INT: Well, you were talking about honorable men, what was Sidney Sheinberg like to work with?

ES: I found him, not only him, but the others to be very honorable and ethic guys, the Mirisch Brothers, Barry Diller, Sid Sheinberg. I felt they really were trying to understand, and when they didn't understand, they admitted that they didn't understand, they promised to try to correct things. And I think if they were indirectly in charge of everything, I believe that very few of the breaches would occur. I have a sense that what happens is when the command operations are relegated to middle management, who are scrambling to cut corners, that they're the ones that tend to kind of overlook what has been agreed to. Often because they don't know, but sometimes because they figure maybe they can, there's a threat to the Director, unless you cooperate with me, you're not gonna work for me again, and that's a real threat. But again, your Director I suppose has to, if I can quote my dear departed friend Richard Brooks when he said, "A Director has to first of all learn to eat shit, unsalted." And I suppose you can stand up for what you believe, take the penalty--there's always a penalty for standing up or not; it's your choice. But those guys with whom I negotiated were straight men. It was some of their lower downs who kind of skidded along the ethics questions a lot.

INT: Eight, you were talking about some of the things in Article 8 [BA Article 8], that you wanted to mention.

ES: Yeah. Just generally speaking, we dealt with credits, before we negotiated credits for Assistant Directors and Production Managers [Unit Production Managers], they were lumped in with the other below the line crew. And again trying to think always of preserving the unity of the Director and the Assistant Directors, and the Production Manager who we didn't have approval of, but still were generally sympathetic to helping get the movie made that the Director wanted to be made. We thought their credit should be more distinguished, and so we negotiated a separate card for them and pulled them out of the other list of the crew. Something that very few Assistant Directors knew came from my Creative Rights Committee.

INT: So, I wanted to talk a little bit about the moral rights. [ES: Okay.] And why don't you explain what that is and a little bit of its history.

ES: Okay, so creative rights takes care of the time the Director comes aboard till the time the film is released. And then, the film is released and the companies have signed an agreement to permit a Director to seek excellence, to go as far as he can, he or she can. We've made the gift of time and effort, and they turn around and say, "Never mind," throw that contract and that agreement out the window, and start butchering the films, cutting them up, colorizing them, speeding them up, misframing them, doing all of, all that they can do to serve a market as they say. Well, 1986, Woody Allen complained to the Guild [Directors Guild of America] about something called colorization. First time it was coming on the scene. And so I said to Gil Cates, "We really should examine this." And he said, "Well, let's form a President's Committee--let's form a committee to look into that." And he said, "What do we call it?" I said, "Well, let's call it a President's Committee, that reports to the president, so the President's Committee." And about the same time, the world was considering asking the United States to join the Berne Convention, in the city of Berne [Berne, Switzerland], B-E-R-N-E. Berne Convention is a convention of nations, which administer the Berne Treaty [Berne Convention]. The Berne Treaty was created by Victor Hugo, I think in 1850, if I'm not mistaken or something like that, to protect the rights of authors across national borders. It's like an international copyright. One of the clauses in the Berne Treaty offers so-called moral rights. What it says is, "Apart from economic rights, and even after the transfer of economic rights, the author shall have the right to object to any useful modification of the work, any changes in the work or alteration of the work, or misuse of the work, which is prejudicial to his honor or reputation. Now the Congress [United States Congress] in its wisdom decided that it could join the Berne Treaty without adhering to that clause or if it did adhere to that clause, the author was the copyright owner, which is why you see at the end of movies that some corporation is the author for purposes of copyright law. So they have the right to complain, but the true author does not. The true author has no rights at all, no standing in court. No matter what they do to your film, you have no standing in court to object to it. They can make your film into a pornography, a piece of pornography with your name still attached. You have no rights, which is unusual. No redress against conscious and demonstrable damage to your reputation. And those rights to object are called moral rights. So, we found out that that was happening and we began to lobby Congress. The Board of Directors in its wisdom was not encouraged by the notion of the Guild going to Washington and becoming political. And I pointed out tirelessly that they and the courts were the only two avenues for recourse. And to go to court you have to have a case, in order to go to court you have to have standing in court. That is, you have to have some rights before the law, since we have no rights before the law, the only one that gives us rights before the law are Congress. So, sometimes we paraded 15 of our most prominent Directors into Washington and we lobbied right and left. Years, went on, about a million and a half dollars the Guild spent. And worldwide, we're traveling all over the world, I went everywhere, I talked to government ministers and so forth and so on. But the European governments who were very active in the Berne Convention were more interested in trading the price of tomatoes than they were with improving moral rights for Americans.

INT: What is your feeling about copyright in general? There's quite a discussion now in terms--do you believe copyright should be in perpetuity? Going from estate to estate?

ES: I've never understood, Bob, and no lawyer has ever been able to explain it to me, why if you create a building, you create a building, you own a building, you can pass that building on to your family throughout the generations. If you create a great play, or a great movie, or a great novel, you are limited, your heirs are limited, you are limited to a time period to enjoy the rights of that intellectual activity. I don't understand it. But it seems to be built into the law--[INT: From the very beginning.] From the very beginning. And there is, however, you can find within that, as much as it gives me discomfort, an argument for moral rights in as much as after that copyright period is over the rights to the film go to the public, public domain. Well then you may ask yourself, we provide military, require military service, we pay taxes, we suffer under government in order to provide the opportunity for a way of life which we generally all agree we should have. So the products of that, should be transferred to the next generation, and the next generation, or the public in the public domain, should get what we paid for, the products of that way of life, instead of getting something that's butchered, changed, altered, that doesn't reflect at all the work of the authors who lived in our time working with the materials with which we have to work and the techniques that we have available to us. But these arguments have to be pressed forward constantly, constantly, constantly with a leadership that stands behind them.

ES: I believe in my heart there's only one difference between the Directors Guild and the other unions, and that's this document. The Creative Rights area, otherwise you're no different than any other union. You get paid per job, per hour, per this, all your money, it's a money and insurance and pension and welfare, and that's what it is. But it may be the only union in America that gives back something without asking payment. That insists that what comes off the assembly line not be the same thing as it was before but be the product of some individual effort, individual vision. Picture the General Motors workers saying, "We want to make the second Chevrolet a better Chevrolet than the first one, and we're not charge you for it.” I mean, picture that. Wouldn’t happen. We're unique. And I'm very proud of my part of that, and I worry that not enough is being made of those articles, by teaching them fervently to thy children in the morning when they waketh up and in the evening when they goeth to sleep.

INT: Well, this has been terrific. Is there anything that were left unsaid that you want to talk to?

ES: Oh, God, yes, I can go through every article then, and… [INT: Well, or in regard to your career or any of your films, is there something, is there an anecdote that I didn't elicit or...] If this were to be a discussion about my career or my films, I probably would not have been interested to do it. I really seize the opportunity just to make a record of, of the history of I think what makes this Guild [Directors Guild of America] different than other organizations, not only other entit--other film organizations, but other labor organizations in the country. And to record my dismay that many of the principles that were so painfully executed by so many people, at such a great sacrifice, they've just been rather casually treated when it comes to their application. [INT: Well, just speaking for myself, while on one hand I'm sorry as a child you have such difficulty, on the other hand, on behalf of the Guild I'm very happy because we wouldn't have half of the things in our creative rights had you not had that childhood.] Yeah, well, okay. [INT: Thank you.] A pleasure.