The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild Read Online Free Page B

story: “I discovered, much to my chagrin, when I got out here, that I no longer owned what I wrote. In New York, I leased it to the studios for one showing. I come out here and find out Harry Cohn [president of Columbia Pictures] is the author, which put me into shock.” 34
    When television writers joined the Guild, they were dismayed by their lesser role within the media hierarchy, but they were in a much betterposition regarding control of authorial rights. Ernest Kinoy, a writer on
Goodyear Playhouse
and the miniseries
Roots
, explained the complex differences in notions of authorship and creative control between film and television writers as they united under one umbrella guild in the 1950s:
    You hired a [film] writer like you hired a carpenter. And they were interchangeable. . . . The project was considered the property (emotional property, let alone legal) of the producer. . . . In New York, in live television, the concept of the playwright and the author lay philosophically behind . . . the writer. It was his play. . . . [Screenwriters] felt that we were neophytes and lesser in prestige. . . . And no screenwriter would demean himself by working in television. We felt that they came out of the Hollywood tradition, in which the position of the writer was in fact demeaned. The truth was probably somewhere in between.” 35
    Hortense Powdermaker admitted in 1967 that she had been disdainful of film writers in her 1950 anthropological study
Hollywood, the Dream Factory
precisely for their lack of authorial control. She was incensed that prosperity for a writer necessitated a loss of integrity.
    Although closer by temperament and profession to the writers than to any other group in Hollywood, I failed to identify with them. . . . I was indignant at the writers . . . and horrified when I found gifted writers (whose work before coming to Hollywood had been literature) working on admittedly mediocre scripts and taking them seriously. But was this any different from the actor taking his role in a mediocre film with seriousness? Obviously not. For both it was a way of preserving some measure of self-respect. But at the time I did not see this. I wrote that the writers had become “soft,” that they sacrificed their integrity as artists for monetary rewards. 36
    The notion of giving up ownership for financial security infuriated Powdermaker, and many others as well. The idea of selling one’s soul—and setting aside one’s artistry—for money is a popular myth in Hollywood. At various periods in time, challenging this classic conception of screenwriting was reason enough for writers to fight the studios for more control over and credit for their work.
    In my conversations with writers, this lack of creative control—at least for those who did not also carry a secondary role as a producer or director—led to a kind of frustrated sense of entitlement. In the 1930s and 1940s, writers worked under exclusive contract for a specific Hollywood studio, making substantial sums of money, but they had little autonomy; for example, writers could be loaned out to other studios for particular projects with little choice in the matter. As Max Wilk describes in
Schmucks with Underwoods
, “You came as a pencil for hire, at sums heretofore unheard of for pencils. You brought no plots, dreams, or high intentions. If you wrote a good movie it was because you were lucky enough to get on the payroll of a classy boss. Class or not, the boss called the shots and you did as bid. You were a sort of literary errand boy with an oil magnate’s income.” 37 Playwrights, on the other hand, controlled their own writing and, as pointed out by Stirling Silliphant, screenwriter of
In the Heat of the Night
, also paid their own bills.
    If you sit in a New York cold water flat and you write your play and no one is paying your rent and giving you any money you, by god’s right [you] have the ownership of that material. You have created