The screen writer (Apr-Oct 1948)

The Road to Self -Employment By EMMET LAVERY ORIGINALLY this started out to be one more article about the licensing of material for the screen. But we'll get around to that soon enough. You can hardly talk about self-employment without talking about licensing. So let's begin where I left off about a year ago, or to be more exact, in the June 1947 issue of The Screen Writer. Those were the days when the idea of the American Authors Authority was very much alive and I was speaking up as follows: And so we in the Screen Writers' Guild say: let's stop talking about licensing. Let's begin to license. Let's set a stop-date. Let's have a thorough study and a prompt vote on AAA. We still think AAA is the best form of licensing we have seen so far but we're willing to be shown if somebody has found a better way; let's have the alternatives, if any, and let's have them soon . . . very soon. . . . The way we look at it, that was a pretty good snowball we threw out in the early spring. And there's still a lot of snow clinging to it, even in the heat of June. There will still be a lot of snow on it, when the frost is on the ground in the fall. But let's not fool around too long with this thing called licensing. The best snowball in the world won't last forever. So — If it isn't this snowball, what snowball is it? Well, a lot of snow has come and gone since then. And AAA lies quietly in its grave. No formal obsequies have been held, apart from one formal report of a sub-committee of the Authors League. Nor have many tears been shed by those of us who sincerely believed in the program envisioned in the proposed Authors Authority. Whatever the merits of AAA, it had become immediately apparent that most members of the other guilds of the Authors League would never approve a plan that involed even a temporary assignment of copyright to a central writers authority, no matter how closely identified this authority might be with the basic machinery of the Authors League. So the whole concept of the Authors Authority, by common consent, has been put aside and put aside without any rancor or any ill feeling between the guilds concerned. Out of all the tumult and the shouting, oddly enough, has come a stronger feeling of unity and common identity among the various guilds of the League than there has been in many years. For while a few of us have disagreed from time to time on the matter of methodology, we found implicit unity on the matter of principle. Especially, on the principle of licensing. HP* RUE, we haven't the answers to ■*~ all of the questions that we asked a year ago, but some progress has been made. If we don't know which snowball we would like to throw, we at least know the snowball we do not want to throw. And we have a hunch that the snowball we are looking for is something mighty like a minimum basic agreement for the marketing of original material for the screen, something similar to the contract which the Dramatists' Guild has in the theatre. But whether a contract such as this would have to be negotiated by each of the four guilds of the League with motion picture producers, or by the Screen Writers' Guild alone, or by the League acting as a joint agency for all the guilds, are matters that no one has yet resolved. UNDER normal conditions, a good idea like licensing might be kicked around in committees in the various guilds for a few more years without achieving anything except a few pleasant commitments "in principle." But time has a way, occasionally, of working for writers instead of against them and this, your correspondent is happy to report, is one of those pleasurable intervals. Three developments, among others, would seem to hasten some definitive action on licensing. One is the rapid emergence of television, with its assorted problems for producers as well as for writers. The second is the gradually changing character of motion picture writing, which in many instances is beginning to take on the form and the substance of self-employment. The third is the employment contract of the Screen Writers' Guild with the motion picture studio which comes up for renegotiation in 1949. Should the Guild in 1949 seek a contract or • a clause to cover the marketing of original material, an item not now included in a contract which covers a distinctly employment situation? Or should the Guild join with other guilds of the League in working out some over-all negotiation in 1949 for licensing of original material? Yet each of these questions in turn is really subsidiary to the question of the basic nature of screen writing and, in turn, to the basic nature of screen writing for television. All of The Screen Writer, May, 194