hollywood dreams, harsh realities: writing for film and television

Transcription

1 feature article denise d. bielby and william t. bielby hollywood dreams, harsh realities: writing for film and television Hollywood films and television programs reach a diverse global audience, but young white men typically write the stories. Why do veterans older than the age of 40, women, and minority writers have such a difficult time finding work in Hollywood? From I Love Lucy to Ally McBeal, from Gone With The Wind to Titanic, U.S. media products reflect and shape popular culture around the globe. For more than 80 years, Hollywood has dominated the production of media images that appeal to the widest audiences. But who is telling these stories? As it turns out, mostly young white men. White men write about threefourths of the scripts for Hollywood feature films and television series. Statistical evidence published in the mid-1980s, documenting systematic barriers faced by women, writers of color, and older writers, provided the impetus for organizing efforts by constituencies within the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and civil rights groups to dismantle discrimination in Hollywood. Yet the most recent statistics show little improvement for women and writers of color, and a rapidly deteriorating situation for writers older than the age of 40. Why has equal employment opportunity remained such an elusive goal in Hollywood? ties who you know can determine access to the corporate fast track. Subjectivity, immunity from review, stereotypes and cliques are part of the context in which Hollywood executives make decisions about hiring writers for film and television, so frequent charges of discrimination are not surprising. Yet, additional, distinctive features of work in Hollywood build stereotyping and an especially insidious form of discrimination into everyday business: a high level of risk and uncertainty, an emphasis on reputation, demographically-based marketing and a product that embodies cultural idioms about age, gender and race. Despite the emphasis on reputation, being associated with a hit from more than a few years earlier is more often than not a liability instead of an asset, especially in television. Sociologists have identified several factors that create and sustain workplace discrimination in corporate settings. Making work assignments in an arbitrary and subjective manner, especially where accountability for equal employment opportunity is absent, allows stereotypes to influence personnel decisions. In the corporate world, this happens when managers have unfettered discretion concerning who to hire or promote, permitting them to make personal judgments about who best fits the job. More often than not, the best fit matches the gender, race and age of those already doing the job. In such circumstances interpersonal Children crowd into the Paramount Theater in Denver, Colorado for a free movie on Christmas Eve, More recently, producers have sought young screenwriters to make movies targeted at the teen market. Photo courtesy of the Denver Public Library fall/winter 2002 contexts 21

2 who gets to be a millionaire? Hollywood writers are usually paid by large multinational corporations like Disney, AOL Time Warner, and Sony, but they sustain their careers by moving from one film or television project to the next, with no permanent attachment to any particular employer. Successful writers parlay accomplishment on one project into employment on a bigger project. In film, the most successful command seven-figure fees, and top writer-producers in television can earn tens of millions of dollars when a popular series goes into syndication. Few ever achieve success of this magnitude. The WGA, the union for film and television writers, has about 11,000 members, and fewer than half are employed in the industry in any given year. In 1997, median earnings among writers who had worked at least once in the previous three years were under $35,000, and a third of those earned nothing at all. In short, writing in Hollywood is highly lucrative for a tiny elite, but even modest success is elusive for most. A writer s skill is a poor predictor of career success. As one prominent former network executive put it, all hits are flukes. The formula for producing a television or feature film is no mystery. The ingredients include a script to provide the narrative and dialogue; talented individuals to provide the acting, direction, music, cinematography and other creative skills; production facilities and the craft workers to operate them; and a lot of money to finance production and distribution. However, it is almost impossible to determine the degree to which the writer contributed to the quality of the end product. Many individuals besides the credited writer have input into the final shooting script, and how well the writer s vision is executed depends on the quality of direction, acting, editing, cinematography and so on. Regardless of how skillfully the project is executed, no one can reliably predict its financial success until it reaches an audience. Informal discussion among members of the Writers Guild of America, Photo courtesy of the Writers Guild Foundation and the Writers Guild of America, west In the clubby, male-dominated world of executives, male writers are insiders. As a result, they are better known and are often perceived as better risks than equally successful female writers. reputation matters, but longevity hurts When nobody knows anything, reputation is everything. In both film and television, those who make hiring decisions are risking millions of other people s dollars. One way to demonstrate to the studio chief or the head of programming that you are maximizing financial returns with a minimum of risk is to point to the top-notch reputation of the writers you hire. So, when networks announce the pilots being produced for the upcoming season, it is not unusual to see references to the past successes of the writer-producers. The press kit for Alias, which debuted on ABC in Fall 2001, reads: Under the deft and nimble guidance of Felicity creator J. J. Abrams, Alias balances the quirky tumult of twenty-something life with the demanding perils of the spy game. Despite the emphasis on reputation, being associated with a hit from more than a few years earlier is more often than not a liability instead of an asset, especially in television. Writers with award-winning credits from the 1970s, 1980s, or even the early 1990s are more likely to remove any reference to that work from their resumés than to call attention to it. Writers who were once among the most successful in the industry recount being snubbed by producers, agents and network programmers today. Their anecdotes are supported by our statistical analyses of Hollywood writers earnings histories. Not surprisingly, writers with recent successes tend to earn more than others. However, a comparison of individuals who had equal earnings and patterns of employment over the previous three years reveals that writers in their forties earn less than younger writers, and the age penalty is even greater for writers in their fifties and sixties. While age bias exists in both television and film, devaluing older writers is relatively new in television. In the early 1980s, earnings increased with age until writers reached their fifties, as is the case in many other professions. However, by the end of the decade the most highly compensated television writers were in their thirties (see figure 1). The industry changed and older writers were left behind. 22 contexts fall/winter 2002

