The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (33 page)

Source
: WGA Women’s Committee, “Women’s Committee Statistics Report,” 7 November 1974, Archives, Writers Guild Foundation Shavelson-Webb Library, Los Angeles.

Note
: Where one-half of a teleplay is noted, a woman was part of a known male-female writing team. Other writing teams may have been mixed, but that information is not clear from the data.

.   .   .

Nevertheless, many women writers were still struggling to land work. Barbara Corday described how she and her writing partner, Barbara Avedon, were treated in the years before their series
Cagney & Lacey
finally made it to air: “Every show we worked on, every producer we worked for, wherever we went, we were ‘The Girls.’ And Barbara was fifteen years older than me, so I was not only part of ‘the Girls,’ I was always referred to as ‘the Kid.’
”
⁸²
Corday noted that rarely would there be more than one woman or a team of women on a writing staff and that often when she and Avedon went out for jobs, they would be in competition with other women. Corday recalled pitching an episode of
Maude
with Avedon to hyphenate Rod Parker. Parker loved the idea, hired them, and walked them out of the office and down the hall. “And as the elevator doors were closing, he said, ‘This is great. We’ve started a lot of secretaries on this show.’ He made the immediate assumption that
up until 8 o’clock that morning, we had been secretaries and we just happened to come up with that idea.”
⁸³

In the 1980s, there was a concerted effort to end discrimination against women in the writers’ room. The way things played out, effectively, access improved for only white women. The Women’s Committee of the WGA sponsored events and addressed key issues in its monthly newsletter. Responding to a 1983 article in the
Los Angeles Times
in which WGA West President Frank Pierson stated, “I don’t know any good writer
not
hired because she is a woman,” Leonora Thuna, who wrote on
Family
and
Lou Grant
, chose a letter to the editor of the
WGAw Newsletter
as her platform. Pierson had missed the point, she observed. When story editors and producers fail to consider women for writing assignments, women writers cannot “build up credits and they remain a minority in the writing world.”
⁸⁴
In 1987, the WGA West commissioned sociologists William Bielby and Denise Bielby to study the Guild’s membership. The statistics they gathered were staggering. From 1982 to 1985, males represented almost 80 percent of employed WGA West writers, whereas women constituted just under 20 percent, with minorities of both genders representing approximately 2 percent of employed writers.
⁸⁵
Among the WGA West’s entire membership, minorities made up 2.9 percent of the total. White male writers had an earnings advantage across the board in the industry (at studios, independents, and networks), with women and minorities often making only 60 to 70 cents for every dollar white men earned.
⁸⁶
Bielby and Bielby continued to conduct regular studies of the Guild, providing detailed numbers and analyses of the representation of women, minorities, and older writers in the Guild until the early 2000s. The Guild attempted to address inequalities in hiring and unequal pay through the MBA, requiring producers to read scripts by women and minorities. But because the Guild was not a hiring agency, members had little power over the signatories.

Despite the skewed gender ratio, some white female writers claim to have experienced no difficulty in getting hired or running a writers’ room. Cheri Steinkellner never felt she was treated differently in the writers’ room while working on
Cheers
.

Because I did not know there was a difference, there was no difference—for me. . . . There were times when I was in an authority position . . . with my two male partners where I would be the lightning rod for controversy and I would not understand why. . . . I think if I had
known that there might have been some gender differences, it would have been a lot harder to do the job. . . . I not only went in, I went in with a baby. I was a nursing mother in a room full of men.
⁸⁷

Whether other women were fortunate enough to be among those treated fairly or whether they adopted an oblivious attitude toward the institutional sexism that so many other women experienced is impossible to say, but important to consider. Dava Savel had her own take: “Cheri was . . . protected from a lot of that” because she co-wrote and co-ran the
Cheers
writers’ room with her husband, Bill Steinkellner. For women working in male-female writing partnerships the situation has historically been different.

Professional opportunities for men of color were limited, and for women of color they were almost nil. Minority writers were an anomaly in Hollywood during the 1970s, and they made up just a tiny percentage of the workforce in the 1980s. In 1969, James Webb, a white writer who scripted
Pork Chop Hill
and
Cape Fear
and who served as WGA West president from 1962 to 1963, categorized all black writers in Hollywood into three factions: (1) writers who saw the industry as the “perpetuation of White Power”; (2) those who were willing to work for the industry “until a black industry can be created”; and (3) “true integrationists.”
⁸⁸
Webb essentially argued that African American writers might be better served as novelists; any success one might have would depend on whether a writer was “basically an integrationist or a separatist.”
⁸⁹
At the time, Webb was writing the script
They Call Me Mr. Tibbs!
for Sidney Poitier. His argument failed to account for the long history of independent African American writer-directors in the United States, from William Foster’s
The Railroad Porter
in 1912 to William Greaves’s
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One
in 1968. Webb’s naïve assessment probably mirrored the perceptions of many, mostly white, writers within the industry and the Guild at that time.

Others were antagonistic toward the need for equal access within the Guild. Carey Wilber berated the Guild for worrying about the representation of minority writers and issues facing international guilds when other issues, like the hyphenate-freelance debate, were, to him, foremost. “We’ve had a Board—the same old faces around that Board that were there in 1960 for Chrissakes—that sits around and they come up with equal opportunity for the n****rs? They come up with coffee klatches with the goddamn Russians?. . . Nobody is talking about the fact that maybe two years from now we have got another negotiation.”
⁹⁰

During the 1970s and into the 1980s, an increasing number of series starred African Americans, including
Julia, Flip, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, Sanford and Son, Get Christie Love!, Good Times, The Jeffersons, What’s Happening!!, Benson
, and
The Cosby Show
. On many of these series, the writers’ rooms rarely mirrored the diversity of the actors on the screen. Bill Boulware, a writer on
Benson
and later
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
, described how discrimination behind the scenes changed: “Back in the 50s or 60s, when it was a matter of discriminatory practices, it was easier to define. . . . The majority of the people in the industry [now] are used to seeing colors as definition of some things. Now that may not even be on a conscious level, but their perceptions . . . and how you come across may be colored by the fact that you are colored. . . . When there’s not a black subject or subject matter, then it’s not that you are not valid, but they just don’t tend to even connect you up with it.”
⁹¹
People of color might sometimes be hired; but if they were not re-hired after a specified period of time, they would lose their voting rights in the Guild. Thus, of the 1,540 writers working in television in 1980, only 4 were black, and of 5,252 members overall, 65 were black (only 15 of whom were eligible to vote).
⁹²
Even though minority families averaged twenty more hours of television viewing per week than white families in the 1980s, representation throughout the industry remained negligible.

Every month, the Black Writers’ Caucus and the Women’s Caucus published dispatches in the WGA newsletters, but the pace of change was glacial. Although independent studios like MTM, Tandem, and Carsey-Werner made more efforts than most to create inclusive workplaces, minority representation in the writers’ room lagged far behind the modest gains for actors. Writers of color were dissatisfied both with their Guild and with its general membership. Hyphenate writer-director-actor Robert Townsend satirized Hollywood typecasting by writers, casting agents, and directors in his 1987 film
Hollywood Shuffle
. But successful African American writers and hyphenates were the exception to the rule. As the 1980s wore on, and as the studios gained a stronger bargaining stance, the WGA struggled to keep its writers unified.

The Alliance and the Strikes of the 1980s

The history of the Guild is a history of interest groups, divided groups.

—Elias Davis, interview, 29 September 2010

1988 is the Guild’s Vietnam.

—Marc Norman, interview 9 June 2011

A sweeping trend toward consolidation overtook the media industries during the 1980s. As Jennifer Holt details in her analysis of the structural convergence of the American entertainment industries, the boundaries between formerly distinct media industries were breaking down: film and broadcast merged under Fox; vertical reintegration occurred at Universal, Paramount, and Warner Bros.; and film merged with cable at Warner Bros., MCA/Universal, and Columbia.
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The phenomenon did not end there; publishing, music, merchandising, and theme parks were part of these corporate empires, as well. The high-concept blockbuster film was Hollywood’s focus, leaving room for small independent studios and paving the way at the end of the decade for the rise of Miramax and other corporate independents. Cable was emerging as a significant new competitor to broadcast television at a time when the broadcast audience was in a dramatic decline, with shows’ average ratings plunging from 50 in 1981 to 33.9 shares in 1991.
⁹⁴
For entertainment unions, the progressive consolidation of the media industry meant a decline in the diversity of outlets interested in making or buying content and in the number of signatories at the bargaining table.

The ten-week SAG and AFTRA strike in 1980 delayed the fall season of television as the unions battled with the studios and networks over compensation for original programming on pay TV and home recording devices. At the time, only 5 percent of households with televisions had a home recording device (only 1 percent of which were VCRs), but the unions understood that this market was growing rapidly.
⁹⁵
In 1981, negotiations between the WGA and the studios and networks broke down over residuals for pay TV exhibition, and the Guild called a strike in April. Independent producers settled quickly on a formula, but the strike continued with the majors for thirteen weeks.

Writers debated the issues among themselves at a series of heated meetings prior to and during the 1981 strike. Some found the gatherings as exasperating as they were entertaining. In describing them, Cheri Steinkellner found an apt analogy: “It was like High Holidays. If there was going to be a strike, that’s when everybody shows up to temple. . . . It was hilarious. Heated. Nobody is more political or opinionated than writers. And articulate. [Arguments were] brilliantly stated. Not always eloquently—and not
always succinctly—but [it was] fascinating to hear people state their case passionately. . . . Writers are not really equipped for a physical brawl. As a subset of humanity we have not been trained in street fighting. Those aren’t the skills that got us to that particular career.”
⁹⁶
That many of the writers were Jewish was a fact never formally documented by surveys, but it was always a part of the collective understanding of writers as a community. David Isaacs picked up on this notion of separateness: “It’s not a classic work action because people are pulling up in their Beemers and Mercedes and sports cars and we’re going to walk, and we’re writers so food is very important, so after two hours . . . [y]ou go off with a bunch of friends to a deli or another restaurant, Italian, and you’d eat.”
⁹⁷
Although the writers’ concerns over compensation were completely valid, the presence of mostly privileged, educated, upper-middle-class white males on the picket line made it abundantly clear why questions continued to arise about who in Hollywood was getting writing jobs in the first place.

IMAGE 22   WGA members and Academy Award–winning writers on strike in 1981. Left to right: Robert Carson, Julius Epstein, Daniel Taradash, Sidney Sheldon, and Frank Tarloff.

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

In July 1981, the Guild and the studios hammered out a deal, a percentage of gross for writers, ending the strike after a brutal forty-week walkout. Soon after, in 1982, the loosely federated Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers changed its name to the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) and became the single bargaining agent and trade organization representing the signatories in their collective bargaining with the entertainment labor unions: DGA, SAG, AFTRA, IATSE, American Federation of Musicians, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Laborers Local 724, Teamsters Local 399, and the East and West branches of the WGA.
⁹⁸
The hope for the networks and the studios was in bringing their disparate interests together as one voice. When Nicholas Counter III took over as president of AMPTP, he suggested that perhaps the 1981 WGA strike could have been averted or quashed: “Certainly . . . by having a unified position in the industry, we have less chance of that kind of disruption.”
⁹⁹