Guest Post By Thomas McKelvey Cleaver
[Editor’s Note: Way back in November, when the Writer’s Guild strike first began, Carpetbagger regular Thomas McKelvey Cleaver was kind enough to write a guest post from an insider’s perspective, offering valuable insights on what the dispute is all about. Now, with the strike coming to a conclusion, Tom is back to explain what happened and put it in a broader context. -CB]
I’ve posted my immediate response to the news of the settlement of the WGA strike in yesterday’s End of Day thread comments. I’ve had a few more hours to think about it, and I think there’s more to this strike than just that we didn’t get smacked around like we have for the past 20 years.
The disastrous 1988 strike made folks like me entirely gun-shy. I can tell you for an absolute fact that my life would be significantly different today had that strike never happened, and I had been able to do the things I was set to do at the moment that strike came along and turned my world upside-down. And having it end in a way that made those things impossible to ever put back together, demonstrating that we writers really were like Humpty-Dumpty, had its intended effect.
Like most of the rest of the membership, I was happy to take the crumbs the other side offered over 6 different contract negotiations in the years since. No, strike that, I wasn’t happy at all. I was mad as hell, but one thing writers in Hollywood learn soon is that if you ever let The Other Side know how you really feel, they’ll go find ten people who will toe the line, and you will not only be fired from what you’re doing, it will be a long time before you do something else, and when you do it will be for less money. “You’ll never work again in this town!” may be thought of as a joke by people who aren’t here, but everyone who is here knows it is real.
Over the years, when I ran across writers who would argue for a “hard line” with the companies, I would think of them the way I did the morons dumb enough to stand up in the middle of a firefight in Vietnam.
As I look at things today, I think it’s clear that my fellow members of the Writers Guild and I weren’t the only union members who have thought like this over the past 25-30 years.
Unions have been whacked and whacked bad. We’re down to somewhere around 15% of non-public employees being members of unions, and too often nowadays it seems like union leaders are merely “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic” when you look at what’s going on with such former powerhouses as the United Auto Workers, or the Steelworkers, or any of the other great unions who created New Deal America and spread middle class affluence further through society than it had ever been spread before in any society anywhere on earth in history.
Nowadays the airline unions give up pay increases and even agree to give-backs, only to find that the incompetent morons who put the ship onto the rocks are the ones reaping multi-million dollar bonuses when the efforts of the workers results in the company coming back from the dead. And when those who did the heavy lifting come around and ask for their effort to be rewarded with the promised restoration of benefits and paychecks, the thieves look at them like they’re fools (which they were, to ever make the agreement in the first place, as it always seems to turn out).
Grocery store unions give up their future and agree to allow new workers to be hired at lower pay rates, to keep what little the original workers had, and then watch while the company management makes conditions of employment so onerous that within a matter of a few years all the old employees are gone, unable to stand it.
And while that is going on, the “new” workers, the “knowledge workers,” are getting the equivalent of a 1914 Henry Ford work contract: “worthwhile pay” with no benefits, no security, no future other than that of being a “permanent temp,” while they work at companies run by “progressives” who donate regularly to the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party. Trust me, you may think that the names “Yahoo!” and “Google” mean having nice cafeterias serving gourmet food and other little perks, but the working hours and the benefits for the “permanent temps” who constitute 80 percent of the workforce make what old Henry Ford was offering a century ago look good in comparison.
As I said yesterday, I was not one of those who voted for my union’s current leadership when they ran for office, because they were obviously “strike happy.” A vote for Patric Verrone and his list of supporters was a vote for a strike. And anyone who lived through 1988 – 90 percent of those who did are no longer working in the field – never wanted to go through that again and lose what little we had left.
Not only that, but the kind of member the union’s been getting over the past 20 years in greater and greater numbers, the Ivy Leaguers who live right up to my old friend David Freeman’s description of Hollywood as “the last respectable outlaw profession for upper class white boys,” aren’t exactly the kind of people you expect to find on a picket line wielding baseball bats. “Bourgeois Bolsheviks” is what I’ve called them. More than once.