3 figure 1 Median Earnings of Working Television Writers by Age Category, 1982, 1989 and 1997 $120 $ Median Earnings (in thousands) $80 $60 $ $ $0 les s than Age Category typecasting is the name of the game Typecasting is a basic business principle in Hollywood, and it explains why career opportunities for older television writers declined so rapidly in the 1990s. That decline coincided precisely with increasing pursuit of younger audiences and the introduction of the people meter ratings technology in Suddenly, advertisers were willing to pay more to reach a younger audience, and those who hired writers assumed that only younger writers could reach that audience. By the late 1990s, older writers were practically locked out of certain segments of prime-time television. Writers older In response to employment discrimination, the WGA established support panels and work groups for female, black and Latino screenwriters. Photo courtesy of the Writers Guild of America, west than 50, who account for 30 percent of the WGA membership, received just 10 percent of the on-screen credits on television series broadcast during the season, and just 5 percent of the credits on network sitcoms. More than half the series broadcast that year employed no writers older than 50, according to the records of the WGA. During that season, writers older than 50 were most likely to find work on CBS with its older-skewing audience (19 percent of writing credits) and least likely to be employed on youth-oriented Fox s and WB s series (6 percent and 3 percent of writing credits, respectively). Peripheral work in the industry such as freelance writing for syndicated series, once the route for breaking in, is now performed disproportionately by veteran writers. Industry executives sometimes talk openly about the age stereotypes that shape hiring practices. For example, in its recent Next Generation special issue, Robert Dowling, publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, proclaimed: the world is going young, and it takes youth to understand it. To succeed in this business, according to Dowling, takes a level of stamina and enthusiasm that must match that of the ever-growing young audience it serves (November 14, 2000). Speaking to Morley Safer of 60 Minutes in February 1999, 38-year-old producer Chris Keyser explained, There s no question that, certainly in an age when getting something new and exciting out on the air is the most important thing, and when young audiences are the most important audiences to get, that there s a kind of a struggle to say, who s the next big person, who s the great new cutting fall/winter 2002 contexts 23

4 edge writer? Keyser went on to describe his reaction to receiving unsolicited resumés from experienced writers: I ll tell you one thing that s really scary. That periodically you get stacks of resumés when you re producer of a television series. I don t even know where they come from. And they come, and they re on your desk, and they are the resumés of people who have written television shows 20 years ago. You know, hit shows of the seventies. And you look through those stacks of people, and they haven t worked in a long time, and you know that the shows that they worked on are every bit as popular as the show you re working on right now, and it s very scary. At the time of the 60 Minutes interview, the creative team on Keyser s series consisted solely of writers in their thirties. Are writers with 20-plus years of experience incapable of delivering the kind of dialogue that connects with the youthful target audience of Keyser s show? It seems unlikely. His series, Party of Five, was indeed a big hit with the teens who form the bulk of the audience of the WB network, but it was also as formulaic as any family drama of the 1960s and 1970s. Typecast as out of fashion, older writers do not get a second look for these kinds of series, regardless of their talent. Reacting to this kind of typecasting, Larry Gelbart, the Emmywinning creator of M*A*S*H, commented to Morley Safer, Shakespeare never met a king in his life but didn t hesitate to write about royalty; he certainly wasn t a teenager when he wrote Romeo and Juliet. Programming executives really have no way of knowing which writers have a unique knack for writing scripts that resonate best with the desired audience. However, to justify their decisions to corporate management, they can explain that a series writers are similar in age (or gender or race) to the audience. That account draws on positive examples (e.g., a hot young writer on a show that attracts large numbers of teens) and on prevailing stereotypes; exceptions can be explained away as flukes. the hollywood shuffle: typecasting african americans Typecasting also segregates African-American writers, who have few opportunities outside of minority-themed genres. From Photo courtesy of Minnesota Historical Society Cameramen working for Ray-Bell Films in Hollywood producers today are predominantly young, white males who tend to seek screenwriters like themselves. 24 contexts fall/winter 2002

