The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (36 page)

Following an intense lobbying war, the FCC relaxed the Fin-Syn Rules in 1991. A year later, the networks asked a federal appellate court in Chicago to abolish the rules entirely. A three-judge panel unanimously declared the regulations to be not just outdated, but also “arbitrary, unreasonable and capricious.”
¹³
By 1995, virtually all traces of the rules had been eliminated. Within a year of their demise, NBC had become the single largest supplier of its own primetime programming. Jennifer Holt provides dramatic quantitative examples: “In 1995, the networks owned approximately 40 percent of their schedules on average. By the start of the 2000 season, however, CBS, for example, had an interest in or owned outright 68 percent of its prime time schedule, including ten weekly entertainment series. Fox owned 71 percent of its prime time lineup. NBC produced seven shows, all airing on their own network. This trend would continue, and in 2009, twenty-two out of the thirty-two new shows were produced and owned by the network on which they aired.”
¹⁴
With the rules against network production-distribution mergers dismantled, the Hollywood studios adopted a new strategy. Viacom and Warner Bros. soon joined News Corporation in forming their own studio-based television networks and enlarging their in-house production units. Film and broadcast were now uniting under the auspices of the same corporate entities, which were exploring new opportunities for expansion.

Aside from its vigilance in matters of free speech, the WGA was fairly apolitical when it came to government regulation. The Guild later regretted its failure to foresee the profound impact that the death of Fin-Syn would have on television production and distribution and on its members’ income from residuals paid for shows now owned by the networks that aired them. Generally, when a studio sells content internally, it gives itself a discounted rate (a benefit that prompted companies to merge and diversify). Without the competitive pricing made possible by independent producers selling to networks, media workers received lower residuals. Chuck Slocum, executive vice president of WGA West, said, “We weren’t involved directly in Fin-Syn. And we should have been. . . . Fin-Syn was a huge loss for the writing community.”
¹⁵
The only action the Guild leadership took was to present a few papers to the government in defense of the regulation. In written comments to the FCC in 2002, Slocum warned that without Fin-Syn in place, virtually all of the boutique television producers would disappear within a few years.
¹⁶

As the media conglomerates grew stronger, labor’s position became more precarious.
¹⁷
Most writers saw deregulation as a step backward, a loss of creative control, and a harbinger of what writing would be like in this new conglomerated landscape. Looking back on his own career, Tom Fontana saw a marked effect on his partnership with networks and on the kind of television that could be greenlighted: “A lot has shifted over the last thirty years that I’ve been doing television—one [part of it] is the corporate structure. The death of the small studios like MTM, Lorimar—that has had an extraordinarily compelling, negative effect on the quality of television. Now there are only six or seven studios, and most of them have a network that they have to feed. So their appetite becomes very narrow.”
¹⁸

Like the demise of Fin-Syn, the 1996 Telecommunications Act received little attention in the popular press. In this dramatic overhaul of the Communications Act of 1936, the FCC, under the leadership of Michael Powell (son of future US Secretary of State Colin Powell), pushed for a deregulatory agenda more reminiscent of the Reagan era than that of President Bill Clinton. The act relaxed television station ownership limits and cross-ownership restrictions, revoked regulations on cable ownership established by the Cable Act of 1992, granted the FCC jurisdiction over digital broadcast satellites, and assigned existing television stations digital allotments without charge.
¹⁹
Audience fragmentation and the multiplexing of network channels
(NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, and so on) left the cable television landscape looking like a corporate-controlled digital land rush. Digital satellite services, which began in 1990, expanded throughout the decade, improving not just picture and sound quality but also increasing the number of channels available to the average home consumer (even if most of these channels were owned by the same few conglomerates). Although the Guild failed to fight deregulation effectively, its members would take the lessons learned from this period to plot a more forward-thinking approach to regulation in years to come. But the conglomerates were also learning from the gains of the independent industry outside their control.

