The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (10 page)

It quickly became clear to the two guilds that the code openly favored studio employers. As Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund note, the guilds “soon discovered, along with other newly formed unions around the country, that the NIRA was not a silver platter, but a brass bell opening round one of a violent struggle over union recognition and industrial reform in America.”
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Ceplair and Englund detail how the NIRA failed to recognize the authority of the newly founded guilds and lacked a mechanism to improve the status of writers and actors. The guilds quickly went to work to stop the NIRA. SWG president Lawson said, “We’re going to fight. We won’t allow them to place the burden for all their waste and inefficiency on the creative talent which is responsible for every dollar brought into the box office.”
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Using every social tie they had in Washington, the two guilds held off the controversial provisions of the Motion Picture Code of the NIRA. In May 1935 the NIRA itself was declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court, which at the time was extremely hostile to Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation. Rather than place power in the hands of the Academy, Roosevelt’s administration suggested five-by-five committees (five writers paired with five producers, or five actors paired with five
producers), which would oversee disputes regarding wages and hours for their respective constituencies.
Variety
prematurely reported that the Academy was “about to fold up completely and fall into the ash-can of oblivion,” but the moguls would not give up so easily.
⁷⁷

Intimidation and control were the moguls’ first line of defense. The studio heads countered writers’ efforts by instituting a series of measures that restricted their rights. Writers were allowed to work only with particular producers on specific projects; as a result, the total number of writers employed at any time by the studios declined.
⁷⁸
As Ceplair and Englund detail, MGM dropped ten writers in one week, and more writers were finding themselves on week-to-week contracts or per-picture deals. They also document how some blacklisting occurred at the major studios against a few of the more active heads of the SWG. These acts did not amount to much, as most of the writers were quickly scooped up by competing studios, but it was “a taste of what was to come.”
⁷⁹
Everyone observing these changes in the behavior of the front office was on edge. Frances Marion recalls in her autobiography, “We would not have blinked had L.B. [Mayer] roared out a threat to close the studio unless we gave up the [Guild] idea, but when Irving Thalberg made this threat in chilling tones we were shocked into a dread silence which revealed his enormous power over us.”
⁸⁰

The moguls’ second line of defense, the Academy, was still the organization through which they tried to wield their power. First they stalled the five-by-five committees for as long as possible. Then, when Academy negotiators finally did show up for meetings, they rejected every proposal the writers and actors placed on the table. When the NIRA was declared unconstitutional in May 1935, the five-by-five committees dissolved.
⁸¹
The moguls argued that the Academy was the only trade organization that was needed. But Guild writers and the actors who had joined SAG knew that the Academy was really a sweetheart organization for the studios disguised as a mediatory union. The SWG and SAG thus banded together in these early years, sharing legal counsel as they worked against the Motion Picture Code and the constraints of the Motion Pictures Producers Association. As Harry Tugend, writer of
Pocketful of Miracles
, remembered, “The membership meetings were more frequent, louder, until they woke up the news media.”
⁸²

The crisis between the Guilds and the Academy peaked on Oscar night in 1936 with the national news media in attendance.
⁸³
Outside the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, members of the SAG and the SWG protested
the event, insisting that the Academy Awards did not fairly represent all members of the motion picture community. Inside the hotel, when Dudley Nichols won for his adaptation of Liam O’Flaherty’s novel
The Informer
, he stood up and declared that he refused to accept the award. Nichols’s shaming of the studio heads on their most self-congratulatory night made clear to the studios that any guise of the Academy as a mediating unit between management and employees had disappeared. The curtain had lifted on their union-busting scheme.

Though the NIRA was lost, the Wagner Act of 1935 brought new hope for the SWG. This piece of legislation guaranteed collective bargaining for trade unions with jurisdiction over a particular industry. It outlawed company unions and prohibited coercion and blacklisting. The act established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which adjudicated disputes regarding which union might represent a group of workers as well as union violations. The key for mobilized writers was to establish the Screen Writers Guild
as the one-and-only trade organization with jurisdiction over all screenwriters. But studio heads had other plans. First, the moguls spent almost two years challenging the constitutionality of the Wagner Act; second, when that tactic failed in 1937, they argued that the motion picture industry was outside of the jurisdiction of the Wagner Act because the vast majority of its work took place in California and should not be considered by the US government as interstate commerce.
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IMAGE 9   Telegram from Sonya Levien to Dudley Nichols, after Nichols refused the Academy Award for
The Informer
in 1936.

Screen Writers Guild Records, 1921–1954, Writers Guild Foundation Archive, Shavelson-Webb Library, Los Angeles

Despite these actions, the SWG kept fighting, and writers became hopeful not just about jurisdiction within the industry but also about the possibility of increased power through amalgamation with the more established Authors League of America. Here was the chance to become a professional organization that would carry weight with other forms of writing outside Hollywood. The SWG executive board listed for its members thirteen potential benefits of amalgamation, including control of credits, fair arbitration, a prohibition on blacklists, a prohibition on general salary cuts, a prohibition on speculative screenplay writing for any producer, a requirement that producers purchase rights before adaptation, and notification to writers when others are hired to write on the same project for the same producer.
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Sound made great writers invaluable to producers, since tight scripts ensured speedy production. But with so many people eager for good work, a strike, though it might affect the quality of work, would have little effect on production schedules. Amalgamation promised to give the Guild power in a strike: if all writers were unified in a syndicate, no dramatists or novelists would be available as strikebreakers if Hollywood writers went on strike. Joining a national federation was a bold endeavor that would propel the industry into a direct confrontation between producers and talent. But the writers did not stop there. They had an ace in the hole.

