The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (6 page)

The creative crafts of the entertainment industry have historically been less difficult environments for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) workers than other professions. That said, integration has not been easy. Jasmine Love, writer on
The District
, opted for the term
heterosexism
rather than
homophobia
when describing her experiences working in television. She saw institutional bias play out when producers assumed that she could not write heterosexual stories.
⁶²
Dava Savel, who was showrunner on
Ellen
when the character and actor came out, was fired just before receiving an Emmy for writing on the series. Soon after coming out, the star decided to let go of the whole writers’ room and repopulate it with gay and lesbian writers.
⁶³
As Henderson deftly argues, homogenization is of primary import for many in positions of power in the industry.

Some minorities arguably have an upper hand in the industry, most notably Jewish writers, especially in the comedy genre. As Neal Gabler details in
An Empire of Their Own
, every studio head in Hollywood during the studio system was Jewish,
⁶⁴
and even today the number of Jews in the entertainment industry is disproportionately larger than national figures. Ring Lardner Jr. remembers being asked by Paul Jarrico whether the close ties between Lardner, Hugo Butler, Dalton Trumbo, Ian McClellan Hunter, and Michael Wilson resulted because they were all gentiles in a largely Jewish community. Hunter replied that in fact their friendship was based on their proclivity toward hard drinking.
⁶⁵
Although some of my interviewees discussed the usefulness of being conversant in cultural Judaism, race and gender were much more significant markers in defining writers’ experiences of identity within the industry and their feelings of insider or outsider status.

The Story Begins

In 1978, the Writers Guild established a committee to preserve the memories of its members as part of a vast oral history project.
⁶⁶
A bulletin in the
monthly newsletter encouraged writers from the East and West branches of the organization to be interviewed at the WGAw branch headquarters about salient moments in Guild history they remembered. Had they witnessed the Guild’s formation? How did they feel about the blacklist? The notice beckoned: “However memory serves you, rightly or wrongly, the object is to capture, not the dry recounting of absolute fact or dates, but the vibrancy and texture of the times as lived by the membership through the various period of the Guild. . . . This is
your
history as
you
lived it. The brickbats and bouquets.”
⁶⁷
Erna Lazarus, writer on
The Donna Reed Show
, was one of the ninety-four professionals who answered this call. Her recollections of her adventures as a founding member of the SWG and one of the first women to build a steady career in the Hollywood studios bridged more than three decades of turbulence and triumph. At the end of her interview, Lazarus struggled to find words to express her gratitude for the Writers Guild. Not surprisingly, this veteran screenwriter conjured a film that could tell the tale of the writers:

I just wish that all the new writers could have a complete motion picture to view of what it was like from the 1930s until [the] present time, and I think then they would really appreciate what they have got. Our kids do not know what it means to [have] electric light. We do not know what it means. Our mothers, perhaps our grandmothers, knew what it was like to turn on a gaslight. So we take it all for granted. Do not take the Writers Guild of America for granted. It is a very important part of our lives and of the industry.
⁶⁸

Few historians or screenwriters today know Lazarus’s name. She is one of hundreds of extraordinary writers—some legendary, others mostly forgotten—who enrich the remarkable history of an industry. So, as Margo Channing warned in razor-sharp words by Joseph Mankiewicz in
All About Eve
, “Fasten your seatbelts . . .”

1

The Artist Employee

IMAGE 5   Illustrated script and storyboard for the film that would become
Alice in Wonderland
, c. 1933. Screenplay by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

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

INTERVIEWER: Now we look back at . . . the 1930s, as the Golden Age of Hollywood—

JULIUS EPSTEIN, writer of
Casablanca
: We didn’t think so at the time. We did not think it was Golden at all. Maybe a little Bronze here and there, but far from Gold [laughs].

—
The Writer Speaks: Julius Epstein
, 1994

[David O. Selznick] even gave me a screen test, which, after he saw it, he said I was definitely going to be a writer.

—Ring Lardner Jr., interview by the Writers Guild Oral History Project, 1978

In the winter of 1933, the steady foundation under Hollywood began to crack. Quite literally, the walls started to shake when the Long Beach earthquake rumbled its way across the Southern California landscape on March 10. But it was not the first seismic shift noted that year. In the weeks preceding it, the film studios were facing the rapidly falling box office sales. Although the wild success of sound film and audiences’ desire for escapism during the dark economic times of the Depression had ensured big box office numbers for a few years, the cost of sound conversion along with a decrease in box office sales finally forced the moguls to reexamine their spending habits. This belt tightening, in turn, pushed Hollywood’s creative talent to open their eyes to the potential power of unionization.

Across the United States, the situation for working and unemployed Americans was dire. In the richest country in the world, more than fifteen million workers were unemployed and looking for jobs that did not exist.
¹
In the middle of this national devastation, an American president came to power who used popular media as a central means to communicate with his suffering citizens. In the first of his “fireside chats” on March 12, 1933, Franklin
Delano Roosevelt took to the radio airwaves to calm the public regarding the banking crisis, explaining clearly and in lay terms the notions of value, credit, and capitalism, and declaring a bank holiday. Roosevelt emphasized his confidence in the American people and American workers, whom he valued as “more important than gold.”
²
Citizens were scared, and they were looking to their leaders for inspiration and for a clear path out of financial ruin.

