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Home | About NWU | Events | Issues | Get Involved | Benefits | Links | Marketplace | Submissions | Contacts | FAQCatherine Hiller, author of five novels, most recently Cybill In Between (2009), and a book of short stories, gave the NWU permission to post an excerpt from 17 Morton Street (St. Martin's Press 1990), which features a dope-smoking Greenwich Village documentary filmmaker, Perri Jennings, who wants to make a film about the National Writers Union, back when it was just a few years old. In this scene, Perri pitches her idea to Tom Fenley, for a film with the working title of "Birth of a Union." "I want you to co-produce a film with me about the National Writers Union." Fenley said, "Never heard of it." "It's still small," she said. "These are the early years." Fenley asked, ""Who wants to watch a bunch of writers having meetings?" "That's not what I had in mind," she said. "I had in mind an exciting film about purpose and confrontation. About books and society. About literature. About money. About people working for change against enormous odds." He gave her a cynical look. She continued rapidly. "On the one side, there are giant conglomerates and book chains. On the other, a group of writers working together for the first time. Union neophytes, powerless as individuals. The way I see it," she said "the National Writers Union is the labor equivalent of David and Goliath." She felt her rhetoric redden her cheeks. "What about PEN and the Authors Guild?" Fenley asked. "They're literary organizations -- but only the Union is fighting for writers' economic rights. These huge new publishing conglomerates are making more profit than every before. Yet most writers who publish a book make less in a year from their work than the ladies who clean up the office at night.'' "That's a good visual," Finley said. "But with so little reading and so many writers, what can a writers' union really accomplish?" "Ask the Screenwriters Guild! Ask the presidents of the writers' unions in Sweden and England and France ! We could go to Paris and Stockholm and show what unions have done there. It'd be fun." "Oh really?" Fenley leaned back and looked at Perri appraisingly. Looked at her breasts. She said, hurriedly, "I didn't mean fun." Home | About NWU | Events | Issues | Get Involved | Benefits | Links | Marketplace | Submissions | Contacts| FAQ
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