedy writers. And if we didn’t personally know each other, we certainly knew of each other.”
³¹
Writers were feeding on the energy, but they were also living an untenable lifestyle. Norman Lear, who worked on
The Colgate Comedy Hour
and
The Martha Raye Show
during those early years, remembered the impossible pace: “We were all last-minute writers. . . . [We wrote] a book musical every two weeks, and I’d work until two o’clock in the morning, sleep for three hours, get up at five, be at the mimeograph—a word you may not know—at seven, page by page coming off
the machine, for rehearsal that started at ten, and I was directing. So there was a pharmacy . . . where we used to get our Seconal to sleep and our Dexedrine to stay awake. No prescription or anything. Every writer I knew was taking something to help sleep, something to wake up.”
³²
Though many memoirs celebrate the storied writers’ room on
Your Show of Shows
, Carl Reiner, who acted on the series and later wrote sketches, disputed the term
room
. He remembered a stairwell: “The writers’ room in the old days was Max Liebman’s office. He used to leave and we used to hang around. Until [the writers] got their own room, they used to go into the landing between the stories. Or into the toilet.”
³³
This was a medium in its infancy and many writers fell in love with the speed of the production schedule, the exponentially growing audiences, and the inventiveness and adventures of creating a new form of entertainment.

The guilds soon realized that jurisdictional control of the new medium would be critical to their future as stakeholders in the American arts and entertainment industry. An extraordinary potential for revenue and power was at stake. The various guilds that covered writers had had complicated relations before 1950, and television now had the potential either to destroy inter-guild relations or—as luck would finally have it—to bring them together.

The Dramatists Guild argued that motion photography of a live television series was the equivalent of broadcasting a staged production. That argument persuaded some other guild leaders—at least until telefilm took over as the dominant form. At the first National Television Conference in 1951, the Dramatists Guild gained temporary jurisdiction over live and filmed television on the West Coast. Many young writers maintained simultaneous careers in the theater and in television anthology series, including Paddy Chayefsky on the
The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse
and Reginald Rose on
Studio One
.

The SWG had viewed television first as a curiosity, then as a potent rival for film audiences; but unlike the major Hollywood moguls, who refused for many years to see television as anything other than a threat, SWG leaders decided it would be better policy to fold in the writers in this new medium. Guild writers knew about story, they knew about moving pictures, and they genuinely believed their union was best positioned to represent television writers. Although very few filmed series existed in 1949 (that year,
Fireside Theater
was the first), the SWG was now, five years after Kanin introduced the medium to the union, determined to control television.

The SWG’s resolve was based partly upon an overarching concern for wider control during a historic moment when the Guild and its members were still under attack for leftist leanings. The case of Reuben Ship was only making matters worse. As a radio writer on
The Life of Riley
, he had not yet been granted membership in the SWG, but officially he was a dues-paying member. After HUAC declared Ship an unfriendly witness, US immigration officials had him deported to his native Canada. He had not been declared a communist, just an “undesirable alien.”
³⁴
Roy Brewer, president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, asked, “If Reuben Ship, identified communist, is not good enough for the USA, why is he good enough for the SWG?”
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Publisher William Wilkerson used the story as a basis for further attacks against the SWG in the
Hollywood Reporter
: “Many members of the SWG honestly feel the red danger is over. Are they aware of the infiltration into SWG of communists today through television?”
³⁶

Ronald Reagan, then the head of the Screen Actors Guild, favored the Motion Picture Industry Council’s call for a loyalty board. SWG opinion was split on the matter. President Mary McCall Jr. stated that she was “violently opposed to Communists” but that she rejected the loyalty board because it “sets up a blacklist by inference.”
³⁷
Among workers in Hollywood, only the art directors and writers were collectively opposed to a loyalty board. Some writers believed that the only way they could improve their lot was to acquiesce to the MPIC’s wishes. Virginia Kellogg, who wrote
White Heat
and
Caged
, warned, “If we, out of the twelve guilds, reject this plan, we will, in the public eye, remain red writers.”
³⁸

Whatever the climate among motion picture writers, the Radio Writers Guild was not ready to back down from its belief that it was the ideal guild to represent television writers. In fact, many of the first television writers had been members of the RWG, especially those who were working in television news and comedy and variety shows. They had always written for live broadcast. Moreover, the RWG was accustomed to building contracts with the networks and sponsors that included both staff and freelance writers. It approached the battle for jurisdiction with calculated fervor. The RWG encouraged its membership to learn more about television by providing updates on the market for freelancers in its monthly bulletin, recommending script registration, publishing an annual report of credits for television series, establishing a grievance committee, providing advice on contracts, and offering a series of craft seminars.
³⁹
The RWG told its members, “Since
the day it was founded, your Guild has existed purely to serve its membership. Whether in Radio or Television, service to writers will continue to be its principal purpose.”
⁴⁰
In a tactical move, the RWG turned to the National Labor Relations Board for certification as the sole bargaining agent for all television writers.

But radio writers were also in turmoil. They were facing scrutiny by political conservatives from without and within, and they were struggling to define the territory of their work, given the speed with which American radio listeners were evolving into television audiences. In 1950, the rightwing journal
Counterattack
published
Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television
, which named 151 radio and television writers, journalists, actors, and other creative contributors it suspected were leftist subversives. Two years later, the US Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security released a 126-page report accusing more than thirty RWG writers, by name, of being “Communists or pro-Communists.”
⁴¹
Though the number of blacklisted radio writers was few compared with the hundreds under attack in film, writers involved in narrative series were rapidly leaving radio. Sam Moore, who wrote for the radio version of
The Great Gildersleeve
and was founder and vice president of the RWG, recalled: “About 1950, ’51, ’52 radio began to die and that was the end of it. Nothing could be done. Television was taking over and radio was through. And the Guild situation began to reflect this. The Radio Writers Guild had accomplished most of the major objectives. They had staff contracts all around. They had minimum basic agreements for freelance writers everywhere—in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. Everything was down to a routine of renegotiation. And [then] television came along.”
⁴²
Seeing its imminent defeat, the RWG ultimately withdrew its petition to the NLRB. It would have to join forces with the other guilds to survive.