I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History

6. The Screen Producers Guild

6 The Screen Producers Guild S hortly after I became head of production at Monogram in 1951, I received a telephone call from Arthur Hornblow Jr., a wellknown producer at Paramount and at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He introduced himself and told me that he and a group of other producers had been talking about organizing a Screen Producers Guild, along the lines of the writers and directors guilds, in order to enhance the recognition that they felt producers lacked and that they felt was not achievable without an organization. He invited me to lunch, and I very much enjoyed meeting him. I was then working on the proverbial other side of the railroad tracks, and he in the fabled halls of MGM at its zenith . I was very flattered. On his part, he seemed interested in how lowbudget production functioned. We had a pleasant lunch, and he invited me to attend the organizing meeting of the Screen Producers Guild, to be held in a private dining room at Chasen’s restaurant. I am sure Arthur and the other organizers each had assignments to call a certain number of people and inquire whether they would be interested in joining. The organizers were principally interested in lobbying the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to present the Academy Award for the Best Picture to the producer of that picture, not to a studio head, which had been the practice up until then. The organizers of the guild were the most prominent producers of the time—Arthur Freed, William Perlberg, Sol Siegel, Lawrence Weingarten, Pandro Berman, 61 and others—the people producing the films that won those awards, and it didn’t sit too well with them that they weren’t the recipients. There were other, serious injustices about which producers complained . At certain studios, principally Republic, producers were still not given credit on their pictures as producers. They were called supervisors . Some studios called all producers associate producers, with the studio head considered the producer of all the studio’s films. There were other injustices, such as lack of pensions and health and welfare plans. The producers felt that if they had an organization of their own they could afford publicity representatives who would undertake campaigns to make the press and the public aware of what the role of the creative producer was in the making of motion pictures. Those were the major reasons for the creation of the Screen Producers Guild, later renamed the Producers Guild of America. The Screen Producers Guild constituted my first real involvement in industry affairs, and I found it most stimulating. It was a wonderful opportunity for me to make the acquaintance of most of the other producers in the industry, and it was also useful in other ways. People in the industry were always calling one another to inquire, “What do you know about that writer? What was your experience with that director?” Now they knew one another. So the whole fraternal aspect of the guild also became of use to its members, because they came to know people from all segments of the industry. It was useful to producers in the big studios who had all of the facilities of those behemoths available to them. It was even more useful to me, in that little studio off of Sunset Drive, down near Vermont Avenue, to be able to call the producers at MGM or Paramount or Fox and have a discourse on a serious matter of business. William Perlberg was elected the first president of the Producers Guild, and Sol Siegel was the second. For tactical reasons, the guild avoided taking a strong position against the blacklist, although most everybody on the creative side opposed it. It generally depended on how far out in front of the issue any individual wanted to be, or could afford to be. The guild charged its members dues and hired an executive secretary, Bess Bearman, who had formerly been Darryl F. Zanuck’s secretary. She had excellent connections in the industry and was effective in her job. The guild undertook publicity campaigns and began a tradition of annual dinners, which 62 The Screen Producers Guild / became important social affairs as well as publicity vehicles for the producers. It chose the most important people in the industry as the recipients of its annual presentation, the Milestone Award, to honor an individual whose work had represented a...