The screen writer (June 1947-Mar 1948)

SNOWBALL IN THE SPRING familiar pressures. In the catch-as-catch-can state of the so-called "package" market, outright sales are often effected with no provision for additional compensation to the original author in the event of a profitable resale. In the regular market most studios continue to insist on the preposterous legal fiction that the sale of property and/or literary services to the studio makes the studio perforce the "author" of the property. And in recent weeks we have seen an intriguing variation on this situation in which an individual producer in his individual capacity asked a writer to certify that the producer was, in fact, the complete and sole creator of the literary property that he had just bought from the writer. Appropriately enough, relatively little attention has been given by the press throughout the country to the revised AAA plan as printed in the March supplement, although columns of vituperative comment were hurled at the Screen Writers' Guild and its members when the plan was first discussed some months before. The reason for the silence, naturally, is not hard to understand. The revised AAA plan is a carefully thought out document, fair, honest, and democratic, with every guarantee possible to the individual writer that he is creating nothing more than a revocable trusteeship. There isn't much argument, in law and logic, that can be brought against it. A few points here and there perhaps but not many and none of the kind that give comfort to the creators of scare headlines in the five star finals. True, some very sincere writers — not members of the American Writers Association, organized for the sole purpose of destroying AAA — just don't like the idea of assignment of copyright in any form, no matter how limited. They dispose of copyright every year of course to publishers and studios but they hesitate at the idea of trusteeing any part of it to a group of fellow writers. There are also a few agents, here and there, who have been a little slow to realize that AAA is not an agent and would not replace the agencies. And, it must be admitted, on the basis of questionnaires that have already come in, there are a few younger writers who are frank enough to admit that they would always prefer an outright sale to any form of licensing. They want the bird in the hand even though it might grow to be a bigger bird if they let it have its wings. Finally, there is still a little East Coast-West Coast tension. Not very much. Nothing that wouldn't dissolve quickly when facing a common enemy. Some writers in New York feel that some individual observations in the AAA supplement with respect to the eastern guilds are I not borne out by the facts. Others feel that the AAA is just some kind of screen writing dream for screen writers who have no knowledge of other fields. A few, to be perfectly frank, still think most writers west of the Los Angeles river are blood brothers to one Joseph Stalin and accordingly want no part of us. Time of course will dissipate most of these last objections, time and detailed study of the Questions and Answers section of the AAA supplement. As for the few Marxists in our midst, whose initial enthusiasm for AAA may have disturbed some people, I have no hesitation in repeating now a prediction which I have made many times before : in the last analysis, or, if you prefer, in the last round of the good fight for licensing, we will be hearing less and less from the brethren on the far Left. They will probably not be hostile to AAA or whatever the final form of licensing may be. They will naturally go along with any plan that in the long run improves the standing of writers, especially the financial standing. But, as one of our articulate conservatives pointed out some time ago, the whole battle for licensing and for the AAA is a highly capitalistic maneuvre designed to take a little more capital from one group of capitalists — producers, publishers, radio chains, television — and put in the pockets of another group of capitalists, the writers. It is not something that squares with the Communist Party line. It has no compulsions. It is open to everyone. It has no control of content. It works for the small writer as well as for the big writer. It is the most voluntary form of association that has ever been proposed for American writers : it is a limited, revocable trusteeship administered by democratically elected delegates from the four guilds of the Authors League of America. The Kremlin would not understand it nor care for it. At this point it might be timely to point out one or two more obvious facts: in the Screen Writers' Guild, as in most writing guilds, we have no political or religious screening of membership. We do not even qualify the writers who become eligible for active membership : the studios, who employ screen writers, provide that qualification by providing enough employment (26 weeks) to make them eligible for active membership. The rest of our members, at the moment about 200, come to us on assignment (exchange) from brother guilds in the Authors League of America. So obviously we are not a front for the Communist Party nor a recruiting agent for the Kremlin. We are just a typical cross-section of American writers, people with the average worries, hopes, and ambitions — people naive enough to believe that the struggle for a better world begins with a struggle for a better art, people naive enough to believe that one way to better the art is to better the man who creates it, to give him just a bit