A Strike? The Script Is Out of Their Hands

If one wanted to know how miners felt about an oncoming strike, one could just stand outside the mine at closing time and interview dust-strewn workers as they emerged from the dark caverns. Writers are a more elusive bunch, many of whom toil alone, often at home.

So on the eve of the reconvened labor negotiations between the Writers Guild of America and the studios, The Times assembled an informal panel of screenwriters to ascertain how some rank-and-file types felt about the potential labor unrest with the May 1 strike deadline looming.

Jan Oxenberg, a supervising producer on ABC’s “Once and Again,” is holed up eating tofu in the corner booth of Hal’s, a concrete-and-art-laden restaurant on Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice, where they all live. She is joined by fellow writers Rich Wilkes (“Airheads”), Tony Puryear (“Eraser”), Ron Shusett (“Total Recall,” “Minority Report”), Topper Lilien (“Where the Money Is”) and Jodie Burke, who sold her script “Extremely Complicated Women” last year. Their mood is a mixture of defiance and gallows humor, with an undercurrent of unease that bobs up like an iceberg. All of them are pro-union, in the way most Americans are pro-apple-pie and pro-baseball. The WGA is all that protects them from being “pell-melled mercilessly,” notes Shusett, who says that despite having written several hits he has had to resort to the union, merely to get the studios to pay him his fees. Wilkes went to the WGA because his name was left off the video box of the movie he wrote, and the guild forced the studio to reprint the boxes and pay a fine.

“You’ve got to support the union, but it’s like a helpless feeling,” says Lilien, a former musician.

“None of us wants a strike,” says Wilkes, a gigantic 34-year-old with bleached-blond hair. “But we’ll deal with it the best we can.”

“It’s like saying are we pro-tornado-coming-down-on-our-house,” adds Lilien. “It’s an act of God. I’m not anti-God.”

While some like to joke that the battle between the writers and the studios is just a scuffle between the merely rich and the mega-rich, in truth, the median wage for the 11,500 guild members is $84,000 a year. And in any given year, only half the guild members are actually employed.

All of the Venice panel support themselves by screenwriting--most in fact, quite well. Yet, none has enough money that he or she never has to worry about money again. Even the threat of a strike has taken its toll on these writers.

“I don’t know what it’s done to marriages at this table, but I’ve been insufferable,” says Lilien, who worked for several months last year on the upcoming “Pearl Harbor.”

“I’ve been walking around for six months going, ‘This is the apocalypse.’ Because the bottom line is that most writers will find a way to get through, but there will be some Darwinian weeding out.”

It’s a phrase that sends visible shudders through the other writers, as a few choke back weakly, “Darwinian weeding out. . . .”

“There will be a lot of people who don’t make it, and the thing that worries me is that our negotiating team is made up of some very successful people,” Lilien says. (The guild is led by John Wells, one of the executive producers of NBC’s “ER” and “The West Wing.”) “They have to understand that in the 1988 strike [which lasted 22 weeks] I was lucky because I somehow hung on, but it devastated me financially. There are people out there who I just hope that this [strike] won’t turn them away--because they have talent.”

Indeed, for most working writers, whose careers are divided into hot streaks and cold spells, a strike can mean a crucial loss of momentum--as important to a writer as it is to a basketball team. “The saddest thing is [a career] is all about flow,” says Lilien. “A bump like this undoes three years of hard work.”

“In normal times, it’s not easy getting work. It’s so erratic,” says Shusett. “When you realize you’re not allowed to work, it’s terrifying.”

“There’s a corporate culture in place to keep writers disenfranchised, to make writers anonymous and replaceable,” says Puryear. “I think it was John Gregory Dunne who said, ‘In Hollywood, the word writers is always used in the plural, as in I can always get more writers.’ ”

Not Just Dollars, but Respect Too

To a person, the writers agree with union demands for better residuals for foreign sales and cable TV. Burke is happy that the guild minimums are slated to go up. “Not everyone hits a million-dollar payday on their first spec sale--the ones you don’t read about on the front page of Variety,” she says.

A fourth of the working members of the guild only make the minimum, which is $88,614 for an original screenplay, but $23,611 for a rewrite and $11,800 for a polish, either of which could easily consume six months of a writer’s time. They all chortle when they think that all that separates the two sides (according to the WGA figures) is $100 million spread over three years.

“You know what $100 million buys you? One bad movie!” crows Puryear.

Adds Oxenberg: “That gives the lie to the notion that this is just about money. The studios could easily, in good faith, move enough toward the writer’s position so everybody feels it’s fair. They’re trying to bust our [expletive], to use a word I said I wasn’t going to use.”