The astonishing success of
sex, lies and videotape
in 1989, a film that Steven Soderbergh wrote, directed, and edited, heralded a golden age for the “indie film” and the hybrid filmmaker. New work by John Sayles, Joel and Ethan Coen, David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch (
Mystery Train
), and Spike Lee (
Do the Right Thing
) generated increased energy and creative opportunities for writer-directors operating outside the traditional Hollywood studio structure. Other talented hybrids whose first major successes premiered around the same time include Gus Van Sant (
Drugstore Cowboy
), John Singleton (
Boyz n the Hood
), and Quentin Tarantino (
Reservoir Dogs
). A second wave appeared in the mid 1990s, with Alexander Payne (
Citizen Ruth
), Ang Lee (
The Wedding Banquet
), Kevin Smith (
Clerks
), Todd Solondz (
Welcome to the Dollhouse
), Nicole Holofcener (
Walking and Talking
), Wes Anderson (
Rushmore
), and Paul Thomas Anderson (
Boogie Nights
). Emanuel Levy details how Miramax and New Line Cinema were the first companies to establish the independent studio business model, creating mini-major studios with steady financial backing, no ties to established studios, and dynamic personalities at the top who defined the corporate persona.
²⁰

The success of these mini-majors prompted the major studios to establish specialty branches of their own studios—Focus Features (Universal), Fox Searchlight, and Paramount Vantage—that enabled them to purchase compelling packaged film projects at low prices. These boutique auxiliary units focused on prestige indie films that created subsidiaries of corporate brands for these conglomerates, brands that shrewdly defined themselves as “anti-studio.”
²¹
At the same time, some writers attempted to stay as independent as possible. Gus Van Sant, who made
Drugstore Cowboy
with Miramax and has since worked with specialty studio distributors, compared his experiences working with independent companies versus Hollywood studios: “Hollywood
can’t eliminate the creative side, the writers and directors and actors, which I think they’d like to do. . . . The studios think you should be able to just take bits of screenplays and have a technical writer restructure the dialogue. Design a screenplay, give it to the guy who knows how the camera works, then eliminate the director, and just let the camera guy set up the shot. Then have the actors do the performance part. But when they do that . . . there’s always something missing, like the conductor in the orchestra. Things start to go out of time.”
²²

Audiences may not have noticed the slow shift toward incorporating indies into the conglomerate structure. As Alisa Perren explains, the term “independent” is arguably misleading.
²³
In this new landscape, “indie” could mean an economic approach, a genre, or both. It can define everything from an independent voice coming from New York but produced by a studio (
Do the Right Thing
), to edgy independent productions picked up on the film festival circuit and distributed by Hollywood (
Slackers, The Blair Witch Project
), to a Miramax-style hybrid indie (
Fargo, Boogie Nights
), or a Hollywood production that only mimics the indie in its genre or style (
Juno
). Levy describes two definitions of the term “independent”: one specifically speaks to a structure of film financing, the other to the point of view, aesthetics, or vision of the film or filmmaker.
²⁴

During the late 1990s, studios began eliminating projects with midrange budgets; suddenly the majority of films greenlighted were either expensive mass-appeal blockbusters or low-budget indie-like productions. As independent films continued to profit commercially through the 2000s, win prestigious awards, and capture a small but significant share of the audience, studios aimed to package and corporatize independent film as a genre. In 2005, Disney purchased the top distributor of independent films, Miramax.
²⁵
Although writers looking to distribute their films could find other outlets, this takeover signaled a clear end to an era of robust independent production.

Pushing the Boundaries of Jurisdiction

The categories of writing under the jurisdiction of the WGA expanded rapidly during the 1990s and 2000s. New genres and platforms tested the boundaries of what could and should be included under the union umbrella. Many writers working outside Guild’s purview were eager for
their work to be counted as “insider” labor so they could obtain guarantees on minimum pay, benefits, and pension funds. Television producers experimented with reality television and animated primetime series, both complicated territories for television writers and the Guild to navigate. At the same time, audiences in increasing numbers were plugging in their television sets to video game consoles and DVD players to meet their entertainment needs.

