The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (28 page)

As Thomas Schatz details, the films of the 1960s stood out from the Hollywood films of the classical era for their oversized budgets, enormous casts, bloated running times, and wider screens.
¹³³
The studios hoped to draw mass audiences away from televisions and into theaters by making films special events. But time and again this formula flopped, and box office failures like
Doctor Doolittle, Hello, Dolly!
, and
Paint Your Wagon
, devastated the Hollywood studios. Television series were Hollywood’s butter—though not necessarily its bread—during this era. Many television shows had been designed for mass audiences and were succeeding far better at keeping families entertained with what NBC executive Paul Klein called “least objectionable programming.” But other writers began pushing the envelope in shows ranging from Serling’s
Twilight Zone
to
The Dick Van Dyke Show
. Carl Reiner’s series featured three television writers as central characters. Reiner said that over the years many people told him that the series made them realize that television writing was an actual profession, one that even seemed appealing. “They always thought comedians made up their own
material. . . . They saw this show with these writers writing for a comedian [. . . and] they tell me ‘I’m a writer because of
The Dick Van Dyke Show
.’
”
¹³⁴
With the rise of film schools and college courses in film and television, writing for film and television increasingly became a craft to be studied and learned. The draw of these writing professions would only become stronger in the 1970s.

Producing television series kept Hollywood’s major studios afloat; but as media researcher Justin Wyatt explains, these television successes in the middle of a film downfall made the majors tempting properties for large corporations. In 1966, Gulf+Western purchased Paramount; a year later, TransAmerica purchased United Artists; and then, in 1969, Kinney National Services bought Warner Bros.,
¹³⁵
and Kirk Kerkorian bought MGM.
¹³⁶
As Wyatt points out, between 1969 and 1972 the majors lost more than $500 million. Independent films—by focusing on subjects outside the mainstream and testing new distribution models—began to gain traction in the marketplace. Many of the majors began to look to the independents for ideas about how best to reach audiences. This shift for the majors was facilitated by changes in the ratings system in 1968. The country was experiencing a cultural revolution. Audiences’ tastes were changing, and filmmakers’ interests were shifting as well.

By late 1960s, the industry and the profession of writing itself were changing. In the years to come, film and television writers would push the boundaries of preexisting genres and of audience expectations. The union of film and television writers heralded what would become over the next three decades a series of mergers at the very top of the industry, corporate buyouts of the majors in the 1960s, and the dawning of a new era wherein corporations began taking over the film and television industries. The Guild had survived the arrival of a new medium and its first major strike, and over the next twenty years, the diversity of the Guild would prove to be both its greatest asset and the underlying source of its greatest defeats.

4

Mavericks

IMAGE 20   Lawrence Kasdan’s notes for the introduction of Yoda in an early draft of
The Empire Strikes Back
, c. 1978.

Lawrence Kasdan Collection, Writers Guild Foundation Archive, Shavelson-Webb Library, Los Angeles

I’m a writer by choice, a producer through necessity, and a director in self-defense.

—
The Writer Speaks: Mel Shavelson
, 1996

We don’t have the numbers but we have the strength. We should combine this advantage and work together toward the common goal of bettering the lot of the writer instead of squabbling amongst ourselves. . . . This Guild . . . is a very remarkable organization. It is made up of people who don’t particularly like each other very much because half the fellows have rewritten the other half. And nobody likes a good rewrite man. But . . . who ever heard of a
good
rewrite man?

—Sam Rolfe (creator of
Have Gun—Will Travel
),
WGAw Newsletter
, October 1967, 4

In 1950, Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond plotted the grim demise of a screenwriter in
Sunset Blvd
. In 1961, Carl Reiner showcased the endearing adventures of television writers in
The Dick Van Dyke Show
. In the 1970s and 1980s real screenwriters made their first appearance in the popular narrative of financial and critical success in Hollywood. These decades brought tremendous change and upheaval in the entertainment industries: corporate buyouts, mergers and acquisitions, the growth of independents, the rise of ancillary markets of cable and home video, and gradual deregulation during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. An industry that was organized as diverse media companies was evolving into conglomerates with interconnected media holdings in filmed entertainment. This industrial change trickled down, affecting methods of production and of compensation, which in turn shaped the lives and careers of screenwriters. As writers entered the industry in greater numbers than ever before, competition for jobs—as well as for creative control among writers, producers, and directors—generated critical points of conflict.

The era covered in this chapter is bookended by two major spec script sales: William Goldman received $400,000 from Fox in 1967 for
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
, and Joe Eszterhas got $3 million from Carolco for
Basic Instinct
in 1990. Both events serve as telling examples of a new focus on individual writers—their personal voices, their successes, their personalities, their career trajectories—and on the power of the individual screenplay. Long gone were the days of writers on long-term studio contracts. Though a writer might have a short-term deal with a studio for right of first refusal, agents could shop around writers or spec scripts in search of higher bidders.

Both of these scripts, and ultimately both screenwriters, had name recognition even before the films premiered. The extraordinary bidding war that surrounded the purchase of
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
and the ultimate success of the film (it became the highest grossing film in 1969 and won four Oscars, including one for Best Original Screenplay) gave aspirants reason to believe that writing was a lucrative profession. Goldman remembers: “It was a shitload of money then but it is really a freakish amount of money now. And it got in all the papers because nobody at this time knew anything about screenwriters because all they knew is that actors made up their lines and directors had all the visual concepts. And the idea of this obscene amount of money going to this asshole who lives in New York who wrote a Western drove them nuts. . . . It was the writing of the screenplay and the money that it went for that basically changed everything in my life.”
¹
Goldman’s wry attitude toward his newfound celebrity, and his simultaneous grouchiness and humility, made him a compelling figure for the media. His continued successes across a variety of genres, including
All the President’s Men
and
The Princess Bride
, and his bestselling book
Adventures in the Screen Trade
, put Goldman about as close to being a household name as any screenwriter can hope to get. Around this time, the art and craft of screenwriting started to attract the admiration of people outside of Hollywood.

