Writing for Hire: Unions, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue

by Catherine L. Fisk

Overview

Required to sign away their legal rights as authors as a condition of employment, professional writers may earn a tidy living for their work, but they seldom own their writing. Writing for Hire traces the history of labor relations that defined authorship in film, TV, and advertising in the mid-twentieth century. Catherine L. Fisk examines why strikingly different norms of attribution emerged in these overlapping industries, and she shows how unionizing enabled Hollywood writers to win many authorial rights, while Madison Avenue writers achieved no equivalent recognition.

In the 1930s, the practice of employing teams of writers to create copyrighted works became widespread in film studios, radio networks, and ad agencies. Sometimes Hollywood and Madison Avenue employed the same people. Yet the two industries diverged in a crucial way in the 1930s, when screenwriters formed the Writers Guild to represent them in collective negotiations with media companies. Writers Guild members believed they shared the same status as literary authors and fought to have their names attached to their work. They gained binding legal norms relating to ownership and public recognition—norms that eventually carried over into the professional culture of TV production.

In advertising, by contrast, no formal norms of public attribution developed. Although some ad writers chafed at their anonymity, their nonunion workplace provided no institutional framework to channel their demands for change. Instead, many rationalized their invisibility as creative workers by embracing a self-conception as well-compensated professionals devoted to the interests of clients.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674973206
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	10/17/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	296
File size:	835 KB

About the Author

Catherine L. Fisk is Chancellor’s Professor of Law at University of California, Irvine, School of Law.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations Used in the Text ix

Introduction 1

Act I Beginnings

1 The Cloak of Anonymity and the Literary Gunman 31

2 The New Story System 51

Act II Intersections

3 Agency-Built Storytelling 89

4 The Revolution Will Be Televised 112

5 The Writer's Share 137

Act III Denouement

6 The Blacklist 171

7 Pencils for Hire and Mad Men in Gray Flannel Suits 202

Conclusion 237

Notes 253

Archival Sources 297

Acknowledgments 299

Index 301

Editorial Reviews

Opening the archives of firms, guilds, and corporations, Catherine Fisk uncovers the stories of dozens of writer-employees and the rapidly changing parameters of their work. Madison Avenue and Hollywood appear as we’ve never seen them before—as twin sectors of the work-for-hire economy separated at birth by divergent practices of attribution, recognition, and unionization. Writing for Hire makes labor history an indispensable means of understanding copyright in the twentieth century and beyond.

Paul K. Saint-Amour

An illuminating work for everyone interested in histories of ‘the author,’ of intellectual property, of unionization, and of Hollywood. Fisk tells a largely unknown story of labor success. And along the way, she uses her imaginative and extensive research to offer something close to an ethnography of contracting behavior and the cultural underpinnings of contracting in twentieth-century America.

Hendrik Hartog

Catherine Fisk has written an immensely readable historical study of the legal and social significance of creative authorship in the American entertainment and advertising industries. Writing for Hire provides clarity and insight on questions of authorship, intellectual property, and unionization—all of which are essential concerns for anyone working in or studying the creative industries today.

Miranda Banks

Drawing on previously unexplored archival sources, Catherine Fisk has produced a rich and rewarding comparison of two parallel cultures of professional writers doing similar work in different industries. Fisk’s book combines a captivating narrative with insightful legal, economic, and social analysis of how writers, movie studios, and advertising agencies grappled with issues of attribution in the formative decades of radio, film, and television.

R. Anthony Reese

This is an incisive work of scholarship and historical reconstruction that not only captures the dilemma of authorship in corporatized film, TV, and advertising but also demonstrates the central importance of good old-fashioned trade unionism in defending the creativity, status, and income of even the most renowned writers. For any ‘knowledge worker’ vexed about his or her place in the gig economy, Catherine Fisk’s eye-opening book is essential reading.

Nelson Lichtenstein