The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild by Miranda J. Banks Read Free Book Online

on
Ellen
when the character and actor came out, was fired just before receiving an Emmy for writing on the series. Soon after coming out, the star decided to let go of the whole writers’ room and repopulate it with gay and lesbian writers. 63 As Henderson deftly argues, homogenization is of primary import for many in positions of power in the industry.
    Some minorities arguably have an upper hand in the industry, most notably Jewish writers, especially in the comedy genre. As Neal Gabler details in
An Empire of Their Own
, every studio head in Hollywood during the studio system was Jewish, 64 and even today the number of Jews in the entertainment industry is disproportionately larger than national figures. Ring Lardner Jr. remembers being asked by Paul Jarrico whether the close ties between Lardner, Hugo Butler, Dalton Trumbo, Ian McClellan Hunter, and Michael Wilson resulted because they were all gentiles in a largely Jewish community. Hunter replied that in fact their friendship was based on their proclivity toward hard drinking. 65 Although some of my interviewees discussed the usefulness of being conversant in cultural Judaism, race and gender were much more significant markers in defining writers’ experiences of identity within the industry and their feelings of insider or outsider status.
    The Story Begins
    In 1978, the Writers Guild established a committee to preserve the memories of its members as part of a vast oral history project. 66 A bulletin in themonthly newsletter encouraged writers from the East and West branches of the organization to be interviewed at the WGAw branch headquarters about salient moments in Guild history they remembered. Had they witnessed the Guild’s formation? How did they feel about the blacklist? The notice beckoned: “However memory serves you, rightly or wrongly, the object is to capture, not the dry recounting of absolute fact or dates, but the vibrancy and texture of the times as lived by the membership through the various period of the Guild. . . . This is
your
history as
you
lived it. The brickbats and bouquets.” 67 Erna Lazarus, writer on
The Donna Reed Show
, was one of the ninety-four professionals who answered this call. Her recollections of her adventures as a founding member of the SWG and one of the first women to build a steady career in the Hollywood studios bridged more than three decades of turbulence and triumph. At the end of her interview, Lazarus struggled to find words to express her gratitude for the Writers Guild. Not surprisingly, this veteran screenwriter conjured a film that could tell the tale of the writers:
    I just wish that all the new writers could have a complete motion picture to view of what it was like from the 1930s until [the] present time, and I think then they would really appreciate what they have got. Our kids do not know what it means to [have] electric light. We do not know what it means. Our mothers, perhaps our grandmothers, knew what it was like to turn on a gaslight. So we take it all for granted. Do not take the Writers Guild of America for granted. It is a very important part of our lives and of the industry. 68
    Few historians or screenwriters today know Lazarus’s name. She is one of hundreds of extraordinary writers—some legendary, others mostly forgotten—who enrich the remarkable history of an industry. So, as Margo Channing warned in razor-sharp words by Joseph Mankiewicz in
All About Eve
, “Fasten your seatbelts . . .”

2
    Two Front Lines

    IMAGE 11   “Hollywood Jabberwocky” by I.A.L. Diamond, from the June 1947 issue of
The Screen Writer
.
    Writers Guild Foundation Archive, Shavelson-Webb Library, Los Angeles
    I was a member of the Communist Party . . . and as far as I was concerned there was never, I would say, any discrepancy of any kind between what seemed to me the best interest of the Guild and what those of us in the Party felt . . . should be done in the Guild.
    —Ring Lardner Jr., interview by