The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (49 page)

Victor, David:
Gunsmoke
(1955–1975, WGAAn),
Dr. Kildare
(1961–1966),
Marcus Welby, M.D
. (1969–1976, creator)

Webb, Jack:
Dragnet
(1951–1959, creator),
Adam-12
(1968–1975, creator with Robert A. Cinader),
O’Hara, U.S. Treasury
(1971–1972, creator with James E. Moser)

Webb, James R.:
Cape Fear
(1962),
How the West Was Won
(1962, AA), WGAw president (1962–1963), Davies Award (1965),
They Call Me Mister Tibbs!
(1970, with Alan Trustman), Cox Award (1974), North Award (1975)

Webster, Tony:
The Phil Silvers Show
(1955–1959, EA),
Car 54, Where Are You?
(1961–1963),
The Love Boat
(1977–1987)

Weiner, Matthew:
Becker
(1998–2004),
The Sopranos
(1999–2007, EA, WGAA),
Mad Men
(2007–2015, creator, EA, WGAA)

Wells, John:
ER
(1994–2009, EAn, WGAAn),
China Beach
(1998–2001, EAn, WGAAn), WGAw president (1999–2001 and 2009–2011),
The West Wing
(1999–2006, WGAAn, Humanitas Prize), Laurel Award (2007),
The Company Men
(2010),
Shameless
(2011–present, developed for US television)

West, Nathanael:
It Could Happen to You!
(1937, with Samuel Ornitz),
Five Came Back
(1939, with Jerome Cady and Dalton Trumbo)

White, Phyllis, and Robert White:
The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show
(1950–1958, Robert only),
Death Valley Days
(1952–1970),
Guiding Light
(1952–2009, EA, WGAA),
My Favorite Martian
(1963–1966)

White, Sydnye:
Detroit S.W.A.T
. (2000),
Moneywise with Kevin Boston
(2000)

Wilber, Carey:
Armstrong Circle Theater
(1950–1963),
Bonanza
(1959–1973),
Star Trek
(1966–1969)

Wilder, Billy:
Ninotchka
(1939, with Charles Brackett and Walter Reisch, AAn),
Double Indemnity
(1944, with Raymond Chandler, AAn),
Sunset Blvd
. (1950, with Charles Brackett and D. M. Marshman Jr., AA, WGAA),
Sabrina
(1954, with Ernest Lehman and Samuel Taylor, AAn, WGAA),
The Seven Year Itch
(1955, with George Axelrod, WGAA), Laurel Award (1957, with Charles Brackett, and 1980, with I.A.L. Diamond),
Some Like It Hot
(1959, with I.A.L. Diamond, AAn, WGAA),
The Apartment
(1960, with I.A.L. Diamond, AA, WGAA), National Medal of Arts (1993)

Willimon, Beau:
The Ides of March
(2011, with George Clooney and Grant Heslov, AAn),
House of Cards
(2013–present, creator for US television, EAn, WGAAn)

Wilmore, Larry:
In Living Color
(1990–1994, EAn),
The PJs
(1999–2001, co-creator),
The Bernie Mac Show
(2000–2006, creator, EA, WGAAn, Humanitas Prize, Peabody Award),
The Office
(2005–2013, EAn, WGAAn)

Wilson, Carey:
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
(1925, with Lew Wallace, June Mathis, and Bess Meredyth),
Faithless
(1932),
Mutiny on the Bounty
(1935, with Talbot Jennings and Jules Furthman, AAn), AMPAS co-founder

Wilson, Michael:
A Place in the Sun
(1951, with Harry Brown, AA, WGAA),
Salt of the Earth
(1954),
Friendly Persuasion
(1956, AAn, WGAA, credit restored 1996),
The Bridge on the River Kwai
(1957, with Carl Foreman, AA, AA credit restored 1984),
Lawrence of Arabia
(1962, uncredited, with Robert Bolt, AAn, credit restored 1995),
Planet of the Apes
(1968, with Rod Serling), Laurel Award (1976), blacklisted

Winship, Michael:
Bill Moyers Journal
(1972–1976, 1979–1981, and 2007–2010, EA, WGAA), Jablow Award (1998),
Nova
(1974–present), WGA East president (2007–present),
Moyers & Company
(2012–present, WGAA)