That’s not to say that all the reasons to have a strike weren’t good and solid reasons. The pinstriped pimps on the other side of the desk really did want to take away what little we had left, and since they were intergalactic corporations for whom their Hollywood studio arms were merely disposable little widget-makers in the big Widget Factory, they were likely able to get away with it. Threats to hire non-union writers were real – there are 100,000 people come to Los Angeles every year to become writers, and the union takes in around 500 or so in a calendar year. Those are long odds, and it’s true there are those who would be happy to take a shortcut to “success,” even if it meant stepping on others and led to a success that wasn’t going to be all that successful.
And so we went on strike. I was definitely a reluctant warrior.
And then things happened that had never happened before.
I recall about two weeks into the strike, driving along Ventura Boulevard in Encino on a very rainy morning, and the traffic was godawful (even more godawful than it usually is with all the over-development going on there). I eventually got down to the site of the delay and it was a bunch of WGA pickets in front of a production company. In the rain! Without umbrellas! This from a union that called off pickets 20 years ago on the threat of a 20 percent chance of rain.
And people were regularly manning picket lines outside the major studios. Every day. Big-Time Name Writers on the lines. Big-Time Name Writers on the lines encouraging those who aren’t (and may never be) Big-Time Names. The guys who created great shows like “Heroes” and “The Shield” leaving their shows and letting them die, for the strike, for the “little guys.”
And then there were the actors. Everybody in Hollywood’s got a “flaky actor story.” They’re the union with the biggest membership and the greatest unemployment. The people who dislike themselves so much they want to be someone else. Don’t get me wrong, I love actors. I am a writer who speaks the lines I’ve just written aloud, to be sure a human being can “wrap their lips around the words” as my old friend Fred Ward explained it to me, but when you watch a scene where the words not only get said right, but that talented artist brings something out of themselves to illustrate points you weren’t even aware were there until they show you their presence, when that scene on the page becomes three-dimensional … well. God love actors.
And God love the Screen Actors Guild. It was the actors who made sure the pimps understood that it wasn’t just the writers out there. It was A-list talent like Tom Hanks and George Clooney and Laura Linney, and you name them, who came out and stood on the lines with the not-so-famous. More importantly, it was the A-listers who told Hollywood they were OK with not having a fun party at the Golden Globes. That made the Big Folks realize this was serious, that they were going to have to deal with “the crazy writers” if they didn’t want their industry to fall apart.
Basically it came down to union brothers and sisters standing on the lines in the rain and cold (OK, a Southern California winter at its worst isn’t like Chicago, but the New York folks suffered and it was cold enough here a couple days I put on my long johns). All those “upper class white boys” (and girls) turned out to have better Teamster guts than the Teamsters had.
In the end, the other side really did lose. All their attack dogs couldn’t run us off. Ol’ Massa had to come down off the portico and talk to the house slaves and the field slaves and recognize they were indeed human beings and they weren’t going away.
What did we get? We got a percentage of the frickin’ gross. No more “producer’s net profits,” which Eddie Murphy once very rightly called “monkey points.” No more having to sue the bastards for ten years like James Garner did 20 years ago to get Universal to admit that “The Rockford Files” had always been profitable.
It’s not a big percentage, but it’s not going away. Ever. 100 years from now, writers using mediums for story telling we can only guess at (and likely guess wrong) will be getting paid as full participants in the creative process because of this strike.
Patric was right when he said yesterday that this is the most important contract the Guild has signed. I would say it’s the most important contract since the first contract in 1941, where we forced the pimps to recognize we existed. Now we have not only the right to exist, but the right to be paid appropriately. It’s still going to be up to us in three years to make sure this sticks, but I think it will.
2008 is an interesting year. Hope went out of our national life 40 years ago when Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated. We’ve been battered as a people to the point where a major candidate for the party that used to be The Party of Hope demonstrated her seriousness as a candidate by refusing to offer something as worthless as “hope.” (The other candidate came out and marched with us for a few hours. I’m glad I voted for him.)
But Hope is battering its way back into our national life. All kinds of things I had given up hope of ever seeing again are showing up – personally, politically, professionally.
What we really won in our strike is the right to hope, to believe that we can stand together and make things better. Now let’s restore it everywhere in America.