'He Was our Elegant Fist' Dashboard Dashboard

Members reflect on TV writer John Bowman’s career and WGAW legacy.

Written by Lisa Rosen
(2/4/2022)

John Bowman, longtime WGAW member and chair of the WGA contract negotiating committee during the 2007–2008 strike, died December 28 at the age of 64. After learning of his death, the media, social and otherwise, was filled with loving tributes from members of the entertainment community he’d worked with over the years, citing his kindness, humor, talent, and mentoring skills.

His comedy career started out, as so many do, as a Harvard undergrad and editor of the Harvard Lampoon, before he made the less expected move to Harvard Business School. As Patric Verrone, his friend since the Lampoon days, noted, the two men took parallel tracks. Bowman received his MBA; Verrone went on to get his law degree. They both tried practicing their respective professions until their respective girlfriends (and later wives), Shannon Gaughan Bowman (Saturday Night Live) and Maiya Williams (MadTV), “lured us into the entertainment industry,” Verrone says. Verrone went into animation, starting with The Simpsons, while Bowman went the live action route, “but we would see each other constantly.”

After a tenure at Saturday Night Live, Bowman moved on to write or executive produce shows including In Living Color, Murphy Brown, The Hughleys, Cedric the Entertainer Presents, and Martin.

Larry Wilmore (Insecure) worked with him soon after that on The Show, based on Bowman’s experience as the white head writer on a Black show. “It was really funny,” Wilmore recalls. “It lasted half a season, maybe. John was a pleasure to work with. He had a lot of charisma, just as a person.” The writers’ room included Matt Wickline (Late Night with David Letterman), and assistants Bill Wrubel (Ted Lasso) and Stacy A. Littlejohn (Naomi).

“It was a real small group,” Wilmore says. “We had so much fun, all we did was laugh all day and write a show. The workday usually ended with John getting a call from his wife Shannon, asking why was he still at the office, and we would always laugh at that. He’d get a little shy and be like, ‘I gotta go.’”

Susannah Grant (Unbelievable), who was on the 2007–2008 negotiating committee with Bowman, notes via email, “Whenever he talked about Shannon or any of his kids, his eyes twinkled and his smile spread a little extra wide. He was delighted by them. And he was equally curious about your family. He remembered your kids’ names. He knew where they were in school. He wanted to hear their stories and know what made them uniquely them.”

He applied that warmth and attention to his work as chair of the negotiating committee in the time leading up to and during the 2007–2008 strike. He was already a Board member when Verrone was elected Guild president in 2005. Soon after, David Young came on as executive director.

For those who weren’t around for the strike, and don’t know the results that impacted every member of the Guild, Verrone provides a recap and explains Bowman’s role in it.

“If you look at the history of the Guild, and the history particularly of residuals, every time a new medium came along—whether it be television, then cable television, then VHS, then DVD—the companies would make the argument that, ‘Well, we don’t know how we will make money off this, it’s going to cannibalize our traditional media, a bunch of other companies are going to come in and make it very difficult for us, so we need to be able to pay all the talent less up front, or we need to be allowed to experiment and do things non-union, and then when it comes to residuals, we simply don’t want to have to pay you, because we don’t know how we’ll make any money from this reuse scheme.’”

But that cannibalization has never happened. “Television became bigger than movies, and they bought up the intervening entities. The same thing happened when television went from broadcast to cable. We gave them lower minimums and weaker residual formulas, and cable TV became their predominant way of doing business. Notably with VHS and DVD, they hacked away 80% of our residual formula in 1985,” Verrone continues.

“So when ‘new media’ came out—it wasn’t known as streaming then—the same arguments were trotted out. ‘Anything we do we can’t be obliged to cover under union agreements, because we won’t be able to afford it. And secondarily the reuse of that content, reruns, is just promotional. And promotional is, of course, free, so we don’t have to pay for it.’ This negotiation was us saying: Fool us once, shame on you, fool us for the eighth time, shame on the entire industry. So we weren’t going to accept that.

“And John was a guy who did not say no to a challenge, or to anything for that matter. He was willing to be in the line of fire; he had a level of confidence that wasn’t so much bravura as genuine internal strength that really made him somebody who could be put in a position of authority, where many of us would just be there faking it.”

Bowman’s business-school expertise and biting humor made a potent combination when it came to rallying troops and explaining what it was the Guild was fighting for—whether he had to explain that to writers or executives.

“He was the perfect person for that type of position,” says Wilmore, who was also on the committee, “because John was very calm, level-headed, self-deprecating, he didn’t take anything too seriously. If he got hot you knew it was important. You knew you were in good hands with him.”

Grant believes his incisive wit was a secret weapon to the strike’s ultimate success. “In every conversation, at every rally appearance or picket line—and he was at all of them—as he patiently explained the issues and the stakes of the fight to the nervous members, he always, invariably made them laugh, and laugh together, without ever minimizing the gravity of the situation or the magnitude of their sacrifice. Thinking of how he carried himself through those long months makes me think of the Zen monk Suzuki Roshi's saying: ‘What we are doing here is so important, we better not take it too seriously.’”

Shawn Ryan (The Shield) was also on the committee, but when he first encountered Bowman, “I was a little shocked he was a comedy writer, because he was very still, and he was very measured, and he was very thoughtful, and he just came off like a very serious dude.” Soon enough he saw Bowman’s funny side. “He had a way of disarming you, of making you comfortable talking about uncomfortable things. A work stoppage was an uncomfortable and, in my opinion, necessary thing. He had a way of calmly bringing the focus back to the big picture of things: the internet.”

Once the Guild went on strike, Bowman’s role changed dramatically. “As I pointed out at the time, they didn’t think we would fight, and we did, and they didn’t think we would strike, and we did, and they didn’t think we would last, and we did, and that third part was really the turning point as far as John was concerned,” Verrone says. “John was a rock. We stood on him when we needed support, and we threw him at stuff when we needed to. And he was always a gentleman. He was our elegant fist.”

After a bruising strike, where WGA members hung together, “the deal that was struck ended up in its most basic form giving us full jurisdiction over internet streaming and downloads,” says Verrone. “Few even knew what that would look like. In those days Netflix mailed out DVDs; Amazon sold books.” It wasn’t until several years later, when Netflix had a hit with its original series House of Cards, that the future started coming into better focus.

“Working on the WGA Board and, most importantly, helping to negotiate a much better deal for writers during the strike, was very important to John,” Gaughan Bowman notes via email. “As we all see now, writers getting a percentage of streaming revenue is crucial, if not central, to their income.”

After the victorious outcome, Bowman continued serving the membership as a Board member, Health and Pension Funds trustee, and 2011 negotiating committee co-chair. His extraordinary contributions to Guild members are an enormous part of his legacy.