The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (27 page)

The negotiating committee in 1959 was eager to set up a royalty system, in part because it would ensure that every showing in every country would deliver a payment. Kay Lenard (
The Cimarron Kid, Father Knows Best, Combat!
) lamented the committee’s focus on the royalty structure at the expense of a system that could provide income from series that were not long-lived: “The negotiating committee was willing to give up a great deal for the illusion of being paid from every country where American television was shown. And in the three years between 1960 and 1963 we found out that what the producers had given us was a big goose egg.”
¹¹⁵
Royalties were ultimately written into the contract in 1960, but by 1966, frustrated writers turned to a residual system of compensation.

As the strike wore on, writers and management realized that they would have to relent on some key issues in order to reach consensus. Screenwriters conceded compensation for their pre-1960 films in order to receive a lump sum to establish a pension plan and a health plan. This sacrifice by older writers to give up their chance at getting royalties in order to guarantee the rights of current writers was an extraordinary act for the greater good of the Guild membership. William Ludwig explained what this provision meant for writers like him. “In 1960, I had thirty-eight feature credits. We threw all of our pictures into the pot in order to get the $600,000 to start the pension plan and that was the grandfather clause. We begged—I remember Jim Webb [writer of
Cape Fear
and
How the West Was Won
] begged the membership to make it a contributory plan because it would have almost doubled their potential pensions and the membership . . . said, ‘To hell with it. Why should we put in any of our money? Let the goddamn producers put it in,’ and they voted down the contributory plan.”
¹¹⁶
John Bright expressed his frustration with the sacrifice: “I have no participation in residuals because all of my pictures were pre-1948 and I feel, and I still feel very strongly, that that contract should have begun—should have been rolled back to the beginning of talking pictures because there isn’t a night goes by that one of my pictures is not shown on television and I get nothing.”
¹¹⁷
While writers still working
would now get percentages of profits, all that former writers could expect was a guaranteed pension and health plan based on their credits and past work in the industry.

Another impasse concerned the role of pay TV. Charles Boren, vice president of the Alliance of Motion Picture Producers, argued that the WGA should accept the same deal agreed to by the SAG, that theatrical exhibition would include any form of distribution on the as yet barely developed model of pay TV. But WGA members held their ground: “The writers’ position is that pay-TV may be the biggest thing to hit the industry in years, with single movies bringing in fantastic revenue.”
¹¹⁸

After five months of wrangling and work stoppages, the strike ended. Film writers established a three-and-a-half-year contract, and television writers signed a six-year contract. The independent production houses and producers that had made deals beforehand and were able to continue employing writers during the strike, now had the opportunity to sign on to the same deal the major studio signatories had brokered. Sadly for the writers, the agreement with the majors was worse financially for them.

Film writers saw an increase in salaries through the minimum basic agreement (MBA); 2 percent of proceeds from sales of films to television within the next six years would go to writers; and the signatories set up pension and welfare plans, with producers contributing the equivalent of 5 percent of writers’ salaries (up to $100,000) per picture. Producers also agreed to put a one-time sum of $600,000 into the pension and welfare fund in lieu of residuals for pre-1960 films.
¹¹⁹
Foreign box office royalties were established for some countries, including France and Spain, where ticket sales were tracked.
¹²⁰
The agreement also put in place a system of film credits. The writing credit would have its own card unless a film required additional credit for the source material from which the screenplay was adapted. The writing card would immediately precede the cards of the director and producer; also, a writer’s name had to appear in a trailer if the director’s and producer’s names appeared in it. Finally, the writer owned publication rights three years after the date of contract or six years after general release of the film.
¹²¹
Pay TV was left on the table to be picked up again at a later date.

The terms of the television writers’ new contract included an increase in salary scales, the signatory’s contribution equivalent to 5 percent of a writer’s salary toward health and welfare, and a royalty formula for domestic
and foreign reruns. The royalty for television was no less than 4 percent of gross, but initial sales of a series in the United States and Canada were excluded.
¹²²
The royalty plan was set to last through 1965, and the writers subsequently negotiated for a residual structure thereafter.
¹²³

There were differences between the structures and controls set in place in this contract for television writers in the East and television writers in the West, in part because of the differences between live and filmed television. The WGA East retained copyright of live series, such as
Studio One
and
Playhouse 90
. In effect, it leased performance rights to the production company and to the network. In contrast, the WGA West gave up copyright of telefilms, just as film writers had done before them. Frank Pierson, who was WGAw president from 1981 to 1983 and 1993 to 1995, pointed to the 1960 strike as a key moment in defining the relationship between the East and the West branches of the Guild: “Sometimes the members of our board of directors in the West will ask me, ‘I don’t understand, the East are so impossible. Why are they so damn hard to deal with?’ And I have to tell them, ‘Because we gave away something which was absolutely, terribly important.’
”
¹²⁴
Writers working in the tradition of New York theater expected copyright control; writers in Los Angeles had long ago given up hope of owning the copyright for screenplays. But as live television became scarce in primetime and many television writers moved west, the easterners realized they could not bring their copyright deal with them into the telefilm medium.

