Here in the US, the Writers Guild of America is on strike and has been since October 31, 2007. Their strike affects American television and movie production. If the strike isn’t resolved, most American tv for the coming season will be reality shows which don’t require WGA writers to script as they are “unscripted.” Yeah, they’re about as unscripted as WWE wrestling matches. Also, I intensely dislike reality television. But this isn’t about me.
The issues forcing the strike are the amount of money generated by online sales of television shows and movies, and increasing the residuals generated by television program and movie sales on iTunes or any other online vendor.
The WGA strike captains have started uploading YouTube videos to highlight the issues behind their strike, and an unreal number of actors have started making videos highlighting the importance of writers for the “Speechless” campaign to support the WGA. The Screen Actors Guild, The Teamsters, and several local outposts of the Service Employees Union, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the United Auto Workers union, and the sister guilds to the WGA in Canada, Greece, Australia, Great Britain, and New Zealand all support the WGA strike.
Our Friday Videos this week demonstrate support for the WGA strike, and to support the work of the writers behind the scenes of much of the entertainment I enjoy.
You can see all the Speechless videos online at Speechless Without Writers.
And then there’s this one:
Excellent. You can also support the writers with The Pencil Campaign, here:
http://www.strikeswag.com/2007/11/the-pencil-camp.html
I’ve always liked Alan Cumming and Walton Goggins before – but now my love for them is everlasting. *lol*
I’m going to Vancouver Film School to study Screenwriting in 2009, so I hope this strike resolves itself into a better deal for writers. I really do. The producers have forgotten how integral to scenes writers are – they reward producers, directors, and actors with incredibly high paydays and forget about the writers – and now they’re learning from their mistake.
As our we all, with the shortened seasons of all our favourite shows.
IIRC, most of the “reality” TV shows employ writers as well. I’m just saying…even bad TV needs writers.
Reality shows use writers, but they aren’t members of the Guild. I think they’re technically producers, because they “shape” the show rather than giving participants specific lines to say.
Is it bad that I just can’t give a fuck? There’s so much money flying around Hollywood and so much hype on these guys that shouldn’t the important thing be the creation?
Maybe I’m terribly naive in that I figure everyone should get fair shakes in the creation cash. But seeing all this support and blah blah blah… I just don’t care. They get enough money as is. If this was going to support the troops or people ACTUALLY SUFFERING it would be a whole different ballgame for me.
Still, nicely shot (of course), vids.
I think the moral of the story here is that you should probably never take on a group of highly creative, media-literate people who, you know, write TV for a living, because you just might find out that they will whoop your bum in a war of ideas like this one.
Flo—
Oh, thank you! I just can’t seem to care for the same reasons as you. Hollywood is filled with money and even a small trickle is way more than your average teacher makes. So in many ways Boo Hoo!
Dear Flo and Bonnie,
For commenters on a website that promotes writing and authors, I’m surprised at you.
The screenwriters strike isn’t about “we want more money” – it’s about “we want a fair percentage” and “we want to be paid for use of our work”.
The problem screenwriters have is this:
a) for every thirty-dollar DVD sold, the writers get 4 cents. FOUR CENTS – from a rate that was fixed TWENTY YEARS AGO. Now, are actors and directors and producers limiting themselves to the same salaries they had twenty years ago? No. These commercials show that screenwriters contribute just as much to a scene as a director’s eye and an actor’s nuance – so why the disparity? It’s not about the money so much as the proportion – if Tim Burton only got $50 for directing “Big Fish,” you wouldn’t catch John August bitching that he only made $20 for his script.
b) producers have started putting the writers’ episodes up on the Internet for free – but the writers aren’t getting residuals (a.k.a. royalties) for them, and it lowers the sales of DVDs of their shows, which means the residuals they do get are shrinking. That’s not a point of asking for more money – that’s a point of asking to get paid for their work!
Imagine a favourite romance author of yours – Nora Roberts or Jennifer Crusie or Lisa Kleypas. What if you found out that her publishers had started posting ENTIRE COPIES of her novels on the Internet for anyone to read for free? And that those copies were framed in commercials and advertisements that brought the publishers plenty of ad revenue to cover their expenses and more? And what if you found out your favourite author was not only NOT getting paid royalties for the novels on the Internet, but was losing what royalties she did get because fewer people bought her novels in the store because they were on the Internet for free?
Wouldn’t you be mad?
So what makes it okay for screenwriters to screwed?
So the successful, steadily working screenwriter gets paid more than the steadily working teacher, and that makes it okay for people to take advantage of them?
