Screen Credit and the Writers Guild of America, 1938-2000: A Study in Labor Market and Idea Market Intermediation

This Article explores how the Writers Guild of America facilitates the labor market for writers and the market for ideas, scripts, and treatments for film and TV. The Article, which is based on research in the archives of the Writers Guild not available to the public, argues that the Guild has survived conditions that might lead to de-unionization because of the value it provides all types of writers and all types of employers in managing the labor and idea markets. In particular, the Guild administers two private intellectual property rights systems – the screen credit system and the script registry – that facilitate transactions between writers and producers. The experience of the Guild suggests that under the right circumstances unions can play a valuable role in supporting innovation addressing structural problems in labor markets for talented short-term workers and the start-up enterprises that hire them. * Chancellor’s Professor of Law, University of California, Irvine. I am grateful to the staff of the Writers Guild of America, West, especially Anthony Segall, Lesley Mackey McCambridge, and Sally Burmester, for providing me access to their files and answering my questions. In order to protect the integrity of the credit determination system, I agreed to mention no names of people or projects referenced in the files. I’ve already benefitted from suggestions of Erwin Chemerinsky, Jonathan Handel, Tony Reese, Bob Spoo, Matt Stahl, participants at workshops at UC Berkeley, Boston University, Georgetown University, the University of Tulsa, and the University of Western Ontario. I am also grateful to UC Irvine students Rachel Diggs, Xenia Tashlitsky, Christina Zabat-Fran, and the reference librarians at UC Irvine Law Library for research assistance.