Wodehouse, P. G.:
The Magic Plus Fours
(1924, short),
The Man in Possession
(1931, with Sarah Y. Mason),
A Damsel in Distress
(1937, with Ernest Pagano and S. K. Lauren)

Wolfson, Roger:
The Closer
(2005–2012),
Saving Grace
(2007–2010)

Woods, Frank E.:
A Corner in Wheat
(1909, with D. W. Griffith),
Judith of Bethulia
(1914, with D. W. Griffith and Grace Pierce),
The Birth of a Nation
(1915, with D. W. Griffith), AMPAS co-founder

Yglesias, Rafael:
Fearless
(1993),
From Hell
(2001, with Terry Hayes),
Dark Water
(2005)

Young, Nedrick:
Passage West
(1951, as front for Alvah Bessie, with Lewis R. Foster),
Jailhouse Rock
(1957, as Ned Young),
The Defiant Ones
(1958, pseudonym Nathan E. Douglas, with Harold Jacob Smith, AA, WGAA, credit restored 1997),
Inherit the Wind
(1960, pseudonym Nathan E. Douglas, with Harold Jacob Smith, AAn, credit restored 1997), blacklisted

Young, Waldemar:
Island of Lost Souls
(1932, with Philip Wylie),
Cleopatra
(1934, with Vincent Lawrence),
The Lives of a Bengal Lancer
(1935, with Achmed Abdullah, John L. Balderston, Grover Jones, and William Slavens McNutt, AAn)

Zweibel, Alan:
Saturday Night Live
(1975–present, EA, WGAA),
It’s Garry Shandling’s Show
(1986–1990, creator with Garry Shandling, EAn),
North
(1994, with Andrew Scheinman),
The Story of Us
(1999, with Jessie Nelson), Hunter Award (2010)

APPENDIX B

METHODOLOGY

Writing is an emotionally draining thing. It is a psychologically damaging occupation. It is to the soul what asbestos clearing is to the lungs. [
To the waiter:
] I’m fine, thank you.

—Craig Mazin, interview, 12 June 2011

In
The Writers
, I explore the history of the American film and television industry through the lens of a particular group of practitioners. I integrate these industries in ways that mirror not only their common structures but also the career paths of many screenwriters. My decision to examine film, television, and streaming media writers, echoes the work of scholars who have traced connections between the often balkanized areas of film studies and media studies. The practice of moving among media is neither a contemporary nor a rare phenomenon. Though writers have always crossed media boundaries, their labor has rarely been examined in a way that takes the specificity of these migrations or its effects into account.

Studies of distinct communities of American media practitioners afford significant insights into media production, and this scholarship grounds much of my work. This methodology breaks down notions of a monolithic industry, explaining the collaborative nature and complex networks of media production, distribution, and exhibition infrastructures, as well as those of local auxiliary support communities. Hortense Powdermaker’s and Leo Rosten’s studies of Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s inform my reading of the classical Hollywood era.
¹
The statistical studies of the WGA by William T. Bielby and Denise D. Bielby, as well as scholarship by Todd Gitlin, John Caldwell, and Denise Mann provide guides on how to combine grounded industrial research with subject interviews and data.
²
Collections of detailed interviews with screenwriters were invaluable, in particular
Horace Newcomb and Robert Alley’s
The Producer’s Medium
and Patrick McGilligan’s
Backstory
series.
³
Production studies scholarship would not be as rich without a parallel scholarly trend toward media industry studies. There the scholarship of Thomas Schatz, Jennifer Holt, and Alisa Perrin has been of particular use.
⁴
Research on the Writers Guild by Nancy Lynn Schwartz, Ian Hamilton, Joan Moore and Burton Moore, Christopher Wheaton, Howard Suber, and Marc Norman was my grounding to understand this rich history.
⁵

Although this book pulls from previous film and television histories, trade journals, memoirs, and documentaries, I have focused much of my scholarship around 155 personal interviews with American film and television writers. I conducted 60 formal interviews between 2008 and 2013. I sat down with professional writers for around three hours each to discuss their careers and their experiences in the Guild. (I also recorded five interviews with industry executives and WGA executives and directors about their work with the Guild or with writers.) All but a handful of these conversations were conducted in person.