Computer-generated imagery (CGI) was first integrated into popular cinema in the 1970s. By the 1990s, CGI’s potential for creating dynamic and innovative film and television cinematography had expanded dramatically. Soon, it transformed the nature of animated film and television. Series such as Fox’s
The Simpsons
(which started in 1989) and MTV’s
Liquid Television
(the original showcase for
Beavis and Butt-head
) transformed viewers’—and studio executives’—perception of CGI’s potential not just for animated entertainment but also for enhancement of the viewer experience.

The overwhelming success of Matt Groening’s
The Simpsons
in the 1990s encouraged Fox executives to expand the network’s adult-oriented prime-time animation programming.
²⁶
In 1999, with
The Simpsons, King of the Hill, Family Guy, The PJs
, and
Futurama
on Fox’s prime time schedule, the campaign for writers of animated television to unionize under the WGA mobilized with relative ease. Peter Chernin, who headed Fox at the time, had already assumed that primetime animation was under a WGA deal. When he found out these writers were not covered and that they had no health insurance, he agreed to put them under a Guild contract. Brian Walton, then the president of the WGA West, said, “It is our hope that this farsighted agreement will lay the framework for similar contracts in this genre.”
²⁷
David A. Goodman, a writer and producer on
Futurama
at the time, detailed the fortuitous nature and timing of this deal: “The fact that the shows . . . got one writer to be the Guild liaison and that they were all unified may have played a big role in Chernin saying yes. At that time there were less union difficulties. It was ten years after the previous strike and everything on television was covered under the WGA contract.” Those negotiations came at a moment of relative peace between the union and the studios, that these animated writers were all at one studio, and that the series were successful made it impossible for Chernin to overlook their writers’ individual and collective importance to the network. But “once reality [programming] started to take off,” Goodman said, “that started to tell the
studios and networks that . . . everything doesn’t have to be covered under the WGA contract. That was really the chink in the armor.”
²⁸
Subsequently, no group of animation writers has ever managed to win such a victory again. And with the increase in primetime reality television, studios had more reason to deny new types of writers Guild privileges.

The effect of reality programming on the media landscape during this twenty-year period rattled television writers to their core. The series
Survivor
and
Big Brother
, both European franchises that premiered on American broadcast television in 2000, altered primetime and set a precedent for reality television’s success. Two years later,
American Idol
became an overnight sensation. The genre’s colonization of primetime hours was a boon to the networks. These series were cheap to produce, and their potential for ratings soon exceeded the best numbers for scripted programming. Reality was not simply a rising new genre; it began to colonize an older one. Documentary writing also evolved. Television documentarian Sydnye White, who wrote written for
America’s Most Wanted
and
NBC Nightly News
, argued, “Reality television is making itself felt in the documentary world. Executives are demanding that documentaries have similar interpersonal conflicts and testy atmospheres. Let’s face it, tears pay off. So do fights.”
²⁹

The enormous popularity of reality shows gave executives reasons to consider a radical restructuring of their business practices. In 2003 reporter Bill Carter quoted Leslie Moonves, president of CBS Television, declaring the end of the old model of series television: “The world as we know it is over.” Carter spelled out the implications: “Not only will reality shows continue to flood network’s schedules next fall, but television executives are also predicting . . . an end to the traditional television season. Instead of the time-honored formula of introducing shows en masse in September and ending them in May, broadcast networks want to stagger the shows’ debuts and banish repeats. . . . There could also be fewer orders for dramas and comedies, with a resulting shrinking of jobs for Hollywood writers and actors.”
³⁰
The advent of programming that could be produced cheaply, show strong ratings, adapt to a variety of production scheduling structures, be rolled out relatively quickly, and get shelved with little loss gave network executives increasing confidence about delaying negotiations with the guilds.