5 the 1920s to the 1940s, African-American writers were limited exclusively to low-budget race movies, produced by independent filmmakers for black audiences. Fewer than a dozen African Americans were members of the WGA prior to the mid- 1960s, and it wasn t until the early 1970s that the blaxploitation genre and mainstream successes of black-themed dramas such as Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues brought more than token acceptance for African-American screenwriters. It is the same in television. African-American writers were virtually absent in prime time until the rise of the black-themed sitcom in the early 1970s (Good Times, Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons, etc.). Sixty-six minority writers (mostly African- American) joined the WGA between 1972 and 1976, three times as many as had joined their ranks from the time of the Guild s founding in 1933 through Yet typecasting makes it almost impossible for African-American writers to break into other genres. For example, in , minorities accounted for 10 percent of the 670 writers working on prime-time series, but 90 percent of the writers of color were working on series (mostly sitcoms) featuring predominantly African-American characters on the WB, UPN and Fox. With just two minority-themed sitcoms on the traditional networks, employment opportunities for writers of color on ABC, CBS and NBC were almost nonexistent. Because of typecasting, minority writers employment is extremely vulnerable to the inevitable cycles in genre popularity. By the late 1970s, mainstream Hollywood had lost interest in both black action heroes and minority-themed dramas. Opportunities for African-American film writers were nearly nonexistent until the late 1980s, when Spike Lee and John Singleton demonstrated that black filmmakers could write and direct films with mainstream (i.e., white audience) appeal. However, that breakthrough appears to have been short-lived. Increasingly, Hollywood films are financed by foreign investors, who believe that scripts with strong minority themes (or even films featuring persons of color in lead roles) have limited appeal in overseas markets. Filmmakers and actors of color assert that their films would be more successful if Hollywood studios would aggressively market them in Europe and Asia. The system is self-perpetuating, since no studio executive wants to take the risk of bucking conventional wisdom. In any given year, without the full backing of the international marketing and distribution arms of the Hollywood studios, no more than a handful of films with minority stars and story lines will generate significant overseas profits. One or two successes can be explained away as a result of the unique crossover appeal of a star like Will Smith, while the overall pattern reinforces the stereotype that only white characters and stories have audience appeal abroad. Increasingly, Hollywood films are financed by foreign investors, who believe that scripts with strong minority themes (or even films featuring persons of color in lead roles) have limited appeal in overseas markets. The vulnerability to genre cycles is equally evident in television. When Good Times ceased production in 1979, the black sitcom genre went through a dry spell, as did opportunities for African-American writers, until it was resurrected by Bill Cosby in his second effort in the format in Fox, the WB, and UPN each seized on the format (and a guaranteed core audience of African Americans) as they launched their prime-time schedules, sustaining opportunities for African-American writers into the late 1990s. Once established, however, each of the emerging networks has followed a similar strategy: shifting to a more broad-based programming approach and jettisoning minority-themed sitcoms. For example, in January 1998 UPN s CEO Dean Valentine proclaimed: UPN wants to give America s middle masses what they want to see, in shows they like, like Roseanne, or Home Improvement, or Married with Children. We want to be broad-based broadcasters, not narrowcasters of any kind (quoted in the Houston Chronicle, January 8, 1998). UPN was following the path taken by Fox and the WB. As a result, between 1997 and 1999, the number of blackthemed sitcoms declined from 15 to 6, which likely reduced employment of African-American writers on prime-time series by close to 50 percent. As in the case of age, Hollywood executives strongly believe that black writers can only write about African Americans, while white writers can write about the experiences of any racial or ethnic minority group. This same logic leads to the near total exclusion of Latino, Asian-American and Native-American writers in Hollywood; they comprise less than 2 percent of those working in the industry. still a man s world Writing is one of the few professions where women have achieved parity with men, at least in terms of participation. By 1990, women accounted for 50 percent of authors, 50 percent of technical writers, and 51 percent of editors and reporters, according to census statistics. Factors favoring women s participation seem to be present in Hollywood as fall/winter 2002 contexts 25

