4. MALEVOLENT MOVIE DESPOTS

Barney Balaban, Paramount; Harry Cohn, Columbia Pictures; Nicholas M. Schenck, Loew’s; Will H. Hays, and Leo Spitz, RKO. Back row, left to right: Sidney Kent, 20th Century Fox; N.J. Blumberg, Universal; and Albert Warner, Warner Bros., in 1938. Harris & Ewing, photographer – Library of Congress

by Norman Schwartz

Until recently, Hollywood was a patriarchal society ruled only by old men with an occasional Dauphin (Irving Thalberg) by their side. Women not allowed. Those who reigned supreme all bore a remarkable resemblance to Christopher Hitchens’ description of the all-seeing, all-punishing Old Testament God who delighted in terrifying His creatures, making them think He could watch over them while they slept and read their minds. In Hollywood, should divine surveillance not have its desired effect during the non-sleeping hours of the work week, it was common practice for the studio heads to hide microphones and recording devices in offices and dressing rooms to listen in to those who grumbled or spoke ill of their superiors.

Orson Welles, whenever hired, instantly set out to discover where the Owners (as screenwriter Ben Hecht preferred to call the Deities) hid these auditory devices. But instead of dismantling or cutting their wires as so many of his nervous colleagues did, he began each morning by addressing those who spied on him in his celebrated bass-baritone voice—a resonance the Lord God Himself might have coveted had the studio time to send Him off to elocution lessons.

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If the listener were Harry Cohn, President of Columbia Pictures, Welles would start each day by turning his head toward where he guessed the hidden listening device was. “Can you hear me? Yes, I am here, Harry. I am here. So go fuck yourself, Harry!”

Once discovered, Cohn had an even more effective technique for discovering what was happening inside his dream factory: he placed a spy at every corner of his lot and on every set. His most feared snoop was Jack Fier, the VP in charge of Production, who would wander unannounced from sound stage to sound stage, looking for the slightest delay in the manufacturing process and report the offender(s) to the head office.

Orson, hired by Columbia to direct his wife Rita Hayward on Lady From Shanghai, anticipated Fier’s visit by ordering a studio sign painter to prepare a welcoming message spread across the entrance to the sound stage. The banner echoed President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s First Inaugural Address, reading, THE ONLY THING WE HAVE TO FEAR IS FIER HIMSELF.

In this climate of espionage and oppression, labor unions—those organisations of men and women who in theory were supposed to meet with their bosses to negotiate working conditions, benefits, and salary—could exist, but did not flourish. The Owners dictated the terms of employment to their underlings and their employees accepted. Writers, among the least respected and most compliant workers on the lot, a necessary and burdensome evil without which the assembly line could not move, were the most compliant.

Jack L. Warner, President of Warner Bros., called them “Schmucks with Underwoods,” [Typewriters] and for an obvious reason: unlike the New York theater where the playwright was the proud possessor of his intellectual property and could, if he or she wished, withdraw a play from production, in Burbank, Culver City, or Hollywood every word a contract screenwriter wrote or rewrote was the sole possession of the studio who had paid for it. This meant that an army of writers could work on the same script, often at the same time. One person doing the dialogue, another the love scenes, the third the gags.

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In 1927, Louis B. Mayer, head of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, the most paranoid of men, founded the Academy of Motion Picture Arts, the Oscar-awarding body with us to this day. Other than self-congratulation, the real purpose of the Academy, so some studio employees guessed, was to dissuade what Mayer and other Owners feared was the growing movement to unionise the thousands of manual laborers— from carpenters to set painters— who worked at the studios. Initially, the Academy only invited six contract writers to join their association. The bosses fully expected these docile company men to support them in all things, especially when they proposed reductions in salary. They were rarely disappointed.

That same year, the movies began to talk, or more precisely in the case with the immensely popular The Jazz Singer, sing and talk. This mechanical innovation necessitated, so the Owners believed, importing men and women who could do more than just scribble gags on the back of an envelope. The Industry now needed those who could write dialogue. And what better place to find them than New York?

The sudden influx of Easterners to Pacific shores brought a revolution in Hollywood, not only technologically, but personally: this group contained an unusually high collection of intelligent men and women, many of whom had emerged from the working-class and the proletarian theater; some of them card-carrying members of the American Communist Party. Those who were not communists were far from being Coolidge and Hoover Conservatives. Together, they tried to resuscitate the dutiful Screenwriters Guild.

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By April 1933, the same year Roosevelt became President of the United States, there were 173 charter members of the Guild, among them John Howard Lawson and Lester Cole (both to be blacklisted in the Forties by HUAC) and other FDR liberals like Edwin Justin Mayer and Samuel Raphaelson. Small as the members of the Screenwriters Guild were in number, they were a militant group determined at last to improve the writer’s lot.

In August of the same year, the early years of the Depression, the all-powerful Mayer asked the members of the Academy to approve a 50% cut in salary for all studio employees, top producers excluded. Lawson, the Screenwriters Guild president, called upon his members to resign from the Academy. Many did. Slowly, word of the Screen Writers Guild’s growing power over The Owners spread. The SWG began increasing its membership.

Mayer sought a remedy by sponsoring another by-invitation-only group called The Screen Playwrights—the SPs. Its members included many of the town’s old-timers, highly paid contract writers like P. G. Wodehouse and Herman Mankiewicz, veterans of the silent film suspicious of the alleged radical politics of the recent migrants who were according to studio gossip, trying to sneak unacceptable socialistic notions like unionisation and racial tolerance into their studio-commissioned scripts.