Newsflash: Steadily working screenwriters get more money than steadily working teachers, but steadily working teachers OUTNUMBER STEADILY WORKING SCREENWRITERS 1000 TO 1. $50 000 is a lot for one script – but not if you only successfully sell one script every two years. And when you aren’t getting residuals for those scripts that you do sell because they’ve been turned into “promotions” on the Internet any one can watch for free.
Also, aren’t you afraid that if the screenwriters lose this battle, that it could set a dangerous precedent for how editors and publishers treat novelists? The producers, and some of you, have demonstrated you don’t give a crap about how much writers get paid so long as their product ends up on the shelves.
There endeth the rant.
Fio and Bonnie, nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve worked in the film biz and my husband still does. The pay scale you’re imagining is entirely fictional. If it were for real, I’d own a mansion instead of renting a small house. Fact is, tenured teachers can make more than many, if not most, people in the film industry.
First, writers often go months or years between pay gigs, so those residuals are everything to them. Yes, their per-episode or per-feature rates are good, but if you add them up, they don’t often amount to a whole lot over the course of a career. Too many projects that go into turnaround after the studio has dicked around, demanding rewrite after rewrite after rewrite. Too many TV series that get cancelled after two episodes, once it’s too late to get a staff position on another show.
Second, if you’re not Somebody by the time you hit 40 or so, you’re considered washed up and will find it harder and harder to get hired in a notoriously ageist industry. Once again, those residuals can mean the difference between paying the rent and starvation.
Third, the writers aren’t just fighting their own fight. The deal they get will be the template for the directors and actors (and when I say actors, don’t think Julia Roberts or Tom Hanks, think “that guy who was really good in that one scene on Heroes last night and who I think I saw in some other show last year.” IOW, they need this badly too.
It also affects my husband, who is a film editor, because, again, the deal the writers make determines how much the studios pay into the IATSE (his union) pension and health plan. So it affects my old age. Hell, it affects me next year and the year after, if it means our health insurance plan gets decimated.
The thing is, what they’re mostly fighting over is the future. More and more, we as audience members download shows instead of watching them on air. That’s where a shocking percentage of the overall ad revenue is apparently coming from these days, that’s where the studios and networks are bragging they’ve got the big numbers. But if the AMPTP gets the New Media (ie: internet streaming etc.) deal they’ve been proposing, all those lovely and entirely necessary residuals are going to go bye-bye. It looks an awful lot like they’re trying to break the union. And if they succeed, an industry already known for the exploitation of its workers will become that much more feudal. And that? Is a scary world for my barely-middle-class brain to contemplate.
(Sarah, thanks for posting the Speechless videos. I love the whole series.)
(And apologies for the long-assed comment.)
Becky:
The writers on ANTM, for one example, lobbied to be included as members of the WGA a year or two ago. At that time, they didn’t even have health benefits. WGA was supportive of their cause at the time. Not sure if they were successful, but from their standpoint, they are writers.
See, if the news outlets had only explained it the way you did, maybe I would not have been so apathetic about it. All I heard is “We’re not getting paid enough!” from the news clips I’ve seen. Thank you for explaining it better. It isn’t right that writers get 4 cents a copy for DVDs or that they’re having their stuff ripped off online. I’m glad Flo and I spoke up so that you could clarify.
One of the reasons that the media isn’t doing much to explain the writers’ side of the strike is that the news outlets are owned by by the same production companies the writers are on strike from. Not to be a conspiracy theorist or anything, but it isn’t in the news outlets’ best interests to say much in the defense of the strikers.
megalith:
The ANTM writers lost their jobs and were replaced with “editors” when they tried to join the union. They were let go part way through one of the seasons.
Wow, Missmiah, thanks for the update. I always kind of wondered what happened with that. Sounds pretty evil, and coincidentally backs up my impression of that show’s exploitive nature.
It is difficult for me to understand why screenwriters are treated with such disdain, in an industry that is so dependent on good stories for its survival. Perhaps the writers are largely invisible to us, the audience, so the truly clueless think the writers have no voice. Reminds me of that stupid but amusing Dell commercial: I can’t hear you because you’re not famous.
I beg to differ—I may not know who wrote my favorite lines, but I do hear and remember them. And the very fact that I “know” that screenwriters are treated with disdain, simply from seeing it acted out in movies and on TV, proves my point.
This reads like pure greed on the part of the “producers” and a blatant attempt to shaft the creative staff who actually produce the product they are so profitably marketing—a dynamic I’m sadly familiar with in my own field.
But anyone who’s seen television recently can’t be surprised at what people will do for money. Maybe if the writers were willing to eat fermented jackal intestines on camera? Oops, I forgot. You can’t write that stuff…NO ONE would believe it.