Sad to hear of the death of TV writer Rick Mittleman last Wednesday. Rick, who was 84, was walking his dog in the Hancock Park area of Los Angeles and was killed in a traffic accident involving an S.U.V. One of his colleagues, Jack Mendelsohn, just told me about it and he was really depressed…as am I.
Rick was one of the most prolific TV writers of his day, able to write comedies, dramas, adventure shows…he even wrote for The Flintstones. His was one of those names I knew from credits on all my favorite programs, including The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Odd Couple, Get Smart, M*A*S*H, The Red Skelton Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, That Girl and so many others. In the late sixties, when I was sneaking up on a career in TV writing, I went to a bookstore in Hollywood to buy some produced scripts to use as models. I was amazed at how many of those scripts were by Rick Mittleman.
I met Rick through our mutual work with the Writers Guild of America. In the late seventies, the WGA was trying to find a way to wrest jurisdiction of animation writers from Local 839, the Animation Union. For long, circuitous reasons we who wrote cartoons were in a union that represented artists with whom we did not have much in common. 839 wanted to maintain jurisdiction over us because we paid the highest rate of dues and the withholding of our services was a good weapon if and when that union had to threaten to strike.
Taking a body of employees out of one union and allowing them to join another is called Craft Severance…and the tricky thing about that is that you can't file for it when there's a contract in place. Once the union signs its new contract with Management, there's this thing called a "contract bar" that guarantees the employees represented will not leave the bargaining unit.
Rick had written both live-action (under the WGA) and animation (under 839) and he knew how badly the Animation Union represented the needs of its writer members. The Union still has control of writers at some studios and it does a better job of representing them now. But back then, the gent who was 839's Business Agent and negotiator was unabashedly hostile to writers. He even told some of us that if it had been up to him, he would have lowered our pay. Even after Rick stopped writing animation and had no self-interest, he campaigned to try and get us out of that union and therefore away from that Business Agent.
In 1979, it was necessary for the Animation Union to go on strike. It was Rick who realized that while we were on strike, no contract bar was in place. I don't recall if he was on the WGA Board of Directors then — he was, from time to time — but he got them to quickly file a lawsuit demanding Craft Severance. At the time, I was writing both animation and live-action so I was selected as the writer in whose name the suit would be filed, which was fine with me.
The suit did not succeed. Craft severance is very difficult to achieve and it's even harder when…the National Labor Relations Board is full of Republican appointees, as it was then so soon after Nixon. Also, management — in this case, the studios like Disney and Hanna-Barbera — was working closely with the union to keep us in the union. That should give you some idea of how poorly the union represented our concerns then. 839 wasn't just in bed with the producers, it was gleefully subservient in a committed S&M relationship. (And I will remind you again that this is no longer the case under its current Business Agent, who is a good guy.)
Before we reached that outcome, we spent a lot of time in hearing rooms at the N.L.R.B. and what struck me was that Rick was in there, devoting his time and fighting along with the rest of us. He was not writing animation at the time and was so successful in live-action that he could easily have avoided that kind of work the rest of his life. It was a matter of principle and justice to him…and that's when I realized that in addition to being a fine, fine writer, Rick Mittleman was also a fine, fine gentleman.