The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (25 page)

Suddenly, the business had a realization that live television was really limiting profits severely, because if they put it on film, or tape, which had yet to exist, they had something to re-sell and re-sell and re-sell. So within a dramatic one-year period of time, New York closed up. . . . The twenty writers who were working in New York over those years sustaining the
Sid Caesar Show
, the
Bilko
show [aka
The Phil Silvers Show
], the [
Jackie
]
Gleason Show, The Colgate Comedy Hour
, all had to make a decision. What do they do? Do they uproot themselves? Do they move to California? How could they earn a living in New York? And finally seventeen of [the twenty of] us . . . [because] we had families and children to support, said we’d better go to California. Three men decided to stay behind and take a chance at writing a play. If it didn’t work, they would come. They figured they had enough money set aside or they were devout New Yorkers or the wife wouldn’t move. Whatever the reason, they stayed behind. And the three were Doc [Neil] Simon, Woody Allen, and Tony Webster.
⁷⁰

Some writers who were then trying to get into the industry found themselves caught off guard. Writing partners Richard Levinson and William Link, who together created
Columbo
and
Murder, She Wrote
, moved to New York, “only to discover that the migration of television to the West Coast had happened in our absences. The anthology was gone, eclipsed by the series. . . . If we wanted to continue writing for the medium we would have to move, like prime-time television itself, to California. A nice place to live, as Fred Allen said, if you happen to be an orange.”
⁷¹
The number of writing jobs in New York had also diminished substantially with the introduction of music formats at radio stations. Many series and serials that had been mainstays on radio were transitioning to the small screen—and their writers were moving with them.

In his history of television in the 1950s, William Boddy examines the replacement of the live primetime drama broadcast from New York by the Hollywood telefilm. That transition in formats, he explains was just one of many programming changes, which also included the shift of “anthology
programs to continuing-character series, and from the dramatic model of the legitimate theater to that of genre-based Hollywood entertainments.”
⁷²
The experience of B movie screenwriter and television writer Maurice Tombragel confirms Boddy’s assessment. As live shows were gradually phased out and the East Coast writers came west, the differences between the two branches of the Guild came into relief. “They had, in a sense, a better—maybe a little smaller but more . . . aggressive guild maybe than we had in the television area because, don’t forget, we were a kind of a little, poor-relation brother.”
⁷³
Television writers—those working on series as well as for news programs and daytime soaps—needed protections for short-term labor. These were issues that screenwriters, during the studio days, had never needed to worry about. The structure, deadlines, and style of writing for these media were vastly different. But while the two branches of the WGA conducted their labor negotiations separately, their collective bargaining agreements would now be published as a single document under the same contract cover.

All writers, no matter their genre, were highly attuned to their roles within the media hierarchy of this new guild. Screenwriter Edmund North described this awkward alliance: “I would not call it a shotgun marriage but I would call it a marriage of convenience and the birth pains were considerable. . . . The birth pains that I refer to are mostly psychological in origin and they sprang from a feeling . . . of the television writers of that period that screenwriters were looking down their noses at them and considering them upstarts rather than fellow craftsmen.”
⁷⁴
Whether or not these sentiments were spoken out loud, and they sometimes were, there was a hierarchy in place that had to do with age, experience, and a clear sense of the importance of film as an artistic medium in relation to television. To try to overcome this inherent tension, WGA members elected a council of eleven film members and eleven television members to discuss questions that emerged about how the Guild would support the disparate needs of its members. Television writers David Harmon and Nate Monaster, who were both on the board at the time, describe this uncomfortable partnership between unequal communities:

HARMON: We were the kid brother, as it were. . . . [T]he screenwriters would list credits that went back to the early ’30s. They were noble writers. We would list credits of things that were already off the air.

MONASTER:
Gone with the Wind
was a little more impressive than . . . I wrote
Duffy’s Tavern
.

HARMON: I did
Armstrong Circle Theater
. You don’t compare that with
Ben-Hur
.

MONASTER: The writing was probably as good but the budget for the chariots was more than the entire season of
Armstrong
. I think, we’re not being flip in making these contrasts. . . . In a way, [we were] victimized by our own propaganda. The word “screenwriter” had a ring like All-American Football Player or Nobel Prize. . . . [I] have no great recollection of being upstaged by any screenwriter. We were reading into it and probably were obnoxiously defensive.
⁷⁵

Harmon and Monaster exposed the psychological effects of what were, in fact, a number of professional differences. Writing for film and writing for television were decidedly different occupations. The contrast involved not just the length of a script or its format, but also job security. Most screenwriters were working under contracts, whereas television writers were primarily freelancers. Film writers were concerned about salaries, whereas television writers were most concerned about minimums for piecemeal work.
⁷⁶

And yet, as the years progressed, television flourished and writing jobs increased. With the rise of the Hollywood telefilm, writers—and the Writers Guild—began to see the substantial monetary and authorial benefits of television writing. Television writers were soon outvoting film writers within the Guild, and many screenwriters, especially those who had written B movies and genre films, were testing the waters of the telefilm.
⁷⁷
As the popularity of television grew, so did the number of hours stations stayed on the air. Content was desperately needed to satisfy a voracious viewership at just the time when Hollywood was cutting budgets and terminating screenwriters’ contracts.

Retrenchment, Reruns, Residuals, Royalties, and the 1960 Strike

BANKS: What do you love about writing?

ROBERT SCHILLER: Adulation.

