The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (9 page)

It was in this environment that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was formed in May 1927, with a dinner party for thirty-six in the Crystal Ballroom of the Biltmore Hotel as its first event. The Academy was Louis B. Mayer’s brainchild: he intended it to be a mediating agency that ideally could curb any talk of further creative or craft organizing. The Academy would bring together prominent producers, directors, actors, writers, and technicians. Potentially anyone “who had contributed in a distinguished way
to the arts and sciences of Motion Picture Production” was eligible to be voted in as a member.
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This vague terminology was precisely what the studio heads liked best: it allowed them to exclude possible troublemakers. Officially, the Academy was designed to arbitrate between concerned parties, but in actuality it was a mock company union intended to repress further unionization. For five years, by rallying around the Academy, the studios were able to keep talent from mobilizing through the start of the Depression.

Even though the Guild and the Academy offered some arbitration, there was no codified method to adjudicate credits when a dispute arose about whose name should appear on a film. Attribution is critical to a writer’s ability to build a reputation, and a writer with a good reputation could garner better writing assignments and better wages. Under the seven-year contract, writers struggled to make a name for themselves within the profession, whether or not they came to Hollywood with previous success. Many writers were ultimately just cogs in the wheel of the studio system—or, as Aldous Huxley remarked, prisoners to it. At every studio, he wrote, there were “rows and rows of hutches, each containing an author on a long contract at a weekly salary. You see their anxious little faces peering through the bars. . . . There are authors on some lots whom nobody has seen for years. It’s like the Bastille.”
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The cultural myth of Hollywood as a place that ruined literary and theatrical writers is a common one. As Richard Fine argues in his study of 138 writers who came to Hollywood, “The members of this group . . . lie at the heart of the Hollywood-as-destroyer legend, for it is their experience which initially provoked complaint about the studios’ treatment of its imported writing talent. . . . Not all writers came to sad ends in Hollywood, then, but virtually
every
writer was disquieted or unnerved by the experience.”
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Many writers came to Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s for the money and not for the status or for the recognition. However, once they became a part of the industry, they realized the tremendous injustices toward workers within the studio system. Edmund North, who wrote
In a Lonely Place, The Day the Earth Stood Still
, and
Patton
, described their treatment: “I don’t want to suggest here that the life of a screenwriter in those days resembled that of a galley slave. What I am trying to say is that management treated writers with a high-handed disdain that made possible, if not inevitable, the creation of a Writers Guild.”
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Still, some groups in Hollywood had succeeded in coming to terms with the studios. In 1929, the American Society of Cinematographers
negotiated a five-year contract guaranteeing a minimum wage of $50 a day or $200 a week, along with basic working conditions, such as a fifty-four hour maximum work week, and a closed shop agreement, meaning that the studios would hire only union members in good standing. But the cinematographers were the anomaly within the industry, and they also settled their negotiations the summer before the stock market crashed.
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As writers soon learned after Louis B. Mayer’s performance in the spring of 1933, most employees were without recourse. The position of Hollywood workers was clear: those with unions and collective bargaining agreements behind them refused the cuts; those without negotiated contracts had little, if any, choice. After the lies they were told by their bosses about the state of the studios, writers decided to reestablish their former social club and create a labor union under the same name.

Formation of the Guild and the Academy Battle

In April 1933, the Screen Writers Guild drafted its first contract for the studios to sign. The intention of the document was basic: to establish uniform working conditions for all writers within the motion picture industry. Salary cuts like those instituted by Mayer had strengthened writers’ determination to fight back against this manipulation of compensation. They also considered other demands, such as control over the allocation of screen credits and restoring some authorial control to writers, but decided against them. As Christopher Wheaton explains, part of what made the Hollywood unions unique at this moment was that they were not fighting for better wages or better working conditions; rather, their primary goal was to keep the status quo in the face of studio rollbacks during the Depression. Above all, the Hollywood talent guilds were defensive entities.
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The first Screen Writers Guild union meetings crackled with excitement as writers debated plans for unionization. John Howard Lawson, who had come to Los Angeles five years earlier after a successful career as a playwright on Broadway, became the Guild’s first president. Frances Marion was elected vice president, and Joseph Mankiewicz was voted in as secretary. Marion’s position among the elected officials was no surprise. At the time, many women had successful careers as screenwriters, including prolific veterans like June Mathis (writer of
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
), Jeanie Macpherson (
Male and Female
), and Sonya Levien (
The Hunchback of Notre
Dame
). In the early days of the Guild as a labor organization, female screenwriters played a fundamental role in ensuring its success. Lizzie Francke argues that female screenwriters volunteered for the Guild in its earliest days as a way to channel their varied frustrations with their profession. The organization rewarded some for this hard work, and these women rose to positions of power within the union.
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Each new member promised to bring other writers as guests to the meetings, with hopes that these visitors would soon join the Guild. Membership was available based on a merit system. Active membership required meeting one of three criteria: three months of studio employment as a staff writer, a screen credit for a feature film, or three screen credits on film shorts. Writers who had not yet received credit on a film but were being paid by a studio were given junior status. Working with fellow writers, members courted new members, explaining their plan to end the tyranny of the long-term contract. Frances Marion remembers tackling this task with Anita Loos and Bess Meredyth, writer of
The Mark of Zorro
: “Anita, Bess, and I drew into these meetings other writers who had long-term contracts like ours [who] felt as we did toward the newcomers who had been fighting for credits on movies to which they had contributed, and for protection against being dismissed without cause. The contracts given to these potential scenarists abounded in clauses, and many [writers] had been let go before they had had an opportunity to prove their worth.”
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That desire to support younger, less experienced, or lower-paid employees was something writers continually mentioned in these conversations about the establishment of the Guild as a trade union. Lawson contacted Louise Silcox, head of the Dramatists Guild, to tell her of the screenwriters’ newfound success, mentioning how writers on top were looking out for writers at the bottom of the pay scale: “You will be glad to hear that the re-birth of the Screen Writers Guild is being accomplished with tremendous success and enthusiasm: in fact, a more immediate response than we had even dared to hope . . . the rush to sign and pay at last night’s meeting, and the solid support of the Screen Writers Guild was so heartening that I have not quite recovered from the excitement: many people spontaneously offered two and three hundred dollars [to cover dues] for those writers who could not afford the payment.”
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Writers were not as keen on unionization as they were on opening up lines of communication and negotiation between themselves and studio heads. The reorganized structure of the Screen Writers Guild became the model for the formation of
both the Screen Actors Guild and the Directors Guild of America. With President Roosevelt in the White House and labor leader John L. Lewis spearheading the new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), it was a time of increased interest in unionization. Labor was on the rise across the country, and the climate in Hollywood was such that its creative workers were interested.