In television, where the writer-producer had become the norm, these hyphenates were increasingly taking on ownership of their series as well. Smaller production companies produced series for networks. Economically and creatively, this decentralization provided diversity in television production. Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin created Tandem Productions (later known as Tandem Enterprises), which started with variety shows and specials and went on to great success with
All in the Family, Good Times, Maude
,
and
Sanford and Son
. Frank Pierson, who twice served as president of the WGA West and started his career in Hollywood writing for television, maintained that the ripple effect of writer ownership spread to film: “It led to a burst of creativity in the industry including the movie business in the 1970s. For a period of the next ten or fifteen years, there was really a creative explosion on all kinds of levels. A swift evolution in television quickly becoming much better than it had been before.”
²
The careers of some of the greatest writer-directors in American film peaked in this period: Stanley Kubrick with
Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey
, and
Full Metal Jacket
; Francis Ford Coppola with
The Godfather, The Conversation
, and
Apocalypse Now
; Woody Allen with
Annie Hall
and
Manhattan
; George Lucas with
American Graffiti
and
Star Wars
; David Lynch with
The Elephant Man
and
Blue Velvet
; and, later, Joel and Ethan Coen with
Raising Arizona
and
Barton Fink
and John Sayles with
The Return of the Secaucus Seven, Passion Fish
, and
Lone Star
. Studio and network executives who were inclined to challenge the status quo in order to back an original idea turned to independent-minded creative talent. This was a time when mavericks had a chance to change American screens—and to change the Writers Guild.

Known for his family-friendly fare, Sherwood Schwartz was a wise observer of his industry. Schwartz owned his series,
Gilligan’s Island
, and his next big hit,
The Brady Bunch
. He spoke of the strange role he played in those early days as what he termed a “writer-owner.” When he learned of the Guild’s oral history project, Schwartz was eager to tell his story because he realized he was one of the first of a new breed: “There was such a thing as the writer and then there was such a thing as a producer. And I was a new animal and I was uncomfortable. I felt I was going to divide the Guild. I’m not making this dramatic . . . I was a precursor of this whole cursed hyphenate problem.”
³
In further interviews, a number of hyphenates talked about how there was never a conflict of interest for them on the job, but in the Guild setting their dual roles in the industry made it impossible to ally wholly with either the labor or the management camp.

As this chapter will explore, hyphenate writers both in television and in film struggled to define themselves in a labor environment that regarded groups as either employees or management. The Guild found it difficult to decide whose needs the union should champion in negotiations: hyphenates brought in more money and had more clout within the industry, but they were outnumbered by the steady influx of freelance writers. Sometimes the
needs of hyphenates were in absolute opposition to those of television writers. And in the 1985 strike, the concerns of television writers and film writers put them at odds with one another. This lack of cohesion undermined the strike and lead to a quick resolution on VHS residuals that has plagued the Guild ever since.

Weaving through the history of this era are the three motifs that guide this narrative: authorship, the writer’s name, and the boundaries of membership. Each motif highlights the changing nature of the business of writing during these two decades and the attempts of the Writers Guild to respond to these transformations. At the center of this chapter is the prominence of individual writers, some of whom gained considerable control over production. This chapter begins with an overview of industrial shifts in the early 1970s and then illuminates a series of issues that were central concerns for writers and the Guild, namely, the possessory credit in film, the role of the hyphenate in television, race and gender representation in the industry, and the strikes of the 1980s. These strikes ruptured trust and solidarity among members. By the end of the 1980s, the prestige of the individual writer superseded the notion of craft solidarity or faith in the WGA’s capacity to be a strong representative for its members. One of the paradoxes of this era for the Guild was that, just when it was gaining ground, the role of the writer shifted, the structure of the industry evolved, and the population of writers changed. Its membership—and members’ needs—became increasingly diverse.

The variety of career possibilities for writers began to multiply in the 1970s and 1980s. Before, writers had had a diversity of experiences in their careers and professional trajectories based on their primary medium, their skill set, the period in which they entered the industry, and their political affiliations. Gone now was a sense of predictable overlap in their writing experiences, and the WGA could not serve the needs of all of its writers under a single set of provisions. As David Rintels, a writer on
The F.B.I
and president of the WGA West from 1975 to 1977, noted: “When you say writer, you can be talking about a radio writer, a television writer, or a film writer. You can be talking about somebody who has got enough clout to get . . . creative control or a meaningful definition of profits. Or you can be talking about somebody two weeks out of USC film school. . . . We have an infinite number of varieties of writers in this Guild whose interests have to be balanced. You cannot go into a negotiation and have any realistic expectation
that you are going to win as much for every classification of writers.”
⁴
Some writers, like Alvin Sargent, experienced ongoing success, and virtually everything they wrote was produced. For others, like Allan Burns, who created
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
, it took years of false starts before they found success. Still others, especially newcomers the industry in the 1970s and 1980s, found it much more difficult to break in. This fracturing of writers’ experiences is reflected in the great number of small strikes that occurred through the 1970s, which culminated in a series of three particularly devastating strikes for the Guild in the 1980s. Whereas previous chapters have followed a clear chronology, this chapter and the next one offer a series of chronologies that chart the experiences of different communities of writers while still tracking the story of how their Guild—already divided by its East and West branches—tried to respond to changing times.