—Interview, 12 January 2012

Toward the end of the 1950s, the number of writers on contract at the major studios was rapidly diminishing. The number of feature films released by the eight major distribution companies dropped from 263 in 1950 to 184 in 1960—and would sink to 151 by 1970.
⁷⁸
During the 1950s and into the 1960s screenwriters saw the end of the seven-year contract as the industry norm. The studios claimed that the vast expenses of innovations like 3-D and
widescreen systems like CinemaScope were to blame, technologies desperately embraced to distinguish movies from programs aired on the smaller home screen. In hindsight, the film studios shouldered this financial burden not just as a counter to television, but also in response to the end of vertical integration and the beginning of the end of the studio contract system.

Film studios—and therefore film writers—also saw this shift in the workspace as an opportunity to emphasize what made film unique. For a number of years, the film industry had been responding to the threat of television by providing audiences with epic stories, bigger (even deeper) images, and more adult themes. The US Supreme Court’s so-called Miracle Decision in 1952 marked the beginning of the end of the Production Code in Hollywood.
⁷⁹
Writers used the decision’s loosening of censorship rules to their advantage. John Michael Hayes, who wrote
Rear Window
and
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, commented on his use of risqué language and on how broaching adult topics played into the challenges and pleasures of writing. “We had censorship in those days. So, if I could do it and make it amusing enough, I could get away with it. I used to do that on radio, on shows like
The Adventures of Sam Spade
, by the time they figured out what I was really saying, it was too late to censor it. I think suggestion is better; I’d rather say things through a literary device . . . than just say it flat out. So much of my dialogue is indirect, with layers of meaning, sub-rosa meanings. It’s more challenging to write that way, and people remember the lines.”
⁸⁰
Other film writers used this kind of wit when dealing with serious topics as well, for example, Stanley Kubrick and Terry Southern’s transgressive, satiric script for
Dr. Strangelove
. For a number of years, the industry held on to audiences with content that could not play on the small screen.

In the meantime, as Christopher Anderson deftly explains in
Hollywood TV
, television was getting the assembly-line treatment in Hollywood. The major Hollywood studios started producing telefilms as well as selling off their film libraries to networks or production studios.
⁸¹
Jon Kraszewski discusses the shift from a focus on the dramatic writer (for example from a particular anthology episode) to the dramatic producer (of a long-running series).
⁸²
Very few writers had the opportunity to create series; most, as Stirling Silliphant noted, worked on a freelance basis. “Back in the fifties and sixties, thirty or so of us were writing eighty-five percent of primetime TV. I don’t know if I can explain why—it just WAS. I never stopped freelancing, even while I was writing
Naked City
and
Route 66
. The phones never stopped
ringing, and, because once I had a relationship with a given show or a given producer, I was lucky enough to be asked to deliver multiple episodes.”
⁸³
Writers who picked up the craft of television writing and excelled were paid well for their labor. By the late 1950s, almost all of filmed television employees in New York had closed shop and moved to Los Angeles.

Slowly, over the course of the 1950s, the power of television writers—both in numbers and in shifting needs—was altering the character of the Guild. For the first time, significant numbers of them were placed in a position of power and authority that few had ever imagined possible for practitioners of their craft. Writers who had hyphenate positions on series had significantly more creative control than screenwriters had ever had on film sets. Screenwriters had more cultural and financial capital, but their loss of rights of authorship gave television writers good reason to appreciate their lot.

While Jess Oppenheimer was originally misunderstood by the Guild, hyphenated writers like Oppenheimer, Gertrude Berg, Jack Webb (showrunner for
Dragnet
), and David Dortort taught screenwriters about new forms of power though dual, even triple roles. In this new, content-heavy medium, writer-producers soon became not just necessary but also valued. At first Lew Wasserman, chairman and CEO of Music Corporation of America (MCA), was sure that Dortort would be a total fiasco in his first role as a writer-producer for
The Restless Gun
: “What does a writer know about budget, what does a writer know about the discipline of coming in on time?”
⁸⁴
Ultimately, MCA realized who its real star was. The company fired the show’s lead actor but held on to Dortort, who was saving them money by filming two episodes a week. From a purely budgetary standpoint, Dortort’s next project for MCA in 1959 lived up to its name:
Bonanza
.

With the rise of the Hollywood telefilm, as well as the airing of motion pictures on television networks, screenwriters began to demand that compensation should be extended to cross-media exhibition, global exhibition, and the rerun. Starting in 1958 and into 1959, the studios looked to their vaults for what one reporter called “survival money.”
⁸⁵
Twentieth Century–Fox sold its pre-1948 films for $32 million to National Telefilm Associates, Paramount sold its pre-1948 films (750 in all) to MCA for $50 million, and Universal sold not just its archive of pre-1948 films for $20 million to Screen Gems but also its studio back lot for $10 million to MCA.
⁸⁶
Approximately 3,700 pre-1948 features films were sold or leased to television for a total of $220 million in revenue.
⁸⁷
These blanket deals
were a boon to television stations hungry for content, and they created a windfall of cash for the desperate studios. Without these deals, the trades asked, “How much worse financial shape might Universal have been in?”
⁸⁸
But none of the employees who worked on these films saw any money for the re-release of their work. With contract negotiations beginning in 1959, writers saw an opportunity to gain compensation for cross-media exhibition, not just nationally, but internationally as well. And they were determined to win rights over the films still to sell; accounts at the time estimated the value of the studios’ post-1948 pictures to be between $190 million (as calculated by the trades) and $500 million (as the WGA contended).
⁸⁹
When rights to these films extended to television, cable, Betamax, VHS, DVD, streaming, and Blu-ray in subsequent years, $500 million began to appear the more appropriate, perhaps even conservative, estimate of these films’ worth.

Television writers were also concerned about the re-airing of material and control of copyright overseas. Although they knew they could not own their scripts outright, they hoped for some compensation for each use of the material. This issue was a source of much frustration to writers at the time. Mel Tolkin, a writer on
Caesar’s Hour
and
All in the Family
, remembered seeing his work on television overseas: