During one of the weeks I spent this summer in Los Angeles, there was a cluster of small earthquakes, the most noticeable of which, on the Garlock Fault, a major lateral-slip fracture that intersects the San Andreas in the Tehachapi range north of Los Angeles, occurred at six minutes after four on a Friday afternoon when I happened to be driving in Wilshire Boulevard from the beach. People brought up to believe that the phrase “terra firma” has real meaning often find it hard to understand the apparent equanimity with which earthquakes are accommodated in California, and tend to write it off as regional spaciness. It is in fact less equanimity than protective detachment, the useful adjustment commonly made in circumstances so unthinkable that psychic survival precludes preparation. I know very few people in California who actually set aside, as instructed, a week’s supply of water and food. I know fewer still who could actually lay hands on the wrench required to turn off, as instructed, the main gas valve; the scenario in which this wrench will be needed is a catastrophe, and something in the human spirit rejects planning on a daily basis for catastrophe. I once, in the late sixties, interviewed someone who did prepare: a Pentecostal minister, who had received a kind of heavenly earthquake advisory, and, on its quite specific instructions, was moving his congregation from Port Hueneme, north of Los Angeles, to Murfreesboro, Tennessee. A few months later, when a small earthquake was felt not in Port Hueneme but in Murfreesboro, an event so novel that it was reported nationally, I was, I recall, mildly gratified.
A certain fatalism comes into play. When the ground starts moving, all bets are off. Quantification, which in this case takes the form of guessing where the movement at hand will rank on the Richter scale, remains a favored way of regaining the illusion of personal control, and people still crouched in the nearest doorframe will reach for a telephone and try to call Caltech, in Pasadena, for a Richter reading. “Rock and roll,” the d.j. said on my car radio that Friday afternoon at six minutes after four. “This console is definitely shaking. . . . No word from Pasadena yet, is there?”
“I would say this is a three,” the d.j.’s colleague said.
“Definitely a three, maybe I would say a little higher than a three.”
“Say an eight—just joking.”
“It felt like a six where I was.”
What it turned out to be was a 5.2, followed by a dozen smaller aftershocks, and it had knocked out four of six circuit breakers at the A.D. Edmonston pumping plant on the California Aqueduct, temporarily shutting down the flow of Northern California water over the Tehachapi range and cutting off half of Southern California’s water supply for the weekend. This was all in the category not only of the predictable but of the normal. No one had been killed or seriously injured. There was plenty of water for the weekend in the system’s four southern reservoirs—Pyramid, Castaic, Silverwood, and Perris Lakes. A 5.2 earthquake is not a major event in California, where the movements that people remember tend to have Richter numbers well over six, and the probability of earthquakes like this one had, in fact, been built into the Aqueduct: the decision to pump the water nineteen hundred feet over the Tehachapi was made precisely because the Aqueduct’s engineers rejected the idea of tunnelling through an area so geologically complex—periodically wrenched by opposing displacements along the San Andreas and the Garlock—that it has been called California’s structural knot.
Still, this particular 5.2, coming, as it did, when what Californians call the Big One was pretty much overdue (the Big One is the 8, the Big One is the 7 in the wrong place or at the wrong time, the Big One could even be the 6.5 centered near downtown Los Angeles at nine on a weekday morning), made people a little uneasy. There was some concern through the weekend that this was not merely an ordinary 5.2 but a “foreshock,” an earthquake prefiguring a larger event (the chances of this, according to Caltech seismologists, run about one in twenty), and by Sunday there was what seemed to many people a sinister amount of activity on other faults: a 3.4 just east of Ontario at two-twenty-two in the afternoon, a 3.6 twenty-two minutes later at Lake Berryessa, and, four hours and one minute later, northeast of San Jose, a 5.5 on the Calaveras Fault. On Monday, there was a 2.3 in Playa del Rey and a 3 in Santa Barbara.
Had it not been for the 5.2 on Friday, very few people would have registered these little quakes (the Caltech seismological monitors in Southern California normally record from twenty to thirty earthquakes a day with magnitudes below 3), and in the end nothing came of them, but this time people did register them, and they lent a certain moral gravity to the way the city happened to look that weekend, a temporal dimension to the hard white edges and empty golden light. At odd moments during the next few days people would suddenly clutch at tables or walls. “Is it going?” they would say, or “I think it’s moving.” They almost always said “it,” and what they meant by “it” was not just the ground but the world as they knew it. I have lived all my life with the promise of the Big One, but when it starts going now even I get the jitters.
What is striking about Los Angeles after a period away from it is how well it works. The famous freeways work, the supermarkets work (a visit to, say, the Pacific Palisades Gelson’s, where the aisles are wide and the shelves full and checkout is fast and free of attitude, elevates grocery shopping to a form of zazen), the beaches work. The 1984 Olympics were not supposed to work, but they did (daily warnings of gridlock and urban misery gave way during the first week to a county-wide block party, with pink and aquamarine flags fluttering over empty streets, and with parking spaces available, for once, even in Westwood)—not only worked but turned a profit, of almost two hundred and twenty-three million dollars, about which there was no scandal. Even the way houses are bought and sold seems to work more efficiently than it does in New York (for all practical purposes, there are no exclusive listings in Los Angeles, and the various contingencies on which closing the deal depends are arbitrated not by lawyers but by an escrow company), something that came to my attention when my husband and I arranged to have a house shown for the first time to brokers at eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning, went out to do a few errands, and came back at one to find that we had three offers, one of them for appreciably more than the asking price.
Selling a house in two hours was not, this year in Los Angeles, an entirely unusual experience. Around February, midway through what most people call the winter but Californians call the spring (“winter” in California is widely construed as beginning and ending with the Christmas season, a view reflecting a local preference for the upside), at a time when residential-real-estate prices in New York were plunging in response to the October crash, there had, in fact, developed on the west side of Los Angeles a heightened enthusiasm for committing large sums of money to marginal improvements in one’s domestic situation: to moving, say, from what was called in the listings a “convertible 3” in Santa Monica (three bedrooms, one of which might be converted into a study) to a self-explanatory “4+1lib” in Brentwood Park, or to acquiring what was described in the listings as an “H/F pool,” meaning heated and filtered, or an “N/S tennis court,” meaning the preferred placement on the lot—the north-south orientation that is locally believed to keep sun from the players’ eyes.
By June, a kind of panic had set in, of a kind that occurs periodically in Southern California and had last occurred in 1979. Multiple offers were commonplace, and deals stalled because bank appraisers could not assess sales fast enough to keep up with the rising market. Residential-real-estate offices were routinely reporting “record months.” People were buying one- and two-million-dollar houses as investments, to give their adolescent children what brokers referred to as “a base in the market.” Small houses on modest lots priced at a million four were getting thirty or forty offers the day they were listed.
All this seemed to assume an infinite upward trend, and to be one of those instances in which the preoccupations and apprehensions of people in Los Angeles, a city in many ways predicated on the ability to deal with the future at a rather existential remove, did not exactly coincide with the concerns of the country at large. October 19th, which had so affected the New York market that asking prices on some apartments had dropped as much as a million dollars, seemed in Los Angeles not to have happened. California brokers to whom I talked, if they mentioned the crash at all, tended to see it as a catalyst for good times—something that had emphasized the “real” in real estate.
The Los Angeles Times had taken to running, every Sunday, a chat column devoted mainly to the buying and selling of houses: Ruth Ryon’s “Hot Property,” from which one could learn that the highest price paid for a house in Los Angeles to date was twenty million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars (by Marvin Davis, to Kenny Rogers, for The Knoll in Beverly Hills); that the two and a half million dollars paid in 1986 for 668 St. Cloud Road in Bel Air (by Earle Jorgensen and Holmes Tuttle and some eighteen other friends of President and Mrs. Reagan, for whom the house was bought, and who will rent it with an option to buy) was strikingly under value, since even an unbuilt acre in the right part of Bel Air (the house bought by the Reagans’ friends is definitely in the right part of Bel Air) will sell for three million; and that two houses in the Reagans’ new neighborhood sold recently for thirteen and a half million dollars and fourteen million seven hundred and fifty thousand, respectively. A typical “Hot Property” item ran this way:
I spent some time this summer with two west-side brokers, Betty Budlong and Romelle Dunas, of the Jon Douglas office, both of whom spoke about the going price of “anything at all” as a million dollars and of “something decent” as two million dollars. “Right now I’ve got two clients in the price range of five to six hundred thousand dollars,” Romelle Dunas said. “I sat all morning trying to think what I could show them today.”
“I’d cancel the appointment,” Betty Budlong said.
“I just sold their condo for four hundred. I’m sick. The houses for five-fifty are smaller than their condo.”
“I think you could still find something in Ocean Park,” Betty Budlong said. “Ocean Park, Sunset Park—somewhere like that. Brentwood Glen, you know, over here, the Rattery tract—of course that’s inching toward six.”
“Inching toward six and you’re living in the right lane of the San Diego Freeway,” Romelle Dunas said.
“In seventeen hundred square feet,” Betty Budlong said.
“If you’re lucky. I saw one that was fifteen hundred square feet. I have a feeling when these people go out today they’re not going to close on their condo.”
Betty Budlong thought about this.
“I think you should make a good friend of Sonny Fox,” she said at last.
Sonny Fox was a Jon Douglas agent in Sherman Oaks, in the San Fernando Valley, only a twenty-minute drive from Beverly Hills on the San Diego Freeway but a twenty-minute drive to which someone living on the west side—even someone who would drive forty minutes to Malibu—was apt to display considerable sales resistance.
“In the Valley,” Romelle Dunas said after a pause.
Betty Budlong shrugged. “In the Valley.”
“People are afraid to get out of this market,” Romelle Dunas said.
“They can’t afford to get out,” Betty Budlong said. “I know two people who in any other market would have sold their houses. One of them has accepted a job in Chicago, the other is in Washington for at least two years. They’re both leasing their houses. Because until they’re sure they’re not coming back they don’t want to get out.”
The notion that land will be worth more tomorrow than it is worth today has been a real part of the California experience, and remains deeply embedded in the California mind, but this seemed extreme, and it occurred to me that the buying and selling of houses was perhaps one more area in which the local capacity for protective detachment had come into play—that people capable of compartmentalizing the Big One might be less inclined than others to worry about getting their money out of a 4+1lib, H/F pool. I asked if foreign buyers could be pushing up the market.
Betty Budlong thought not. “These are people who are moving, say, from a seven-fifty house to a million-dollar house.”
I asked if the market could be affected by a defense cutback.
Betty Budlong thought not. “Most of the people who buy on the west side are professionals, or in the entertainment industry. People who work at Hughes and Douglas, say, don’t live in Brentwood or Santa Monica or Beverly Hills.”
I asked Betty Budlong if she saw anything at all that could affect the market.
“Tight money could affect this market,” she said. “For a while.”
“Then it always goes higher,” Romelle Dunas said.
“Which is why people can’t afford to get out,” Betty Budlong said.
“They couldn’t get back in,” Romelle Dunas said.
The entire question of houses and what they were worth (and what they should be worth, and what it meant when the roof over someone’s head was also his or her major asset) was understandably more on the local mind than it perhaps should have been, which was one reason that a certain house under construction just west of the Los Angeles Country Club became, over the spring and summer, the focus not only of considerable attention but of emotions usually left dormant on the west side of Los Angeles. The house was the one being built by the television producer (“Dynasty,” “The Love Boat,” “Fantasy Island”) Aaron Spelling and his wife, Candy, at the corner of Mapleton and Club View in Holmby Hills, on six acres the Spellings had bought in 1983, for ten million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, from Patrick Frawley, the chairman of Schick.
At the time of the purchase, there was already a fairly impressive house on the property, a house once lived in by Bing Crosby, but the Spellings, who are known for expansive domestic gestures (crossing the country in private railroad cars, for example, and importing snow to Beverly Hills for their children’s Christmas parties), had decided that the Crosby/Frawley house was what is known locally as a teardown. The progress of the replacement, which was rising from the only residential site I have ever seen with a two-story office for the contractor and a sign reading “CONSTRUCTION AREA: HARD HATS REQUIRED,” became over the next several months not just a form of popular entertainment but, among inhabitants of a city without much common experience, a unifying, even a political, idea.
At first, the project was identified, on the kind of site sign usually reserved for office towers in progress, as “THE MANOR;” later, “The Manor” was modified to what seemed, given the resemblance of the structure to a resort Hyatt, the slightly nutty discretion of “594 SOUTH MAPLETON DRIVE.” It was said that the structure (“house” seemed not entirely to cover it) would have fifty-six thousand five hundred square feet. It was said that the interior plan included a bowling alley, and five hundred and sixty square feet of extra closet space, balconied between the second and the attic floors. It was said, by the owner, that such was the mass of the steel-frame construction that to break up the foundation alone would take a demolition crew six months and cost from four to five million dollars.
By early summer, the site had become an established attraction, and evening drive-bys were enlivened by a skittish defensiveness on the part of the guards, who would switch on the perimeter floods and light up the steel girders and mounded earth like a prison yard. The Los Angeles Times and Herald Examiner published periodic reports on and rumors about the job (“Callers came out of the woodwork yesterday in the wake of our little tale about Candy Spelling having the foundation of her $45 million mansion-in-progress lowered because she didn’t want to see the Robinson’s department store sign from where her bed-to-be was to sit”), followed by curiously provocative corrections, or “denials,” from Aaron Spelling. “The only time Candy sees the Robinson’s sign is when she’s shopping” was one correction that got everyone’s attention, but in many ways the most compelling was this: “They say we have an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Not true. There’s no gazebo, no guest house. . . . When people are out to dinner, unless they talk about their movies, they have nothing else to talk about, so they single out Candy.”
In that single clause “unless they talk about their movies” there was hidden a great local truth, and the inchoate heart of the matter: this house was, in the end, that of a television producer, and people who make movies do not, on an average evening, have dinner with people who make television. People who make television have most of the money, but people who make movies still have most of the status, and believe themselves the keepers of the community’s unspoken code—of the rules, say, about what constitutes excess on the housing front. This is a distinction usually left tacit, but the fact of the Spelling house was making people say things out loud. “There are people in this town worth hundreds of millions of dollars,” Richard Zanuck, one of the most successful motion-picture producers in the business, said to my husband not long ago, “and they can’t get a table at Chasen’s.” This was a man whose father had run a studio and who had himself run a studio, and his bewilderment was that of someone who had uncovered an anomaly in the wheeling of the planets.
When people in Los Angeles talk about “this town,” they do not mean Los Angeles, nor do they exactly mean what many of them call the community. “The community” is more narrowly defined, limited to those inhabitants of this town who can be relied upon to sit at one another’s tables on approved evenings (benefitting The American Film Institute, say, or the Joffrey Ballet), and to get one another’s daughters into approved schools (Westlake, say, in Holmby Hills, not far from the Spellings’ house, but on eleven acres rather than six). People in the community meet one another for lunch at Hillcrest but do not, in the main, attend Friars Club Roasts. People in the community sojourn with their children in Paris, and Aspen, and at the Kahala Hilton in Honolulu, but visit Las Vegas only on business. “The community” is made up of people who can, in other words, get a table at Chasen’s.
“This town” is broader, and means just “the industry,” which, tellingly, is the way people who make television and motion pictures refer to the environment in which they work. The extent to which the industry in question resembles conventional industries is often obscured by its unconventional product, which requires that its “workers” perform in unconventional ways, for which they are paid unconventional sums of money: some people do make big money writing and directing and producing and acting in television, and some people also make big money, although considerably less big, writing and directing and producing and acting in motion pictures.
Still, as in other entrepreneurial enterprises, it is not those who work on the line in this industry but those who manage it who make the biggest money of all, and who tend to have things their way, which is what the five-month Writers Guild of America strike—by the time of its settlement in early August perhaps the most acrimonious strike in the industry’s history—was initially, and despite its settlement is still, about. It was not about what were inflexibly referred to by both union and management as “the so-called creative issues,” nor was it exclusively about the complicated formulas and residuals that were the tokens on the board. It was about respect, and about whether the people who made the biggest money were or were not going to give a little of it to the people who made the less big money.
In other words, it was a class issue, which was hard for people outside the industry—who in the first place did not understand the essentially adversarial nature of the business (a good contract, it is taken for granted in Hollywood, is one that insures the other party’s breach) and in the second place believed everybody involved to be overpaid—to entirely understand. “Whose side does one take in such a war—that of the writers with their scads of money, or that of the producers, with their tons of money?” the Washington Post’s television reporter, Tom Shales, demanded (as it turned out, rhetorically) in a June 29th piece arguing that the writers were “more interested in strutting and swaggering than in reaching a settlement,” that a “handful of hotheads” who failed to realize that “the salad days are over” were bringing down an industry beset by “dwindling” profits, and that the only effect of the strike was to crush “those in the lowest paying jobs”—for example, a waitress laid off when Universal shut down its commissary, whom Tom Shales perceived to be “not too thrilled with the writers and their grievances” when he saw her interviewed on a television newscast. (“This was an example of what became known locally during the strike as “the little-people argument,” and referred to the traditional practice among struck companies of firing their non-union hostages. When hard times come to Hollywood, the typing pool goes first, and is understood to symbolize the need of the studio to “cut back,” or “slash costs.”) “Just because the producers are richer doesn’t mean the writers are right. Or righteous,” Tom Shales concluded. “These guys haven’t just seen too many Rambo movies, they’ve written too many Rambo movies.”
This piece, which reflected with rather impressive fidelity the arguments then being made by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the negotiating body for management, was typical of most coverage of the strike, and also of what had become by early summer the prevailing mood around town. Writers have never been much admired in Hollywood. In an industry predicated on social fluidity, on the daily calibration and reassessment of status and power, screenwriters, who perform a function that remains only dimly understood even by the people who hire them, occupy a notably static place: even the most successful of them have no real power, and therefore no real status. “I can always get a writer,” Ray Stark once told my husband, who had expressed a disinclination to join the team on a Stark picture for which he had been, Ray Stark had told him a few weeks before, “the only possible writer.”
Writers (even the only possible writers), it is universally believed, can always be replaced; this is why they are so frequently referred to in the plural. Writers, it is believed by many, are even better when they are replaced—hired serially—since, in this view, they bring only a limited amount of talent and energy to bear on what directors often call their “vision.” A number of directors prefer to hire fresh writers—usually writers with whom they have previously worked—just before shooting; Sydney Pollack, no matter who wrote the picture he is directing, has the habit of hiring for the period just before and during production David Rayfiel or Elaine May or Kurt Luedtke. (“I want it in the contract when David Rayfiel comes in,” a writer I know once said when he and Pollack were talking about doing a picture together; this was a practical but unappreciated approach.) The previous writer on any picture is typically described as “exhausted,” or “worn out on this.” What is meant by “this” is the task at hand, which is seen as narrow and technical, one color in the larger vision, a matter of taking notes from a producer or an actor or a director and adding dialogue—something, it is understood, that the producer or actor or director could do without a writer, if only he or she had the time, if only he or she were not required to keep that larger vision in focus. “I’ve got the ideas,” one frequently hears in the industry. “All I need is a writer.”
Such “ideas,” when explored, typically tend toward the general (“relationships between men and women,” say, or “rebel without a cause in the west Valley”), and the necessity of paying a writer to render such ideas specific remains a source of considerable resentment. Writers are generally seen as balky, obstacles to the forward flow of the project. They take time. They want money. They are typically the first element on a picture, the people whose job it is to invent a world sufficiently compelling to interest actors and directors, and, as the first element, they are often unwilling to recognize the necessity of keeping the front money down, of cutting their fees in order to get a project going. “Everyone,” they are told, is taking a cut (“everyone” in this instance generally means every one of the writers), yet they insist on “irresponsible” fees. A director who gets several million dollars a picture will often complain quite bitterly about being “held up” by the demands of his writers. “You’re haggling over pennies,” a director once complained to me.
This resentment surfaces most openly in contract negotiations (“We don’t give points to writers,” studio-business-affairs lawyers will say in a negotiation, or, even though a writer has often delivered one or two drafts on the basis of a deal memo alone, “Our policy is no payment without a fully executed contract”), but in fact suffuses every aspect of life in the community. Writers do not get gross from dollar one, nor do they get the Thalberg Award, nor do they determine when or where a meeting will take place: these are facts of local life known even to children. Writers who work regularly live comfortably, but not in the houses with the better N/S courts. Writers sometimes get to Paris on business, but rarely aboard the Concorde. Writers sometimes have lunch at Hillcrest, but only when their agents take them. Writers have at best a provisional relationship with the community in which they live, and this is precisely what has made them, over the years, such convenient pariahs. “Fuck ‘em, they’re weaklings,” one director I know said about the Guild.