Although neither film nor television writers achieved all that they had hoped for, negotiations had finally established a system of compensation that has since ensured writers will see a profit from the replaying of films and television series, along with guaranteed pension and health benefits. And for all screenwriters, having one’s name in the credits ensured not just recognition but also an enduring mode of financial compensation. The card at the beginning or end of a production’s credits carried extra weight: writers were now guaranteed a stake in future profits. It was around this same time that Otto Preminger announced that Dalton Trumbo had written the script for his new film
Exodus
. That one of the Hollywood Ten was finally using his own name again and would not only be paid for writing the film but also, according to the new MBA, collect royalties on the film was an extraordinary landmark that demonstrated how many battles the writers had won in the past thirteen years.

Looking Forward into the Unknown

Though at its start the WGA existed as an uncomfortable marriage of convenience between film and television writers, by the 1960s its members had realized that this alliance could serve as a powerful labor force and as a strong voice for creative workers within the American media industries. The screenwriters had been eager to gain jurisdiction over the new medium, though reluctant to embrace its practitioners. Herb Meadow, creator of the series
Have Gun—Will Travel
, pointed out that before the SWG merged to become the WGA, television was a lost opportunity: “The [SWG] had no teeth. It couldn’t function in television. . . . I don’t mean the television industry but the television writers were the ones who gave it to us. There were no fat cats. There were no elitists among them. They were working stiffs and they knew they had to go out and march.”
¹²⁵

The merger signaled new challenges in understanding the work of the writer and highlighted critical differences between film and television in terms of prestige and authorial power for individual writers. While the jurisdictional battles had been hard fought, these writers’ choice to join ranks in 1954 saved the Guild during troubled times and redefined the power and potential of entertainment writers and of their union. Nate Monaster, who speculated in the early 1950s that it might be thirty years before a television writer became a president of the Guild, became the first for the WGA West in 1963, and Ernest Kinoy was the first for the WGA East in 1967.
¹²⁶
By the mid- to late 1960s, screenwriters could see change coming. Edmund North said in 1978 that a “preponderance of power both numerical and otherwise in the Guild has shifted towards television now—the screenwriter being in the minority as he was not originally.”
¹²⁷
When asked about how the Guild had changed over time, Michael Kanin, who had introduced television to the SWG and had been charged to investigate it as a committee of one, said, “The most distinct change has been the fact that it has become now a Guild of television writers, with the screenwriters in a minority.”
¹²⁸

A number of critical issues for writers and the Guild emerged during the 1960s: a call for fair and equal treatment of women writers, the ongoing struggle to define the labor status of the writer-producer hyphenate, the shift from studios owned by individuals to studios run by corporations or conglomerates, and the evolution of new genres in film and television. Women had always been in the Guild, but the situation for female writers had in many ways regressed since the 1920s. Regarding the treatment of
women like her during the 1960s, Jay Presson Allen, who scripted
Marnie
and
Cabaret
, remembered: “One, the writer is a lowly thing, and two, a woman writer is a doubly lowly thing, perceived as being so unthreatening that they can say anything in front of you.”
¹²⁹
Starting in the 1970s, a group of concerned writers—women and men—asked the Guild to compile research that would help improve the situation for women within the profession.

IMAGE 19   The annual WGA television awards show was created when the screenwriters refused to allow television writers to participate in their awards ceremony. According to many who attended the annual events, the television awards were one of best nights of live entertainment in town. They were never televised. Left to right: James Komack, E. Jack Neuman, Ellis Marcus, Rocky Kalish, unidentified, Joel Rapp, Bruce Howard, and two unidentified writers, c. 1963.

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

The confusion over how to deal with writer-producer hyphenates at the bargaining table and on the picket line continued to grow during the 1960s. Hal Kanter, himself a hyphenate, expressed distrust: “Where are their loyalties? There’s always been a hyphenate problem. . . . [To] paraphrase Napoleon, in every soldier’s knapsack there’s a field marshal’s baton. I think that in every writer’s pencil box there’s a hyphen. And the whole strange business of hyphenates is one that I doubt is ever going to be solved to
everybody’s satisfaction. Because a pure writer today can be a writer-story editor tomorrow or a producer-writer. . . . Unfortunately, a lot of writers hate to write. And the moment they become a producer . . . they cease to write. Although they will maintain their Guild activity.”
¹³⁰

In 1966, a group of writer-producers asked the WGA to represent them in their capacity as producers. Technically, the Guild could not do that, but it did begin to help hyphenates improve their compensation deals.
¹³¹
Stanley Rubin expressed his frustration with this attempt by the Guild to represent the parties on both side of the hyphen: “I have never agreed with the WGA position that the WGA has the right to represent what they call the whole man. The Writers Guild has always wanted—and this is certainly no secret—has always wanted the power of representing the whole hyphenate because the hyphenate represents an enormous amount of power in the television industry.”
¹³²
Around this time the Producers Guild of America (PGA), formed in 1962 with the merger of the Screen Producers Guild (established in 1950) and the Television Producers Guild (established in 1957), became interested in building an agreement with the newly formed trade association for the studios and networks, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and brought up the issue of representing writer-producers. The PGA then focused its efforts not on compensation but on establishing health and welfare for its members.