The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (24 page)

The jurisdictional fight came to a head in the summer of 1952 over the issue of ownership of television content. When the Authors League of America (ALA) and the SWG called a strike against the Alliance of Television Film Producers in Hollywood, the RWG followed suit. In all, 6,000 professional writers went out on strike to demand ownership of television copyrights in the way that playwrights had control over their material, rather than the way film writers were credited but did not own their work. ALA president Rex Stout explained the significance of this strike: “Television is already a major source of income to many members of the League, and it is quite possible that before many years it may become the largest single
source. It is of vital importance to all writers to establish in television practice the principle that a writer owns what he writes and that therefore he may properly claim the profits and privileges of that ownership. If that principle is not established in television now, it may never be, and the resultant loss for writers both of today and tomorrow will be incalculable.”
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Television studios, sponsors, and networks knew the financial stakes as well and were willing to outlast the writers. They argued that the precedent for studio and sponsor ownership of programs had already been set. Many television writers who belonged to the RWG were ready to give in. In August, Richard Powell, then the pro tem head of the television writers within the RWG, advised that “no adequate remedy for the adjudication of TV writers—both live and film—exists within the confines of the ALA.”
⁴⁴
Television writers were increasingly interested in forming their own labor group. Robert White, who wrote for
The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show
and later
Guiding Light
, did his homework while his new guild, the Television Writers Association, got its bearings. “I started out by getting a hold of every labor constitution I could find, of all the unions—the printers, the teamsters—anybody[’s] I could get my hands on and . . . if you look at a TWA constitution I think it’s the most democratic labor union constitution that’s ever been written in the country. It was every, everything—all power went to the membership. The Board simply carried out the wishes of the membership in between very frequent membership meetings.”
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Arguably, this structure was made possible because the TWA was still a very small group.
⁴⁶

Although officially the TWA was not required to strike, its members voted as a group to support the strike, in part to respond to the fears of the SWG that they would act as non-union replacements. In explaining their support of the strike, TWA members were careful to note that “neither the Screen Writers Guild nor any other existing union or guild is a true representative of a majority of television writers in the field.” Members had “agreed to withhold material from struck producers” because the “idea of violating picket lines, physical or moral, of any writers is abhorrent.”
⁴⁷
Though the TWA walked out, members of the SWG were still concerned that producers would exploit this two-union system.

After fourteen grueling weeks, with little to show for their efforts, the writers broke off their strike. It was at this point that the National Labor Relations Board stepped in to mediate. Between 1952 and 1953, the NLRB oversaw fifty-seven arbitrations between film writers and producers and
thirteen arbitrations mediating ownership of telefilms.
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In the meantime, SWG president Mary McCall Jr. went so far as to call the network pact her guild had signed with live television writers in October 1952 “the most forward-looking contract ever negotiated in the history of writers organizations,” while simultaneously declaring that the TWA was a “little group of impatient finks whose loyalties are not to writers but to a fanatic political party.”
⁴⁹
The studios agreed that writers of one-time shows and anthology series would lease their scripts to the producers for television use over a period of seven years. For added compensation, writers could lease radio and sequel rights to a studio for a fixed time period, after which rights would revert to the writer.
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But with the NLRB case moving forward, the SWG’s control was tenuous at best. After a hearing during the spring of 1953, the NLRB presented television writers with an election, asking them to vote by secret ballot for the guild they preferred to join. That summer, the Television Writers of America was declared the winner.

SWG leaders were not willing to back away from the overall battle for television jurisdiction. The Guild published a full-page ad in the trade papers declaring that the NLRB election did not pertain to most television writing because the SWG and ALA already had collective bargaining agreements with 90 percent of active telefilm production companies in Los Angeles and New York, with independent producers of live packaged programs, and with staff writers at all of the networks. The SWG and ALA reminded writers, “
you do not have to be a member of TWA until
TWA negotiates contracts with these employers,
and unless
such contracts contain a Union Shop clause requiring membership in TWA as a condition of employment.”
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In November 1953, the SWG boasted of thirty-six new full members, twenty-four of them from television, and thirty-five new associate members, fourteen from television.
⁵²

In its twentieth anniversary year, the SWG was anxious to demonstrate its relevance, in part by looking past its struggles with HUAC, right-wing politicians, and industry moguls. A puff piece by SWG president Richard L. Breen interpreted its role during the difficult years of the late 1940s with a breezy tone that placed blame on the studios rather than on the Guild for any communist members among its ranks.

The Guild next turned its attention to a necessary cleaning of its own house. . . . The great majority of SWG members had long been
disgusted with the maneuverings of a Communist or Communist-inclined minority. The majority, moreover, was increasingly alarmed at the way the best interests of writers were being shunted aside for the furtherance of the minority’s political and ideological purposes. A Guild or Union does not choose its membership, a fact little understood, and sometimes it seems deliberately misunderstood, outside the Industry. A Guild is not a private club with the luxury of the blackball. Under law, it is and must be open to all who meet the working qualifications for membership. Actually, the employers choose the Guild’s members.
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Despite this attempt to move on, the issue of requiring loyalty oaths was still a contested topic among SWG members. Less than a week before he was elected as the Guild’s new president, F. Hugh Herbert, who wrote
The Moon Is Blue
, was reported to have said that “while he will sign all non-Commie pledges required by law he is still philosophically opposed to them” and that “I do not believe that loyalty can be attested by a signature on a dotted line. By the same token, I would resist any attempt to impose on the SWG the function of screening its members for political or other affiliations.” Herbert’s opponent, Ranald MacDougall, on the other hand, stated that he “favored ratification of a legally feasible non-Commie oath for writers.”
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The TWA was simultaneously under attack from the right and from its left-leaning members. Actor and producer Dick Powell, who signed the Taft-Hartley anticommunist oath, petitioned the TWA not to bankrupt the union by expelling writers for the sake of pleasing the right. He said that “offering basically the same service as professional blacklisters, unsolicited and free of charge . . . seems to be straining the traditional function of a trade union” and that “attempts to legislate unity of thought are in themselves destructive of true unity.”
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Film and television writers were still trying to understand one another, especially in the midst of the blacklist. Unity was increasingly part of the language the TWA employed, in part because it saw its own membership losing faith in the union’s capacity to lead. Even though the TWA had won the election, it was losing the hearts and dues of its members.

Soon after TWA won its certification election, the National Labor Relations Board dismissed a TWA petition to bargain collectively on behalf of the writers at Desilu Productions.
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Since Jess Oppenheimer was a
producer-executive and therefore not qualified to speak for his writer-employees, Desilu did not have to recognize the TWA. The future looked dim for the new union. As Charles Isaacs remembers, “Since we were neither backed by Communists, nor were we backed by anyone else either, we were barely able to pay the rent on our tiny office or even our typewriter, which was also rented. The long fight had taken its toll.”
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Many of the writers who had founded the TWA or had served in its leadership began to defect to the SWG, including Isaacs, Oppenheimer, John Fenton Murray (later a writer on
McHale’s Navy
), Benedict Freedman (writer on
The Red Skelton Hour
), regional vice president Irve Tunick (later a writer on
East Side/West Side
), national president Arthur Stander (writer on
Make Room for Daddy
), and ten members of TWA’s East Coast office. Robert White mourned, “We ran out of money. We ran out of strength. We couldn’t hold on. TWA went out of existence. . . . It simply withered away. TWA was gone.”
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In 1954, after years of rancor, screenwriters finally came to see what each of the other associations had also come to realize: television was already too big to be simply folded into an existing writers’ union. At the same time, there was a great deal of overlap in membership. Of the 1,200 members of the SWG, 503 had written for television.
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If the SWG wanted television, it would have to agree to a merger that would serve not just film writers but television and radio writers as well. Hy Freedman, writer on
You Bet Your Life
, wanted it on the record that no one union had won out over the others: “TWA didn’t collapse. TWA forced screenwriters to come into a guild together. That’s what happened. It was an amalgamation actually of the three guilds. While we were in TWA we were also still members of our Radio Writers Guild. So it forced the amalgamation of the Screen Writers, the TWA, and Radio Writers. So we didn’t lose any more than screenwriters lost.”
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The SWG devised a merger that allowed all parties to save face and declare victory. The alliance was announced in the entertainment trades in 1954: writers in the fields of motion pictures, radio, and television—previously represented by separate organizations—would all be under the jurisdictional umbrella of the newly formed Writers Guild of America. The Screen Writers Guild and the Radio Writers Guild would separate from the Authors League as part of the new merger.
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The writers filed a petition for certification with the NLRB to become the Writers Guild of America, with separate branches for the West and East.

On October 30, the new guild issued its first bulletin under the masthead of the Writers Guild of America.
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In November 1954, the two branches
of the WGA began negotiating on a national scale on behalf of approximately 1,000 screenwriters, 800 television writers (400 on each coast), and 700 radio writers (400 on the East Coast, 300 on the West Coast).
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Writers saw the advantage of being a part of one guild that had history and experience with negotiations—but they needed a new title.
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Current contracts that were previously held by the SWG, the RWG, and the TWA were all organized separately but under the umbrella of the WGA. Film and television maintained separate minimum basic agreements with unique boards and officers until the early 1970s.

The resources that each writers group brought to the union varied widely. The Radio Writers Guild was penniless, with $32 in its coffers and a deficit of $2,980.
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The TWA had exhausted its funds.
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The SWG leaders were willing to take on these insolvent groups, but they were not altruistic. When the Screen Writers Guild dissolved and became the Writers Guild of America, the SWG’s reserves of $135,000 were placed into a newly established Writers Guild Foundation, so that radio and television writers could not profit from screenwriters’ previously pooled membership dues.
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In other words, the SWG had found a way to start off this new guild penniless as well. Its members would hold on to their own funds through the foundation while taking full advantage of their new partners’ earning potential.

At the time the new union was formed, it made some logical sense to create two branches. Writers were assigned to the East or West branch according to their location of employment in relation to the Mississippi River; a writer who worked on the other coast for a significant period of time was expected to switch affiliations. East members were primarily radio and television writers working in live broadcasting, whereas West members were primarily film writers and telefilm writers. Tensions between the two branches of the Guild, as well as between film and television writers were evident from the moment the new guild was founded. Regional writers’ needs from their union varied greatly. Ernest Kinoy remembers that the tensions “certainly got more obvious as television developed because the difference between what was going on in the East and what was going on in the West in terms of the industry became marked.”
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He argued that writers for comedy variety series—whether they were based in the East or West—had more in common with each other than with the “continuity” scripters on fiction series, who were salaried weekly employees, or with the hourly wage earners who worked in news writing.
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Film writers were almost all based in Hollywood, and television writers were almost evenly split between the coasts. But as filmed television became the norm, many television writers based in New York began moving west. Leonard Stern recalled: