The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (35 page)

The proliferation of credits during the 1980s continued through the 1990s. Being a writer was a coveted job, but writers wanted to extend their power as producers as well. Writers began to demand a greater say in the
production of their material. If a film or a television series was now a property that could be bought, franchised, and branded multiple times in the marketplace, the value of content continued long after a script was written. Film and television writers had a new role in the corporate landscape of media production as content makers. In the next decades, this concept would lead to the rise of a new model of hyphenate.

5

Confederation

IMAGE 23   First page of Matthew Weiner’s script for the
Mad Men
episode “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” c. 2007.

Matthew Weiner Collection, Writers Guild Foundation Archive, Shavelson-Webb Library, Los Angeles

The West is a very exclusive country club. It’s for A-list writers, showrunners, movie writers. And the East is truly a Bolshevik cell. They still think it’s 1917.

—Tom Fontana, showrunner of
Homicide: Life on the Street
and creator of
Oz
, interview, 23 October 2009

During the first week on the picket line, I started talking to a guy who had been in the Guild for thirty-some-odd years. He said, “Oh this is your first strike?” He said, “This is my fifth one.” And then I thought, “Oh my God, I’m going to have to do this
again
?” And here I thought that this was the strike to end all strikes.

—Courtney Lilly, phone interview, 16 May 2009

“It was bad. It was as bad as it could be,” Tom Fontana recalled, thinking back to relations between the Writers Guild of America East and West in 2004.
¹
Other feuds had been worse, damaging relations between the Guild and other writers’ groups as well as between different factions within the Guild. But this time, the Guild’s infighting was between its two official branches, and the two people at the center of the battle were not even writers.

The uncomfortable balance of power between the East and West branches began to topple in the late 1990s.
²
At the crux of the controversy in 2004 were the Guild’s two executive directors, John McLean for the West and Mona Mangan for the East, who were refusing to speak to each other. John Auerbach, a Writers Guild East board member and the writer of
Stepfather II
, remembers that the acrimony stemmed from McLean’s twentythree years at CBS, where Mangan, who often oversaw news contracts, challenged him over news writers’ negotiations.
³
At the same time that members were growing increasingly uneasy with McLean’s ties to CBS, many also faulted Mangan for her negotiating style, which was “long on formality
and short on practicality.”
⁴
Finally, the writers themselves came together behind the leaders’ backs to resolve their differences.

Over a series of phone calls and a weekend-long meeting in San Francisco, a coalition of board members from East and West attempted to untangle union strategy from the melodrama of clashing personalities that had been plaguing Guild negotiations since 1997. The détente focused on issues critical to both branches: dropping formal charges against one another and reorienting the Guild’s focus toward negotiations with the studios, improving health coverage, and addressing concerns over the vertical integration of the studios. Fontana recalled: “The people in the room from the West were as determined to make it work as we were. . . . And they realized that when writers talk to writers, there are no major issues. When [Guild] staff members talk to staff members, then it gets complicated.”
⁵
But even after the two branches unified on a strategy, more frustrations followed as the Guild entered negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) in 2004.

The Guild’s attempts at pattern bargaining in 2004 with the Directors Guild of America (DGA) and Screen Actors Guild (SAG) failed. Writers on the negotiating committee had asked McLean to focus on compensation for DVD sales. McLean recommended that the writers cease their negotiations with the AMPTP, form a strategic alliance with the DGA, and allow the DGA to set the pattern for bargaining that year. The negotiating team accepted the idea, but McLean never attempted establish the alliance he had promised, and the DGA entered negotiations without an opportunity to consider the writers’ plan. According to WGA board member Howard A. Rodman, “John McLean negotiated against his own Guild—far more than he was willing to negotiate against his old pals in the conglomerates. Again and again he maintained we’d be ‘laughed out of the room’ if we asked for the things we asked for—and in many cases won—[in our 2008] contract.”
⁶
The WGA emerged from the 2004 negotiations with a few gains in health and pension plans, but also with some rollbacks and no increase in residuals. Writers’ exasperation with what they viewed as an autocratic leadership set the stage for a radical change at the top in the West and a transformation in the relationship between the eastern and western branches.

Writers and journalists noted that the Guild was growing increasingly out of touch with its membership. For much of the 1990s, film and television writers and the Guild were staggering from the blows dealt during the strikes
of the 1980s. No writer wanted to walk off work, and most wanted peace with the companies, yet tensions ran high across various constituencies: between writers who were exhausted by activist members of the Guild and writers who saw still more battles ahead; between writers of studio films and prime-time scripted television and writers in newer areas of media production; and between the WGA East and the WGA West. Simultaneously, new generations of prospective screenwriters were applying for work in an industry that was busy restructuring itself to reap increasing profits. Many of these writers took positions as flexible contract laborers; as such, their work did not necessarily fall under the jurisdiction of the Writers Guild. Susan Christopherson argued in 2008 that the unions and guilds in Hollywood were failing in their mission: “Because they generally continue to operate as conventional US unions—that is by representing their current membership rather than serving as a
labor
movement—the unions appear to be losing touch with a younger generation that does not perceive union membership as an indicator of ‘having arrived’ in the media industries. Instead unions are perceived more than ever as gatekeepers for a labor aristocracy whose goals and working style are not relevant to the younger generation of multi-skilled independent contractors.”
⁷
Media companies were developing personal digital technologies that demanded new content. At the same time, questions of what should be considered Guild writing and the appropriate levels of compensation for such writing were under debate.