As the strike wore on, then, a certain natural irritation, even a bellicosity, was bound to surface when the subject of the writers (or, as some put it, “the writers and their so-called demands”) came up, as was an impatience with the whole idea of collective bargaining. “If you’re good enough, you can negotiate your own contract,” I recall being told by one director. It was frequently suggested that the strike was supported only by those members of the Guild who were not full-time working writers. “A lot of them aren’t writers,” Alliance spokesman told the Los Angeles Times in May. “They pay their $100 a year dues and get invitations to screenings.” A television producer suggested to me in June that perhaps the answer was “another guild,” one that would function, although he did not say this, as a sweetheart union. “A guild for working writers,” he said. “That’s a guild we could negotiate with.”
I heard repeatedly during June and July that I, as a member of the Guild “but an intelligent person,” had surely failed to understand what “the leadership” of the Guild was doing to me; when I said that I did understand it, that I had lost three pictures in the course of the strike and would continue to vote against a settlement until certain money issues had been resolved, I was told that such intransigence would lead nowhere, because “the producers won’t budge,” because “they’re united on this,” because “they’re going to just write off the Guild,” and because, an antic note, “they’re going to start hiring college kids—they’re even going to start hiring journalists.”
In this mounting enthusiasm for punishing the industry’s own writers by replacing them “even” with journalists (“Why not air-traffic controllers?” said a writer to whom I mentioned this threat), certain facts about the strike receded early into the mists of claim and counterclaim. Many people preferred to believe that, as Tom Shales summarized it, the producers had “offered increases” and the writers had “said they were not enough.” In reality, the producers had offered, on the key points in the negotiations, rollbacks on a residual payment structure established in 1960, specifically on residual payments that had been assured in 1985, when the W.G.A. contract was last negotiated. Many people preferred to believe, as Tom Shales seemed to believe, that it was the writers, not the producers, who were refusing to negotiate. In reality, the strike, from the Alliance’s “last and final offer” on March 6th until a federal mediator called both sides to meet on May 23rd, had been less a strike than a lockout, with the producers agreeing to attend only a single meeting, on April 8th, and the Alliance negotiators walking out after twenty minutes. “It looks like the writers are shooting the whole industry in the foot—and they’re doing it willfully and stupidly,” Grant Tinker, the television producer and former chairman of NBC, told the Los Angeles Times after the Guild rejected, by a vote of 2,789 to 933, the June version of the Alliance’s series of “last and final” offers. “It’s just pigheaded and stupid for the writers to have so badly misread what’s going on here.”
What was going on here was interesting. This was not an industry unaccustomed to labor disputes, nor had it been one—plans to hire “journalists” notwithstanding—historically hospitable to outsiders. (“We don’t go for strangers in Hollywood,” Cecilia Brady said in “The Last Tycoon;” this remains the most succinct description I know of the picture business.) For reasons basic to the structure of the industry, writers’ strikes have been a fixed feature of local life, and gains earned by the writers have traditionally been passed on to the other unions—which themselves strike only rarely—in a fairly inflexible ratio: for every dollar in residuals the Writers Guild gets, another dollar goes to the Directors Guild, three dollars goes to the Screen Actors Guild, and eight or nine dollars goes to IATSE, the principal craft union, which needs the higher take because its pension and health benefits, unlike those of the other unions, are funded entirely from residuals. “So when the W.G.A. negotiates for a dollar increase in residuals, say, the studios don’t think just a dollar, they think twelve or thirteen,” a former Guild president told me. “The industry is a kind of family, and its members are interdependent.”
Something new was at work, and it had to do with a changed attitude among the top executives. I recall being told quite early in the strike, by someone who had been a studio head of production and had bargained for management in previous strikes, that this strike would be different, and, in many ways, unpredictable. The problem, he said, was the absence at the bargaining table of “a Lew Wasserman, an Arthur Krim.” Lew Wasserman, the chairman of MCA-Universal, it is said in the industry, was always looking for the solution; as he grew less active, Arthur Krim, at United Artists, and, to a lesser extent, Ted Ashley, at Warner Brothers, fulfilled this function, which was essentially that of the consigliere. “The guys who are running the studios now, they don’t deal,” he said. “Sid Sheinberg bargaining for Universal, Barry Diller for Fox—that’s ridiculous. They won’t even talk. As far as the Disney guys go—Eisner, Katzenberg—they play hardball. That’s the way they run their operation.”
Roger Fisher, the Williston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, recently suggested, in an analysis of the strike published in the Los Angeles Times, that what had been needed between management and labor in this case was “understanding, two-way communication, reliability, and acceptance,” the very qualities that natural selection in the motion-picture industry had tended to eliminate. It was, in fact, June before the people running the studios actually entered the negotiating sessions, which they referred to, significantly, as “downtime.” “I talked to Diller, Mancuso, Daly,” I was told by one of the two or three most powerful agents in the industry. He meant Barry Diller, at Twentieth Century Fox; Frank Mancuso, at Paramount; and Robert Daly, at Warner Brothers. “I said, ‘Look, you guys, you want this thing settled, you better indicate you’re taking it seriously enough to put in the downtime yourselves.” Sheinberg and Mancuso have kind of emerged as the point players for management, but you’ve got to remember, these guys are all prima donnas, they hate each other, so it was a big problem presenting a sufficiently united front to put somebody out there speaking for all of them.”
In the context of an industry traditionally organized, like a mob family, around principles of discretion and unity, this notion of the executive as prima donna was a new phenomenon, and not one tending toward an appreciation of the “interdependence” of unions and management. That the main players on one side of the negotiations were themselves regarded as stars—the subjects of fan profiles, pieces often written by people who admired and wanted to work in the industry—did not work toward settlement of this strike. Michael Eisner had been on the cover of Time. Sidney Sheinberg had been on the cover of Manhattan, inc. Executive foibles had been detailed (Jeffrey Katzenberg, of Disney, “guzzled” diet Coke, and “sold his Porsche after he almost killed himself trying to shift gears and dial at the same time”), as had—and this presented a problem—company profits and executive compensation. In 1987, the net profit for Warner Communications was up 76.6 per cent over 1986, and for Paramount it was up a hundred and thirty per cent over 1986. CBS was up twenty-one per cent, ABC fifty-three per cent. In 1987, the chairman and C.E.O. of Columbia, Victor Kaufman, received $826,154 in salary and $1,506,142 in stock options and bonuses. Michael Eisner was said to have received, including options and bonuses, a figure that ranged from twenty-three million dollars (this was Disney’s own figure) to more than eighty million dollars (this was what the number of shares involved in the stock options seemed to suggest), but was most often given as sixty-three million dollars.
During a season when management was issuing white papers explaining “the new, colder realities facing the entertainment industry,” this last figure, in particular, had an energizing effect on the local consciousness, and was frequently mentioned in relation to another figure—that for the combined total received in residual payments by all nine thousand members of the Writers’ Guild. This figure was fifty-eight million dollars, and, against Michael Eisner’s “sixty-three,” made it hard for many people to accept the notion that residual rollbacks were entirely imperative. Trust seemed lacking, as did a certain mutuality of interest. “We used to sit across the table from people we had personally worked with on movies,” I was told in June by a writer who had sat in on negotiating sessions during this and past strikes. “These people aren’t movie people. They think like their own business-affairs lawyers. You take somebody like Jeff Katzenberg. He has a very ideological position. He said the other night, ‘I’m speaking as a dedicated capitalist. I own this screenplay. So why should I hand anybody else the right to have any say about it?’ ”
In June, it was said around Los Angeles that the strike was essentially over, because the producers said it was over, and that the only problem remaining was to find a way for the Guild negotiators to save face—a “bone,” as Jeffrey Katzenberg was said to be calling it, to throw the writers. “This has largely come down to a question of how Brian will look,” I was told by someone close to management. He was talking about Brian Walton, the Guild’s executive director and chief negotiator. “It’s a presentation problem, a question of giving him something he can present to the membership, after fifteen weeks, as something approaching win-win.” It was generally conceded that the producers, despite disavowals, were determined to break the union; even the disavowals, focussing as they did on the useful clerical work done by the Guild (“If the Guild didn’t exist we’d have to invent it,” Sidney Sheinberg said at one point), suggested that what the producers had in mind was less a union than a trade association. It was taken for granted that it was not the producers but the writers who, once the situation was correctly “presented,” would give in. “Let’s get this town back to work,” people were saying, and “This strike has got to end.”
Still, this strike did not end. By late July, it was said around Los Angeles that the negotiations once again in progress were not really negotiations at all—that “they” were meeting only because a federal mediator had ordered them to meet, and that the time spent at the table was just that, time spent at a table: downtime. Twenty-one writers had announced their intention of working in spite of the strike, and had described their decision as evidence of “the highest form of loyalty” to the Guild. “What’s it for?” people were saying, and “This is lose-lose.”
“Writers are children,” Monroe Stahr had said almost half a century before, in “The Last Tycoon,” by way of explaining why his own negotiations with the Writers Guild had reached, after a year, a dead end. “They are not equipped for authority. There is no substitute for will. Sometimes you have to fake will when you don’t feel it at all. . . . So I’ve had to take an attitude in this Guild matter.” In the end, the attitude once again was taken and once again prevailed. “This strike has run out of gas,” people began to say, and “This is ridiculous, this is enough,” as if the writers were not only children but bad children, who had been humored too long. “We’ve gotten to the end of the road and hit a brick wall,” the negotiator for the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, J. Nicholas Counter III, said on the afternoon of Sunday, July 31st, at a press conference that the Alliance had called to announce that negotiations with the Writers Guild were at an end, “hopelessly” deadlocked. “I suggest it’s time for Mr. Walton to look to himself for the answer as to why his guild is still on strike,” Jeffrey Katzenberg said that afternoon to Aljean Harmetz, of the New York Times. That evening, Jeffrey Katzenberg and the other executives of the major studios met with Kenneth Ziffren, a prominent local lawyer who represented several Guild members who, because they had television-production companies, had a particular interest in ending the strike; the marginally different formulas suggested by Kenneth Ziffren seemed to many the bone they had been looking for: a way of solving “the presentation problem,” of making the strike look, now that the writers understood that it had run out of gas, “like something approaching win-win.” On the following Sunday, August 7th, the Guild membership voted to end the strike, on approximately the same terms it had turned down in June.
During the summer many people outside the industry had asked me what the strike was about, and I had heard myself talk about ancillary markets and about the history of pattern bargaining, about the “issues,” but the dynamic of the strike—the particular momentum that kept several thousand people with not much in common voting at least for a while against what appeared to be their own best interests—had remained hard to explain. The amounts of money to be gained or lost had seemed insignificant against the money lost in the course of the strike. The “creative” issues, the provisions that touched on the right of the writer to have some say in the production, would have been, if resolved as the Guild wished, unenforceable.
Yet I had been for the strike, and felt toward that handful of writers who had declared their intention of deserting it, and by so doing had encouraged the terms on which it would end, a coolness bordering on distaste, as if we had gone back forty years, and they had named names. “You need to have worked in the industry,” I would say by way of explanation, or “You have to live there.” Not until midsummer, at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, did the emotional core of the strike become clear to me. I had gone to Atlanta in an extra-industry role, that of reporter (or, as we say in Hollywood, “journalist”), with credentials that gave me a seat in the Omni but access to only a rotating pass to go on the floor. While I was waiting for this rotating pass one evening, I ran into a director I knew, Paul Mazursky. We talked for a moment, and I noticed that he, like all the other industry people I saw in Atlanta, had a top pass—one of the several all-access passes. In this case, it was a floor pass, and, since I was working and he seemed not about to go on the floor, I asked if I might borrow it for half an hour.
He considered this.
He would, he said, “really like” to do this for me, but thought not. He seemed surprised that I had asked, and uncomfortable that I had breached the natural order of the community as we both knew it: directors and actors and producers, I should have understood, have floor passes. Writers do not, which is why they strike. ♦