The leaders of the SWG proposed an addition to the amalgamated guild’s bylaws. Article XII called for prohibiting contracts or options for services or the sale of any material to a studio after May 2, 1938, unless the studio was a signatory of a Guild contract. Under this provision, long-term contracts would be null and void without a Guild contract for all writers working at the studios. Producers were quick to remind writers that these acts of defiance—amalgamation, Article XII, or a possible strike—would lead to dire consequences. Thalberg reportedly told his writers, “If you wish to put all these people out of work, it is your responsibility. For, if you proceed with this strike, I shall close down the entire plant, without a single exception.
Make no mistake. I mean precisely what I say. I shall close this studio, lock the gates, and there will be an end to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer productions. And it will be you—all you writers—who will have done it.”
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As early as 1938, Charles Brackett, in his role as president of the SWG, asked the NLRB to ensure that the Guild’s membership list would remain private. If producers got hold of lists, Brackett argued, they could strong-arm or, worse, fire writers who belonged to the Guild.
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Studio lawyers declared that amalgamation would destroy the studios and make them vulnerable to federal antitrust law as well as California’s antitrust legislation, the Cartwright Act.
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Though they accepted plenty of Wall Street money, the moguls refused to imagine making deals with a trade union of writers that was “being governed from New York.”
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This accusation, of course, made some writers bristle: they feared losing their negotiating power to playwrights and novelists.

Some highly successful screenwriters who were politically more conservative and also sympathetic to the producers—people like John Lee Mahin (
Captains Courageous
), Howard Emmett Rogers (
Libeled Lady
and
For Me and My Gal
), and James K. McGuinness (
A Girl in Every Port, A Night at the Opera
, and
Rio Grande
)—started to express distaste for the Guild’s agenda. They declared that the leadership was going too far and might put the Guild in the hands of eastern Reds, a prospect they found intolerable.
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Others found themselves wavering, wary of amalgamation but not willing to walk away from the Guild.

The primary targets of the producers’ attacks were Article XII and the writers’ proposal for a closed shop. The newspapers came at the Guild at full throttle, most notably William Randolph Hearst’s papers and the conservative trade journal
The Hollywood Reporter
. An April 1936 editorial in Hearst’s
Los Angeles Examiner
described the SWG as a self-serving group that was threatening the heart of the industry: “The beneficiaries of the industry generally should not allow greedy and selfish cliques to kill the prolific geese which have laid such marvelous golden eggs for all. There are no such other golden eggs to be found in the world.”
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A few days later an editorial in the
Los Angeles Times
asked, “Why do you want to turn over your independence to a group of men who have continuously expressed nothing but contempt for you as artists and to whose dictation the producers would never and could never submit?”
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The public attacks were unrelenting. On May 2, the producers issued a statement: “There is not the slightest change in the position of the motion picture producers with regard to proposals to establish a closed shop
for screenwriters. Any attempt to cripple the industry by invoking Article XII will be fought to the limit; any effort to curb the free and independent relationship between producer and writer will be resisted at any cost.”
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The SWG chose to respond to its own constituency through the
Screen Guilds’ Magazine
. To the question posed by W. R. Wilkerson, owner and editor of
The Hollywood Reporter
, as to why writers would want a closed shop, Dudley Nichols replied with a list of benefits: “Fairness. Honesty. Genuine friendship with producers. A more courageous stand against foolish censorship. More integrity as craftsmen. Abolish fear. A stronger industry and a better art. Pride and self respect. In fact they are too many to enumerate. Better just to ask, ‘What have producers to fear?’ Nothing. ‘What has the dishonest producer or writer (assuming that the human race is fallible) to fear?’ Everything!”
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Even as the SWG battled with the press and the producers, there was cause for concern within the Guild. Devery Freeman called it a time of tremendous polarization among writers.
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Some writers expressed frustration with the liberal leadership of the SWG. Samson Raphaelson, writer of
The Jazz Singer, Trouble in Paradise
, and
Suspicion
, recalled feeling that SWG president Ernest Pascal was overly combative in his tone against the producers:

I got a letter saying we were going to organize, we were going to have a big meeting and it was a letter full of defiance terminology. “We will defy the producers.” It had a kind of class war inflection that I felt was not needed. I felt this is . . . going to unduly create a fear that we’re Communists, that we are going to destroy the system instead of organizing. . . . I called him and I said, “God almighty, why did you have to use inflammatory language? The battle has not started. You know, you’re sounding as if you are waving a flag and saying, ‘Let’s all come girded to the loins.’ . . . You just scared the hell out of the studios when all you want to do is have a stronger Guild.”
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At the same time, Raphaelson felt pressured by producer Bernie Hyman to show more allegiance to the studio than he felt at the time.
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Raphaelson and many others were looking for some kind of balance between declaring war against the studio moguls and kowtowing to their demands. But there was no middle ground. Moreover, time was running out.