More than ever, working writers were divided across the financial spectrum. Much like the American economy as a whole, the industry was squeezing out the middle-class writer. There were the A-list screenwriters and television hyphenates who were garnering huge paychecks at the top; there were some people making a good living wage; and there were many who were barely making ends meet. While the million-dollar celebrity film screenwriter was not something new, the television showrunner was. The first appearance of the term in the press occurred in 1995 in reference to John Wells’s work on
ER
.
⁸
“Showrunner” is not an official credit but is used by the industry, the press, scholars, and viewers to describe an individual (or team of individuals) who is responsible for guiding a series over a season or an entire run. The showrunner is the new iteration of the hyphenate: someone who gives a series—and just as important, those who work for the series—a sense of structure and direction. With the development of DVD technology, showrunners are also brand managers.
⁹
They are made
audible through DVD commentaries and podcasts, made visible in behind-the-scenes extras, and, in many cases, made directly available for commentary, conversation, or comment on websites. As this chapter explores, this new role would become particularly important for the Guild in the years to come.

The Guild had to respond to the ever-fracturing state of screenwriting to ensure that all screen entertainment writing fell under its jurisdictional umbrella. The days of companies applying to the unions to become signatories were gone. The rapid process of media consolidation transformed the boundaries between screen entertainment at the levels of production, distribution, and ownership. Given the radical new landscape of the media industries, professional screenwriters had to be courted and their employers coerced. Writers for animation, reality television, video games, and streaming media did not automatically see the benefit of paying dues for union membership. At the same time, not all WGA members were eager to welcome these “lesser” media writers into their ranks. In the process of reassessing the parameters of professional writing, the Guild was transformed from an “inbox” union that waited for new writers and signatories to approach it to one that reached out to professional writers working in new genres, forms, and platforms within American media industries. The core of this chapter explores the internal and external strife that led to moments of unity and hopefulness for coalitions of disparate groups of writers and between writers and other media professionals.

This era began in a moment of disillusionment for writers. Emerging from a series of brutal defeats in the 1980s, writers were licking their wounds just as media mergers and corporate synergies began transforming the economic and technological structures of the entertainment industries. Writers of indie films watched as the studios overtook their genre. The conglomerates hammered away at the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules (Fin-Syn), which barred networks from airing programs to which they had syndication rights and from holding an equity position in the programs they aired (for example, Carsey-Werner Productions and Bill Cosby owned
The Cosby Show
, and NBC bought rights to broadcast the program). The passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act shifted the broadcast landscape to profit the studios at the expense of independent voices in media production. Speaking seventeen years after the act took effect, Norman Lear lamented deregulation’s damage to the entertainment media landscape: “Look at us
today. One Comcast. My God. Despite all the channels, the people of the world only listen through three or four megaphones to get news and entertainment and context. There is no context. And this is the country that depends on an informed electorate.”
¹⁰
Barbara Corday concurred: “The unraveling [of Fin-Syn] could not have been worse for the TV industry, for writers especially, and for producers. . . . There is a reason Fin-Syn existed in the first place, and it has not changed. . . . Literally hundreds of people are being kept from having ownership in their creations. I think it is outrageous.”
¹¹
The momentum of deregulation during this era was astonishing, and the talent guilds were not paying close enough attention. At the same time, the rise of the DVD and online websites offered new spaces for writers to express themselves and access audiences. These new venues would become invaluable to writers in mobilizing support for their cause. Ultimately, writers took advantage of digital entertainment—the primary territory they hoped to gain during the 2007 negotiation cycle—to promote the Guild’s position.

The conglomeration of independent film and television production, the growth of primetime animation and reality television, the expansion of writing for video games, and the success of ancillary markets of DVD and streaming media were all desirable jurisdictional territories for the WGA. For over a decade, the Guild attempted—but ultimately failed—to react to the growing concerns of its members. But by the time of the 2007–2008 strike, new Guild leadership had devised an argument that appealed widely to its membership: it posited that the gradual interlocking interests of every Guild member in digital media presented an opportunity for a unified action against the companies.

Corporate Power versus Diversity and Independence

Whereas the corporate owners of the 1960s had acquired film divisions within companies that were predominantly not entertainment oriented, the companies merging in the 1980s and 1990s functioned primarily as media conglomerates. By the 1990s, many of these corporations were structured both vertically and horizontally, taking advantage of synergies among television networks, film studios, radio networks, theme parks, video outlets, publishing houses, and, later, Internet holdings. Within this deregulated, conglomerated, multichannel environment, power was in the hands of
the majors. The goal was saturation of a variety of demographic markets, where unique divisions could target different segments of an increasingly fragmented audience.

In 1989, the Coalition to Preserve the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules was formed as a new iteration of the Committee for Prudent Deregulation. Two hundred committee members from SAG, the Caucus for Producers Writers and Directors, and the MPAA lobbied various government members and agencies (including the president of the United States, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), members of Congress, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Commerce), to advocate preservation of the law.
¹²
With Jack Valenti as its spokesman, the coalition argued that deregulation would shatter the already weakened independent production community in Hollywood. In contrast, the networks pointed to increased competition from the News Corporation’s Fox network and the cable industry. The Hollywood studios, they claimed, rather than small independents, were in positions of choice, if not control, about how to capitalize on their productions.