The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (5 page)

Credits and the credibility of writers have been central to individual contract agreements. While much of the Guild’s litigation work is over credits, there is little doubt that not just past erasures of writers’ names but also the continued diminishment of members’ work has compelled many screenwriters to action. Media scholar Mark Deuze speaks of the precariousness of labor as a recent phenomenon, but I would argue that screen and television writers—like many film and television producers—have had their names challenged, their contributions diminished, and their careers held in the balance for enough years that they could be considered experts in tracking the vicissitudes of labor.
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Identity Thief
screenwriter Craig Mazin explains how screenwriters’ lack of legal control over the fate of their scripts—and thereby over
their names and reputations—can lead to bitter disputes. And that distinction is ingrained in the meaning of authorship: “The rest of the world has
droit morale
: the moral right of the author. We don’t. The United States is unique. Our unique approach to copyright, to allow work-for-hire . . . [has] created easily the most economically viable climate for writers in the world. . . . You are so much better off financially as a writer in the United States than you are anywhere else. But artistically? There are deep, deep challenges. The things that make the marketplace so rich are also the things that create that state of discontent that occasionally erupts, riot-style, into strikes.”
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The significance of a writer’s name and credits continues to be a critical issue, a struggle that can be seen most clearly in the Writers Guild’s forty-plus-year battle with the DGA regarding possessory credit. When a film is promoted as “by” a particular director, writers’ hackles go up: all collaboration is erased, the labor is denied, and writers are moved to action.

Identity: Outsiders on the Inside

Unlike the days when writers hammered away at typewriters in studio bungalows between trips to the commissary, the majority of writers today spend their working hours outside studio walls.
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Some have found ways to exist comfortably outside the industry while participating from afar. Sooni Taraporevala, who wrote
Mississippi Masala
, embraces her role on the margin, living in India while writing for the American screen. These sites of solitary production challenge traditional notions of media work as collaborative and, at least geographically, the work of insiders. This position as an outsider is one that writers connect with, given that they perform the majority of their work before the cast and crew appear. This outsider status is often made symbolic as well.

All of the writers I interviewed are established working or retired media professionals. Though some writers said issues of identity do not weigh heavily on them, virtually all recognized the patterns of inclusion and exclusion that serve as evaluators of a writer’s professional self. These distinctions play out in varying ways: in a conflicted position straddling roles as both artist and employee, in changing notions of allies and adversaries, and within marginalized communities of writers, in particular, women and minorities.

Screenwriters are not in a comfortable position; both inside and outside of media production, the creation of commercial art is often seen as a conjoining of irreconcilable goals, or at best antithetical ones. Some scholars
have pointed to the nature of screenwriters’ labor: they are artisans working within a capitalist, bureaucratic system. This paradox is what Joan and Burton Moore call the myth of the “bureaucrat artist.”
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Unlike laborers in blue-collar industries, writers have more regular access to management, both at work and socially, a situation that has led to strange working relationships. Even with this proximity, their pleas for better compensation or public acknowledgment of their work are rarely heard. During the formation of the Screen Writers Guild (SWG), Howard Green, writer of
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
and one of the organization’s early members, was out dancing at the Cocoanut Grove. There MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer walked up to him, irate upon hearing of Green’s union membership, and told him, “You’ll never work in Hollywood again. Never.” Green could not find work for fourteen months.
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When writer William Ludwig did not comply with Mayer’s suggestion that he stay out of labor politics, Mayer called him an “ungrateful son of a bitch” and threw Ludwig out of his office. Ludwig laughed as he said that he was sure all the writers’ phones were tapped and that during his entire career at MGM he was regularly dismissed from Mayer’s office and told he was “stupid and would never amount to anything.”
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Though they were essential to the process and were fairly well paid during the studio era, writers were regularly abused for the privilege. Circumstances have changed for writers since then, and the fact that writers often travel in the same socioeconomic circles as management makes for awkward moments. A few writers told me how uncomfortable it was to run into studio bosses at parties or at their children’s schools during the 2007–2008 strike and to have to act cordial and friendly, only to confront the same executive hours later driving a car across the picket line at the studio. Los Angeles and New York are big cities, but they are small company towns. Many writers speak with bitter wit about “high-class victimization”: in other words, they feel mistreated while in a position of status. A desire for social justice pervades not only some of their scripts but also the narrative they see playing out within their profession.
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The financial success of some can be so immense that these bureaucrat artists must struggle with the uncomfortable position of being cast as outsiders within the inner circle of the media industries.

As the industry has grown, the studio and network apparatuses for handling labor disputes have evolved into a highly structured, tightly monitored group of businesspeople and lawyers who manage negotiations with unions and guilds. On the other side of the bargaining table, the Writers
Guild and other trade groups do hire executives, but working artists and craftspeople sit on their negotiating committees. And few of them have experience with labor negotiations or contract law. In dialogue about the 1960 strike, David Harmon explained the uncomfortable process of reintegration from being a disgruntled employee back to being a creative worker: “We thought that management was the enemy. They were not. They were businessmen. When the strike was over every one of those men across the table from us were gentlemen. They all stuck their hands out. . . . They were paid every week. It was their job one way or another to get it over with. There was no enmity. They didn’t say, ‘We’ll get you later.’ They could not care less. . . . That is what they do for a living. That is not what we do for a living.”
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There is a residual effect for writers as they readjust from outsider to insider again.