6 Board of Directors, Writers Guild of America, Photo courtesy of the Writers Guild Foundation and the Writers Guild of America, west well. Writing for film and television does not require long-term commitment to a single corporate employer. The work can be done in any setting, during hours of the writers own choosing. Shouldn t Hollywood provide the exception to the glass ceiling faced by women in most professions? In fact, there was no glass ceiling 75 years ago when women accounted for at least half of those writing for silent films in Hollywood and were among the most highly compensated professionals in the industry. By the time the studio system became firmly established in the 1930s, filmmaking had become centralized and hierarchical. As in other industrial settings, men soon dominated the most important positions on both the business and creative sides. By the end of the decade, many women were employed in low-level jobs such as script clerk, but they accounted for no more than 15 percent of screenwriters. Today men still outnumber women by more than four to one among those writing feature films and by nearly three to one among those writing for television. Women writers earn nearly 20 percent less than equally experienced male writers, a gap that has hardly changed since the mid-1980s. The explanation is, to some extent, similar to the one in other professions: women tend to be segregated in less lucrative positions. Women television writers are less likely than men to be executive producers of prime-time network series, and in film, they are much less likely than men to have the opportunity to produce and direct as well as write. Typecasting by gender is less extensive than it is by age or by race, although in both film and television, writing action adventures the lucrative genre that appeals to male audiences here and abroad remains a largely male domain. However, even women who are neither segregated to specific positions nor constrained to write for specific genres face subtle barriers. In the clubby, male-dominated world of executives, male writers are insiders. As a result, they are better known and are often perceived as better risks than equally successful female writers. Men are more likely than women to 26 contexts fall/winter 2002

7 Movie theater showing three youth market films concurrently. get long-term development deals and multiple project commitments. Pro-male bias in the industry generates a pattern of cumulative advantage whereby women fall further behind their male counterparts during the course of a career. there s no business like show business? From the earliest stages of assembling a new project, the men and women who finance, produce, market, and distribute films and television programs engage in short-term contracting in a context of ambiguity, risk and uncertainty. They rely on closed social networks of interpersonal ties and informal subjective criteria for evaluating writers contributions. Research demonstrates that these are precisely the conditions under which stereotypes shape decision making, especially when there is no system for holding decision makers responsible for making unbiased decisions. In Hollywood, few companies have reformed their personnel practices to minimize bias regarding creative talent. One reason is that the stereotypes make perfect business sense to Hollywood executives, who self-consciously attempt to mirror and trade on cultural idioms about age, race and gender. Cultural stereotypes are embodied in the industry s product, figure prominently in its marketing strategies, and therefore become rules of thumb for making decisions about writers and other creative professionals. Establishing equal opportunity accountability for creative professionals in Hollywood is a formidable challenge. While most writers are legally employees of large organizations, their employment is similar to that of outside contractors hired for a short-term project. As a result, the organizational structures and policies that create barriers to career advancement tend to remain invisible to the writers themselves. Moreover, the lines of authority for hiring and pay decisions are often blurred. A typical television series or feature film project is a joint venture among the producer s small production company, the major studio or network responsible for marketing and distribution, and perhaps a third organization for financing. The producer who assembles a writing staff on a television series or green lights the screenwriter for a film project is likely to be reporting, directly or indirectly, to executives at each of these organizations, and each is likely to demand input into the hiring and compensation of writers. Given these multiple authorities, it is not clear who would establish such an equal opportunity policy and how oversight might be implemented. The call for equal opportunity in Hollywood has come from the guilds and from civil rights organizations; given the lack of progress to date, it is not surprising that dispute has moved to the courts. In February 2002, a group representing more than 150 Hollywood writers filed 26 separate class-action lawsuits in California Superior Court, alleging age discrimination in employment by the television networks, major studios and elite talent agencies. The stakes are high, not just for fairness in employment, but also for whose stories get told to a global audience. n recommended resources Baker, Wayne E., and Robert R. Faulkner. Role as Resource in the Hollywood Film Industry. American Journal of Sociology 97 (September 1991): Baker and Faulkner analyze how the rise of the blockbuster strategy in the 1970s changed the balance of power between business and creative professionals in Hollywood. Bielby, Denise D., and William T. Bielby. Audience Segmentation and Age Stratification Among Television Writers. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 45 (Summer 2001): How advertisers quest for younger television audiences contributed to typecasting writers by age. Bielby, William T., and Denise D. Bielby. The 1998 Hollywood Writers Report: Telling ALL Our Stories. West Hollywood, CA: Writers Guild of America, West, The most comprehensive description of gender, race, and age disparities in earnings and employment among television and film writers. Caves, R. E. Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, The principles of industrial organization help explain how creative and commercial interests reconcile in the arts. Television Writers Age Discrimination Litigation Steering Committee. Writers Case Web Site, Information about the class-action lawsuit against the networks, studios, and talent industries that dominate the television industry. fall/winter 2002 contexts 27