In the process of doing research at the Writers Guild Foundation Library, I uncovered transcripts compiled for an oral history project carried out under the auspices of the WGA in 1978 and 1979. The Guild History Committee and its two-person staff conducted 104 interviews with prominent WGA members and executives. A copy of each transcript was sent to the interviewee for corrections or amendments, although the committee hoped to preserve “the flavor of conversation” rather than achieve “a pure literary presentation.”
⁶
Transcripts were returned unedited or with a letter that acknowledged approval. They were then stored and forgotten in the Writers Guild Foundation library. Now brought to light, these oral histories provide a personal perspective from which to understand changes in the media industries and cultures of production.

By placing media ethnography in conversation with industry history,
The Writers
provides a qualitative analysis of industry history. As Mark Williams says, “oral history can demonstrate to us and reacquaint us with the fact that the personal is not only political, but historical and dialogical as well.”
⁷
Each writer’s story provides the context for my discussion of aesthetics, technology, politics, and individual experience within this cultural and industry history. During our interview, Craig Mazin offered this warning: “Writers are the most dangerous people to try to discern history
from, because we’re particularly good at lacing together the narrative we want you to hear, and those narratives always flow toward a purpose or a point, the dramatic intent of the narrative.”
⁸
As I wove this history, I parsed the competing narratives presented by subjects who often care passionately about their personal narrative and history.

My research demands an integrated methodology, combining archival research, media industries analysis, and production studies methods in order to understand the fluctuations in the economic, political, and discursive dimensions of this cultural history, and then measuring these factors against the memories and observations of my interviewees. Todd Gitlin states that the language of media practitioners provides “a sense of the ambiance and texture of the industry’s life-as-it-is-lived.” Anecdotes become a part of industry speech, especially among writers, since it is their job to create stories. Gitlin describes Hollywood as a “place where many of the practitioners are brighter and more engaging than their products, and the story of the making of the show more revealing than the show itself. I think these stories, once scrutinized and interrogated, are the royal road to the industry’s workings.”
⁹
Like Gitlin, I found my subjects as compelling as most screen characters. I use these writers’ accounts as verification, testimony, or personal insight into a larger history I ground in historical research.

My use of oral history is in part practical: the work of writers lends itself well to conversation rather than observation. I can observe subjects at pitch meetings, in the writers’ room, or at Guild meetings, but watching writers actually write proves too distracting to my subjects and less useful to me as a scholar.
¹⁰
Oral history is also a particularly rewarding method for studying media practitioners whose central tools are words. In my career as a scholar I have interviewed a number of film, television, and digital media workers. Not surprisingly, writers as a group have been among the most deliberate speakers; they are not just aware of their position and role within the industry but are also uniquely articulate in their analysis of that role. Their facility with words ensures that their observations and their choices of terms withstand exploration and analysis as scholarly data.

American film historian Robert Sklar points in his work to Paul Veyne’s concept of “lengthening the questionnaire,” and I find this concept apt as well. Because my work has depended so much on interviews and oral history, the analogy is particularly prescient. Veyne notes, “Like the art of design, history is descriptive knowledge: the reader of a history book feels, when he
sees the springs of human affairs working, a pleasure of the same order as a Florentine amateur observing the form and the play of each muscle, each tendon. . . . The heartfelt cry of the historian, like that of a designer or of a naturalist, would be, ‘It is interesting because it is complicated.’
”
¹¹
In deciphering history, one is always searching for the truth, which entails a process of constructing and adding multiple plots. This book is a story of storytellers. And while, in their work, finding satisfying conclusions is part of the trade, as a historian, I look more to the serial and its multiple intertwining plots than the clear and closed narrative.

This book has been a deep collaboration with film and television writers to make sense of their careers and of their community. Some of my subjects are aware of my community as well. Many screenwriters work within colleges and universities, teaching the art and craft of writing as they work on scripts. James Schamus, writer of
The Wedding Banquet
and
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
, points to parallels between screenwriters and scholars. Both know “full well what it means to work in large institutions whose existences depend on the production and marketing of intellectual properties, and where, as a rule, ‘making sense’ is a ‘collaborative’ process—one in which intelligibility requires succumbing to protocols and dictates that are often in great tension with the original thoughts and inspirations that motivate our work.”
¹²
We write intellectual property for a living, we pitch our ideas, and we work within vast organizations.