The same was true for individual businesses and industries, including the Hollywood studios. The studios were indebted to stockholders and to personnel and feared that it would be impossible to pay off both debts with funds so tight. In January 1933, RKO and Paramount had gone into receivership, declaring their theater chains bankrupt.
³
Studios were unable to meet payroll. MGM cobbled together the funds to pay its employees in cash, but Universal suspended contracts, and Fox told its employees outright that they would not be paid. Across the eight major studios, the outlook was grim, and a shutdown looked likely.
⁴
Employees were anxious and concerned. On February 3, 1933, ten screenwriters met informally at the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood to discuss a growing number of concerns. Writers working within studio walls had previously gathered under the moniker “Screen Writers Guild,” or “The Writers,” as a social organization. Now they gave the name “Screen Writers Guild” (SWG) new meaning and a heightened sense of urgency.
⁵
As stirrings of unionization began among screenwriters, the studio heads were anxious to deter any talk of the Hollywood workforce organizing. Louis B. Mayer, the MGM studio boss, stood in front of his employees with a plan to counteract the effects of the Depression.

The preceding months had been difficult for Mayer. Irving Thalberg, his vice president in charge of production, had suffered yet another heart attack—though the press reported it as only a bout of influenza. Even when Thalberg was available, tension between the two executives was on the rise.
⁶
The studio had barely made its payment to employees during the bank closure. At the last-minute the studio sold its lucrative Treasury bonds and in a dramatic—arguably cinematic—move, hired a private airplane on the East Coast to airdrop the cash to a line of grateful employees. Still, the studio’s cash flow was drying up, and selling more bonds was not possible. MGM needed bold action and got it: Mayer called an emergency meeting and gave the performance of a lifetime. Even though the SWG’s first meeting had occurred weeks before, screenwriters and historians have often seized upon this event as the moment of the Guild’s formation—a narrative that makes
for a grander origin story for a union of people who tell stories. Inevitably, the event’s details may be embellished, but the actions have been documented in a wide array of memoirs, press reports, and oral histories. The story goes like this:

In early March 1933, Mayer called all of MGM’s directors, actors, department heads, and writers to the executive studio projection room. After letting the crowd wait for more than twenty minutes, Mayer entered, unshaven—perhaps, as many have noted, for the only time in his life.
⁷
He was exhausted and red-eyed. In front of a massive crowd of creative personnel, Mayer declared that the studio was broke. As producer and legendary MGM story editor Samuel Marx describes: “He began with a soft utterance. ‘My friends . . .’ Then he broke down. Stricken, he held out his hands, supplicating, bereft of words.”
⁸
The only way to save MGM, he implored, was for everyone to take a 50 percent pay cut. Philip Dunne tells the story as he heard it: “At the time I remember [fellow writer] Donald Ogden Stewart describing to some of us what had happened at MGM. He said Louis B. Mayer got up and pointed a finger at all the people who were listening to him saying, ‘
We’ve
got to take a salary cut.’
”
⁹
The emphasis was on the community sharing the weight of the studio’s future on their collective shoulders. Employees were given the impression that if everyone worked together, the crisis would be averted. After a pause, actor Lionel Barrymore proclaimed in his commanding, avuncular baritone, “Don’t worry, L.B. We’re with you.”
¹⁰
But they were not. Fellow actor Wallace Beery rose from his seat and stormed out.
¹¹
Ernest Vajda, screenwriter of
The Merry Widow
, questioned the economics of Mayer’s declaration. The pay cuts, he believed, were premature: “I read the company statements, Mr. Mayer. I know our films are doing well. Maybe the other companies must do this, but our company should not.”
¹²
Barrymore boomed back: “Mr. Vajda is like a man who stops for a manicure on his way to the guillotine.” At this point, according to some accounts, the entire room went into peals of laughter and applause; others suggest that the chuckles were more dutiful.
¹³
The drama continued.

May Robson, an Australian-born actress who began her career as a Vitagraph star in 1916, rose from her chair and declared with great aplomb, “As the oldest person in the room, I will take the cut.” As if working from a script, eight-year-old child star Freddie Bartholomew took his cue and piped up, “As the youngest person in the room, I’ll take the cut.”
¹⁴
It was then, when Mayer had the full attention of his audience, that he called for a
vote to show a declaration of allegiance and a willingness to accept the salary reduction. Frances Goodrich, screenwriter for
The Thin Man, It’s a Wonderful Life
, and
Father of the Bride
, remembered, “Everyone got pious and scared.” The vote was cast with tears of solidarity, and the employees agreed to accept the loss in pay. Mayer promised that he would personally see to it that every penny was reimbursed someday. The tone was solemn as the room was rocked by the new reality of Hollywood economics. But walking back across the iron bridge to the front office buildings, Samuel Marx overheard Mayer gloating to his right-hand man and talent expert Benny Thau, “So! How did I do?”
¹⁵
Albert Hackett, Goodrich’s husband and writing partner, said of the meeting, “Oh, that L. B. Mayer, he created more Communists that day than Karl Marx.”
¹⁶

As at other studios, there was economic necessity behind Mayer’s appeal to his talent for retrenchment. Across Hollywood, creative workers took pay cuts and ensured their studios’ safe financial grounding. Lester Cole, writer of
Objective, Burma!
, remembers how forty employees of Paramount Pictures were invited into a projection room to hear that the Depression gave the studio no choice but to cut the salaries of actors, directors, and writers by 50 percent.
¹⁷
The dramatic slashing of incomes was later cited in part as a pretense, a subterfuge play-acted by moguls in front of employees to foster fidelity in a time of economic crisis. After six weeks, Mayer and other executives restored workers’ pay to their full salaries. But the deducted sums for those six weeks were never reimbursed. And there was more to this story than Mayer let on.