An open invitation to a seminar for Muslim college students and recent graduates interested in Hollywood writing careers has placed the Writers Guild of America, West, at odds with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which was planning to hold the session on Tuesday.
Things started simply enough.
In a news release dated July 29, the council’s Los Angeles-area chapter said it planned to join the guild in hosting a “Writing for Hollywood” seminar with “a leading Hollywood filmmaker and writer” at an undetermined location. The program was to include “an overview of resources and opportunities available at the guild” and a tour of the Writers Guild Foundation library, which is in the same building as the guild’s Los Angeles headquarters.
The planned seminar would have been unusual for the guild, said Daniel Petrie Jr., a former president who now serves on the governing board of its foundation. The writers’ union has conducted programs about employment discrimination for older or female members, he said, but appears not to have systematically reached out to specific religious groups.
“I got a call on Friday night from a member who was upset about it,” Mr. Petrie said. “It was the first I’d heard of it.”
The council has known its share of controversy. In 2007 federal prosecutors named it as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Texas terrorism trial involving the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, whose leaders were eventually convicted of supporting terrorism by channeling money to Hamas. The council strongly challenged the co-conspirator naming as being an unfair “demonization” of things Muslim.
On ocweekly.com, the Web site of OC Weekly, an alternative newspaper, one writer, Matt Coker, had already poked fun at the session with a fable about a “talented and unlucky Jewish kid” who brushes up on the Koran and peddles his hitherto rejected script at the meeting under the name Aziz Rahman.
Responding to a request for access to the seminar, Neal Sacharow, the guild’s director of communications, wrote in an e-mail message on Monday that the union was actually not connected to any of it.
“The event you’re referring to is a CAIR event that the guild was going to make space available for,” Mr. Sacharow wrote. “It is my understanding that CAIR has changed the location.”
Shortly afterward, however, Munira Syeda, the council’s Los Angeles communications manager, said the guild had helped set up the session by lining up a speaker, the filmmaker Jeffrey Nachmanoff, who directed and wrote the 2008 thriller “Traitor.”
Mr. Nachmanoff said he was recruited by the guild’s diversity program, as was a moderator. “I’m a non-Muslim writer who happened to write a screenplay” that deals with terrorism and the Islamic world, Mr. Nachmanoff said in a phone interview. Mr. Sacharow did not respond to subsequent requests to comment further.
Ms. Syeda said that the council had held a similar seminar with Fox Entertainment, and that it hoped to do more in the future.
The Tuesday session, Ms. Syeda said, was closed to observers to keep its participants from feeling inhibited in their queries. “We don’t want it to become censored in any way,” she said.