Antagonism and frustration about outsider status can happen within the group as well. For minority communities—most notably women and writers of color—the feelings of outsider status are as exasperating as they are demeaning. In her anthropological analysis of screenwriters in Hollywood in 1994, Jorja Prover argues, “To the extent that motion picture and television writers have been overlooked, the minority writer has not even been mentioned.”
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Women who wanted to write strong female lead characters were often passed over for jobs in writers’ rooms on television series. “It’s pink and blue, in terms of assignments, as well,” said Robin Swicord, who adapted
Memoirs of a Geisha
and
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
for the screen. “All women who work in the film business are swimming in a soup of gender bias, and it is invisible to many people, unacknowledged by many people.”
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Betty Ulius, who wrote for film and television for more than twenty years, explains that the issue was never about barring women from participating. Rather, there was a disconnect between men and women within the community:

Up until 1971, women were almost totally disregarded in the Writers Guild . . . But there was absolutely no feeling that women were left out of the Writers Guild. This was not a big masculine conspiracy. When I came out from New York in 1959, I would go to the few meetings a year that we would have and see maybe two or three women. Women were absolutely not talked to. This was not, again, because of a conspiracy, but because writers are generally shy people. The men would talk to
the men and unless you were built like Farrah Fawcett-Majors you were absolutely ignored. . . . We were not asked to play golf or tennis. We never got jobs the way most men get jobs by knowing other men . . . [who would invite] you to come in and tell a story.
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Although some of the difficulty that women experienced in finding work within the industry could be attributed to sexism, data on writers’ employment follow documented trends in hiring practices at the time. Writers and producers—like many involved in employment—traditionally tend to feel most comfortable hiring people with backgrounds, interests, and experiences similar to their own. And given that most film and television producers are white and male, the discrepancy in numbers is substantial. In 1973, 13 percent of the Guild’s members were women—many of whom were underemployed. Thirty years later, in 2003, the percentage had grown only to an average of 24 percent (27 percent for television, 18 percent for film).
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That same year, the employment of minority writers hit a low point of 10 percent in television and 6 percent in film.
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These figures say nothing about the substantial gender and race gaps in median earnings over the decades.

Other writers feel that diversity in script writing can be an advantage. Ronald Bass, screenwriter of
Rain Man
and
The Joy Luck Club
, has found great success partnering with women on writing projects. He believes that women and men often focus on different aspects of a story:

In my experience, there is a big gender difference. Men are result-oriented. Fuck the girl. Win the prize. Beat up the guy. Get the money. Close the deal. Win the game. And they do not want to know, they do not want an inner life. . . . Women are process-oriented. They have to have an inner life. . . . That is why I like to write about women. We did
Rain Man
. . . and I said to Tom [Cruise] at one point, “This is about your character becoming more like a woman.” He said, “Thanks very much.” I explained . . . “It has nothing to do with the character becoming effeminate. It is with your character learning that he has an inner life . . . Dustin [Hoffman] cannot make that change. He cannot have an inner life. So the access character is you, Tom. You are going to be developing through the course of the movie. You are the person who is going to go on the journey. . . . We are going to focus on Dustin and be obsessed with Dustin but we are going to identify with you.”
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Bass’s comments highlight the necessity not just for male and female writers, but also for male and female characters and for masculinity and femininity to be expressed in creative work. While many women write action and many men write process, this drive to tell compelling stories that lure in wide audiences is part of a push for diversity among writers.

When minority writers, whether women or men, discuss experiences working within the industry, they describe the struggle not just to land a job but also to present an alternative thought or opinion to executives and other creative personnel. Susan Kim told of the surprisingly difficult time she had getting one producer to understand the character of the central boy in “The Princess and the Pea” episode of the HBO animated children’s series
Happily Ever After
. Kim wanted the boy to be spacey, but the producer was eager to give him thick glasses, a bad haircut, and a pocket protector. Kim responded that she did not want him to be an Asian geek. The producer fought back: “
‘But nerds are funny.’ I said, ‘Yes, but Asian nerds—you don’t want to go there, trust me on this.’
”
Happily Ever After
has been lauded by the industry and parents’ groups alike for its representation of minorities and its forward-thinking, reimagined versions of classic fairy tales, but here was a Korean American writer working with a Caucasian producer who could not conceive that the direction she was suggesting invoked a derogatory stereotype. Kim virtually had to plead with her producer: “
‘Please. You have to believe me when I say that it’s an offensive stereotype. Trust me. It is. Trust me. Trust me. That’s why you hire diverse writers, so we can bring some of our experience to it. My experience is that it’s a really offensive stereotype.’ So I like to think that it was an informative discussion for this executive. She didn’t press it. I did manage to do what I wanted with the character, but it was eye-opening. Thinking: why do I have to keep repeating this?”
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The amount of back-and-forth discussion of what was considered a stereotype provides a compelling example of the difficulties minority writers have often faced when trying to put stories on the screen.

As both a showrunner (
Soul Food
) and a media scholar, Felicia Henderson is a uniquely astute analyst of the industry. In her scholarly article on race and gender in the television comedy writers’ room, Henderson provides ample evidence of the difficult role women and minority writers play as they try to negotiate the sixty-year-old traditions of a private and highly protected workspace. Even as much has changed (there are more women and minorities than before), much has stayed the same (the rules of engagement and
the impulse toward homogeneity). Henderson writes, “Humor is generated within this space through a process of inclusion and exclusion, familiarity and othering, and humor is derived from social categories such as race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, which become the means by which the performative space is homogenized.”
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This desire for sameness—in humor, in creative abilities, in background—marginalizes women and minorities within the writers’ room.