East is East and West is west, and old dead fights
There are two Writers Guilds -- the one at Beverly and 3rd, known to all as the Writers Guild west (note that understated lower-case w), and in New York, the Writers Guild East. It’s been that way since 1954, when the old Screen Writers Guild of America, the SWG, became the WGA. The New York branch was meant to cover TV writers -- most of TV was in New York then.
The result today is two related but separate unions. They don’t get along, and it hasn’t always been easy. Now there’s war -- well, at least a lot of arguing. The issue, no surprise, is money. But it’s also about something a little more elusive -- call it a “My town’s better than your town” squabble.
Fifty years ago, when the groups established their constitutions, Los Angeles was called “the coast” by New Yorkers, as in: “Moe’s not here. He’s on the coast.” New Yorkers often inflected the words to suggest something like: “Moe’s gone over the edge of the world to where your mind turns to mush from the sun but you can get work doing dumb things for pea-brained people and there are a lot of actresses.” New Yorkers liked to pretend that it was difficult to get to Los Angeles. Variety used to run a list of people who were “Winging to the coast” or “Airing to Gotham.” It was mostly agents and producers.
For complicated reasons that now seem as dated as winging to the coast, WGA East (they’re sticking with that capital E) agreed to pay a certain portion of their members’ dues to the WGA west. It was meant to cover administrative costs and, crucially, acknowledge the primacy of the west in screenwriting. Built into it was the assumption that if you wrote a picture in New York it was a temporary aberration probably to do with some unlikely gig. Half your dues still belonged to the west. Both constitutions contain identical language about all this.
For reasons no one seems able to explain, the payments stopped about 30 years ago. Now the west wants to be paid what it says it’s owed. The sum of $500,000 has been mentioned. The East sees this as banditry. Angry letters from normally temperate individuals have gone back and forth. The whole thing will surely wind up in some sort of arbitration.
Just as I was thinking about how I was originally a member of the East branch, my fax line began ringing. No fax came through. It could only mean that Ray Stark wanted to talk. He’s been dead a couple of years now, and he hasn’t called in a while. He usually calls to yell at me about something.
“What are you bothering with this east-west stuff for? It’s all crap,” he began, in his customary way, not wasting time on “Hello.”
“Hi, Ray. Nice to hear from you.”
“Yeah, yeah. It’s just like writers to pick over this old dead junk while the studios roll over you.”
“I don’t quite follow.”
“You guys took a bath on the DVDs in that contract and now you’re chasing each other over these old dead fights because you don’t know what you’re doing RIGHT NOW.”
“We negotiated.”
“You collapsed and now you have to live with it.”
“We made some progress on health insurance.”
“You’d get that anyway. DVDs are where the money is. You left it on the table and now you’re fighting over this union crap. That’s another boondoggle. What do you need with two unions? Two boards, two of everything. Only writers would think that’s a good idea. I’m sick of it. Don’t call again.”
“Ray, you called me.” But he was gone.
Rest in peace, Otto
Otto PLASCHKES, who died in London recently at 75, was an entirely different sort of producer from Ray Stark. He was a cultured European gentleman of exquisite taste, committed to art, the theater, music and literature. He came to prominence in the mid-1960s as the co-producer of “Georgy Girl.” Later he produced several of the American Film Theatre’s productions, among them, Harold Pinter’s “The Homecoming.” His most successful American picture was “Hopscotch” with Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson in 1980. Otto was born in Vienna and came to the U.K. with one of the kindertransports that got him out of Austria when he was about 10.
As a boy, in Salisbury, his history master was William Golding, later the author of “Lord of the Flies.” It was often said that Otto was the model for Piggy, the most memorable of the boys in that novel. He read history at Cambridge and later got an education diploma at Oxford, thinking he might be a schoolmaster, but it was always the cinema that called to him. As a young man, Otto spent a year in the Jordanian desert chasing around as an assistant on “Lawrence of Arabia.”
Later, he worked for Otto Preminger on at least two movies, including “St. Joan” with Jean Seberg. Otto was on the set on the infamous day when Preminger shot the burning-at-the-stake scene. A terrified Seberg almost caught fire herself. Preminger kept rolling. Plaschkes was steps away, about to plunge into the flames and rescue Seberg before Preminger got what he wanted and called “cut.”
In the 1980s, in an unlikely pairing, Otto was head of production for Cannon Films Europe. His boss was Menachem Golan, who was an effective mogul but couldn’t be described as a cultured European gentlemen. Otto always referred to him as “The old Menachem.”
One fine evening last month Otto and his wife, Louise, were at a West End screening of two of the foreign-language nominees for the recent Oscars. They watched the Swedish film together. It’s the story of an orchestra conductor who suffers a fatal heart attack. As Otto had seen the second one, the French nominee, he left early, planning to meet Louise at home. He never got there. On a London street, he suffered his own heart attack. It was big and I hope quick. In addition to his wife, he leaves their daughter, Valli, a fledgling film producer. She will take over three of her father’s active projects, a turn of events that would have pleased him. Rest in peace.
David Freeman is a screenwriter and the author most recently of “It’s All True.” This page from his diary is one of an occasional series.