The SWG’s immediate priorities were to stop imminent pay cuts and to gain control of the allocation of screen credits. Writers wanted a standardized system that would ensure that a writer deserving attribution would get it. As it was, the studios had control. Only when they saw their films in a theater would writers know whether they would be credited for their work or whether they would have to share attribution with a producer or his pet employee of the moment. As Nancy Lynn Schwartz explains:

For writers in Hollywood, then as now, a screen credit is the only form of identity he has. Faceless, and generally three pictures down the road by the time a film is finally made, the screen credit, whether it reads “Screenplay By,” “Original Screenplay By,” “Screenplay Based on the Novel By,” “Story By,” or “Additional Dialogue By,” tells the world the writer was there. A writer can work for years and make an exceedingly respectable living without ever seeing his name on the screen. . . . The level of income rises in direct proportion to screen credits, which prove a writer to be a good risk, and the writer with the longest and best list of credits has the safest berth.
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Stopping the capricious allocation of credits was critical to writers and to their new guild. It was not simply recognition or acclaim that writers sought. Rather, with more film titles to their names, especially more substantial films, writers might be able to renegotiate their contracts and leverage a pay increase.

Some writers whose personal contracts were up around this time began putting clauses into their new contracts to ensure that whatever terms they agreed to as individuals would not hurt the Guild’s collective bargaining agreement. Sonya Levien informed her studio that she was unable to sign a new contract pending the preparation of the Code of Practice and Procedure.
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In response, the studio’s lawyers suggested that if the contract met Levien’s approval, she sign it and leave it with her lawyer, to be released only
after the Guild had resolved its negotiations.
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She agreed, but her lawyer sent on the contract before negotiations were completed. Sadly, she had allowed the studio to get exactly what it wanted: a signed contract that went behind the back of the Guild. Not surprisingly, this example was only the beginning. Studio heads fought the Guild with a degree of viciousness that few writers saw coming.

Many of these writers were young, in their mid-twenties and early thirties, and were going up against the paternalistic structure of the industry. Fay Kanin, writer of
Tell Me Where It Hurts
, explained how many young and ambitious writers were not taken seriously: “Today a young person is very much welcomed into the industry, as you know, because they [producers] feel the audience is young and the young people have a kind of way to communicate with their contemporaries. But in that day and age, young was a dirty word in terms of getting a job in the movie industry.”
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A young writer was also much easier for a producer to push around. Although some studio heads like Harry Cohn at Columbia were willing to play along with the SWG at first, Louis B. Mayer threatened to throw out any writers under contract with MGM who joined the union.

When the SWG suggested that writers withdraw as members from the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, the studio heads took notice. Thalberg regarded his writers’ unionization as a personal affront: “How can you do this to me?” he bellyached. He could not understand why they would ever want to organize: “Those writers are living like kings. Why on earth would they want to join a union, like coal miners or plumbers?”
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The comparison of creative workers with blue-collar employees was part of a larger strategy that the studio heads had been using for years and would continue to employ against writers. Writers would have to go up against their own egos and discard the notion that they were “artists” if they were to accept their position in the way the SWG needed to define it—as employees.

When Upton Sinclair won the Democratic nomination for the governorship of California in 1934, a group of writers set up an “authors committee” to raise funds for his election. In response, the studio heads did everything in their power to stop Sinclair and undermine writers’ support for his candidacy. As Ian Hamilton observes, the nascent SWG adopted a resolution that condemned the studios for their tactics and “implied coercion and intimidation.”
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This early political action is significant as the Guild’s first step in speaking out on issues external to the realm of creative work, as well as in
taking a position on national- and state-level politics that countered the voice of the studios. As Allen Rivkin, a founding member of the SWG and writer of
Dancing Lady
, remembered, “We rebelled, because we felt the man had the right to a fair campaign and that we had the right to speak for ourselves. It was democracy in action and a rebellion against the control of the studios over our non-studio lives.”
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The national movement toward unionization was a part of this difficult era. President Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) affected not just blue-collar workers but white-collar workers as well. Under the NIRA and the authority of the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which created a Motion Picture Code, the government suggested that Hollywood’s newly formed creative guilds all coalesce under the auspices of the Academy. The government’s plan for cooperative action seemed acceptable at first, and SWG and SAG were eager to garner national support.
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But the Academy pushed back with so many provisions that it lost this opportunity for negotiation and created an angrier and more determined union movement. “Instead of gaining power by cozying up to the NRA regulators,” Tom Kemper argues, “the Academy managed to mobilize and strengthen the opposition, inspiring stronger pushes for unions by writers, directors, and actors.”
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