Like every other writer in America, our panelists all crave more respect. This was one of the underlying issues of the 1988 strike--a strike the writers were perceived as having lost despite a five-month walkout. It’s the question of respect that underlies the union’s demand to allow writers on the sets, and to the publicity junkets, as well as the sticky, highly contentious wicket of the possessory credit, the “film by” credit permitted to directors, which is the bane of the writers’ union.

On these issues, the writers are divided, not because these wouldn’t be nice things to have, but because it’s hard to know whether they’re achievable, strike-worthy--or, more crucially, would actually change the status of writers. Indeed, it’s hard to evince much passion about the possessory credit, when most screenwriters are simply struggling to get any credit at all.

The Revolving Door of Screenwriting

The group appears more enraged over the ease with which film writers are fired. Many other labor unions have strict provisions about firing employees--not the WGA. Shusett fairly bristles with indignation over being removed from “Minority Report” five years ago.

“I felt terrible,” he says. “The rewrite team had thrown out every single thing we [he and co-writer Gary Goldman] did. It would have been one of the few times the original writer lost credit.” (This story looks to have a happy ending however. When Steven Spielberg came on as director, he opted to use enough of Shusett and Goldman’s work that he let the studio know he thought their credit should be reinstated.)

“For every writer who gets fired, there has to be another writer who willingly takes his place,” says Wilkes. “I hate that. I’ve never done a rewrite without calling the original writer to see if it was OK. When it comes to the revolving door of screenwriting, everyone wants the gig, but sometimes you have to tighten your belt and say, ‘I’m not going to take the job.’ ”

“It just goes to someone else,” says Lilien.

“Yeah, another union brother or sister,” adds Wilkes sarcastically.

The screenwriting process encourages cannibalization, because the highest-paid writers are usually the ones who come at the very end of the process to do production polishes and earn as much as $150,000 a week.

Also provoking ire is the fact that many producers pressure writers into doing free drafts of their scripts. The writers say it’s standard operating procedure, which they largely acquiesce in because if they don’t, they run the risk of having their professional reputations smeared, and if they do, there’s always the carrot that the movie might move closer to production.

“You have to do it to protect your reputation,” says Shusett, who recalls an incident from 1996, when a Universal executive became convinced that he and his partner had put major plot points into the first draft that hadn’t been agreed to beforehand. The studio executive demanded a complete rewrite for free and, when the writers balked, became so angry that he declared he was going to fire them from the project.

Do Execs Ever Actually Read the Scripts?

Fortunately, Shusett’s partner was in the habit of taping all of their meetings to ensure that “we can get it right” and played the tape for the offended executive. “It was like the Mafia. We had his voice on tape saying, ‘Put that in’--all the stuff they said they didn’t ask for. It goes on for about a half an hour, until the executive says, ‘Stop the tape. We’ll pay you for the next draft. We forgot we asked you to put those things in.’ ”

“I’d like it if [executives] would actually take the time to read your script before you’re hired; that would be great,” says Wilkes, who speaks ironically but is actually not joking.

“I’d love to make the union enforce when you work for a company and you hand in a script they have to read it,” agrees Lilien.

“I’ve had a producer say, ‘I like the script but I’m not sure because I haven’t read the coverage [the script summary],’ ” says Oxenberg.

“I’ve heard from a studio executive reading scripts on the way to work in the car--while driving!” adds Lilien. “So you spend a year of your life writing and the guy’s looking up between lights on La Cienega.”

For the writers, it’s a constant balancing act between serving the masters and trying to maintain a sense of integrity. For writers, there’s nothing more unifying than a quick discussion of the development process, one that they’re all intimately familiar with--and one that would stay exactly the same whether the writers win their demands or not.

Lilien remarks that he recently read a script that he and his partner, Carroll Cartwright, wrote 10 years ago, that might get made after the strike. “I couldn’t believe how good it was. Because it hadn’t been run through this filter of having to please some guy.”

Suddenly it’s like a scene from a musical, where every person chimes in effortlessly.

“That this should happen on Page 20,” says Shusett.

“And if we’re going to get such-and-such star,” says Lilien.

“She can’t be unlikable in any way,” says Burke.

“No, she can’t be the star. It’s got to be the man. It’s his story,” says Lilien. “Unfortunately, we can’t strike for better movies,” Oxenberg says with a sigh.

“I went to the movies the other night on the [Santa Monica] Promenade,” says Lilien, “and I was looking at the marquee, thinking, ‘Maybe it’s time to read a book.’ ”