Roosevelt’s New Deal enacted many remarkable reforms, including the end of Prohibition, the Tennessee Valley Act, and the National Industry Recovery Act, guaranteeing the right of workers to bargain collectively for better wages and working conditions. The National Labour Relations Act of 1935 prevented businesses from mistreating their employees, granting them the right to strike. The older studio hands who formed The Screen Playwrights argued that such communistic laws did not apply to them. They were “creative artists,” not workers, independent contractors with no need for trade union protection. The Screen Writers Guild disagreed. Its members, they said, were part of an ever-growing collective of studio employees—film cutters, soundmen, electricians, hairdressers and writers—all joined in solidarity to fight for their long-denied right to negotiate a fair contract and guarantee a decent wage.

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This disagreement between the studio workers who wrote scripts put The Owners in a most unusual position. Because the studio heads had openly sponsored the Screen Playwrights Guild, The Owners had to agree that these “Schmucks with Underwoods” were indeed, as their membership asserted, artists—an admission that stuck in many a boss’s craw.

That great cynic Ben Hecht, the highest-paid screenwriter in town, a man who needed no union or guild to protect him because he was constantly in demand to write or rewrite (often for $1000 a day) found this all highly amusing. He reminded his fellow renegades that until then, “In the Owner’s mind, art was a synonym for bankruptcy.”

This battle for minds, and membership continued for years. The Screen Playwrights, sanctioned as they were by the studio heads, increased in power. Membership in the Leftist Screenwriters Guild dwindled, and they held on to only a handful of loyalists like Lillian Hellman, Donald Ogden Stewart and Dorothy Parker. They met over cocktails at Dashiell Hammett’s room at the Beverly Hills Hotel in an often-futile attempt to induce other wavering writers to stay with their cause, the SWG.

Parker, never known for her patience with those she thought her intellectual inferiors, soon drew tired of trying to convince those torn between the two warring factions. In her typical fashion, Dottie said of one such vacillator: “That sonofabitch is telling me he’s a creative writer. If he’s creative, then I’m Queen Marie of Romania.”

All this came to a head on April 12, 1937. First, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the Wagner Act. According to its reading of the law, writers were indeed artists and not labourers. However, a year later in 1938, the National Labor Relations Board sided with the Screenwriters Guild, claiming that since the Hollywood studios were engaged in interstate commerce, selling its celluloid product throughout the country, all its workers (among them, screenwriters) were entitled to protection under the law. They were entitled to the power to bargain collectively, and to the right to choose which of any opposing guilds they preferred. The Labour Board requested an election at the studios and demanded that all employees vote.

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By the end of the year, Dorothy Parker’s Guild had 615 members, while “The Screen Playrats,” as one screenwriter dismissively called them, had only 158. By 1940, The SWG was triumphant. The Screen Playwrights ceased to exist.

Today, the Screenwriters Guild, now renamed the WGA—the Writers Guild of America—has branches on the East and West coast. It represents about 20,000 members, only a few earning more than a few thousand dollars a year. In 2023, WGA struck, bringing production to a standstill. Following a 150-day strike with picketers outside studio gates, the WGA and the AMPTP, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, came to an agreement about a long-standing point of conflict, something neither the Screen Playwrights nor the Screen Writers could ever have imagined: the threat of Artificial Intelligence.

WGA feared that as technology improved over the years, a machine would one day replace the writer. They reached a compromise. According to the latest agreement signed in 2023 between WGA and AMPTP, AI alone cannot be used to write or rewrite screenplays or treatments. It is up to the writer to decide whether and how to use AI to assist and compliment his work. No one, no studio, can feed existing scripts the studio owns into a database without the writer’s permission. But some members saw in that last clause a loophole, one that must have delighted the spirit of Louis B. Mayer, the greatest loopmeister of them all, hovering inside his mausoleum at the Home of Peace Park in Los Angeles.

Those naysayers contend that if, as the Infinite Monkey Theorem suggests, a simian hitting random keys on a typewriter keyboard for an unlimited amount of time can eventually type the works of Shakespeare, why then can’t AI create another Casablanca or Citizen Kane? Faster and Cheaper. According to the present contract, all it would take to attempt this experiment is for one writer, perhaps the author of tomorrow’s Oscar winner or television blockbuster, to give permission.

We have come a long way since those days when Dorothy Parker, cocktail in hand, debated with a wavering co-worker torn between allegiance to the Screen Playwrights of the Screenwriters. Were she with us today, would not Dottie predict that instead of a Schmuck at an Underwood, or an Asshole at a Laptop, the Future is about to bring us something even more disagreeable: a Robot at his Data Base?

Back in the Thirties, the motto above the roaring lion logo at Mr. Mayer’s MGM was Ars Gratia Artis. Art for Art’s Sake. What will it be tomorrow, Dottie? Ars ad Robots Causa?

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Norman B. Schwartz is the author of the comic novels ‘ALL THINGS small‘, Paradise Now, Don Juan in Space, True (Cinema) Confessions, Hollywood: Below and Beyond, and the DIY guide, The Art Of The Schnoorr. He spent over forty years working on films in Hollywood and Rome. Norman was the first ADR sound editor / director to be admitted to Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles.

Norman B. Schwartz essays will appear in sequence monthly in each issue of the magazine with a view to Centre House Press publishing the entire collection of essays in book form in spring 2026