What astonishes me about the strike coverage is that, since the vast
majority of writers are middle class folks who are lucky to make one
sale a year, the media powers-that-be have seen fit to “jazz” up the
event by just making stuff up. Even the basic storyline is twisted.
First off, this strike isn’t the writers vs. the producers. It’s the
writers vs. the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers
(the AMPTP). This is the organization that represents the major TV
networks and movie studios and, most importantly, the multi-national
conglomerates that own them. Many of the members have as much to do
with hands’ on producing as I do levitation.
This latter point (excluding my levitation skills) was underscored a
week or so ago, when a group of eighty “independent” producers took out
an ad stating, in regards to the AMPTP, “it serves the studios’
interests to pretend to represent individual producers instead of
corporate entities…Creative producers are not directly involved in this
dispute.”
Vance Van Petten, executive director of the 4,000-member Producers
Guild of America, agreed, stating that it had been years since
producers ran studios. Today, he said: “producers are relegated mostly
to employees or independent entrepreneurs who are out there trying to
put things together.”
Okay. So, now we know it’s the writers against the networks and the
studios. Why are the writers’ whining? I mean, the AMPTP says that the
average working writer makes $200,000 a year. Oy! Where to begin? Let’s
say you have ten people who are teachers making 30k-40k a year in a
room. Then, Oprah Winfrey walks into the room. Now, what’s the average
income of the eleven people in the room? Wow, look at that average
skyrocket! I bet those teachers didn’t know they had it so good!
Neither do most writers. If you take into account that nearly half of
the WGA is unemployed, the average writer makes about $5,000 a year. If
you remove the unemployed, the average writer makes anywhere from
$30k-50k. There go the Porsches!
Before I go into what a working writer experiences in his or her
lifestyle, here are a few things to consider. Fiction writers are
inventors, of a sort. They create characters and stories out of nowhere
and put them down on paper. Were it not for writers, Clark Gable would
have turned to Vivian Leigh at the end of “Gone With the Wind” and
said: “!” Judy Garland would have summed up her arrival in Oz with the
exclamation: “?” And “CSI” would offer nothing but shots of test tubes.
Okay, even MORE shots of test tubes. You get the idea.
So, how are writers rewarded for their inventive skills? Well, on a DVD
version of his or her work, a writer earns fewer than four cents a
shot. If the writers’ work is purchased and downloaded via iTunes or
other Internet services, they make 1/3 of a cent of the profit. (This
is not as bad as it sounds. You can do a lot with 1/3 of a cent. For
instance, you can make a down payment on a penny!) Recently, and this
is at the heart of the strike, those frisky conglomerates have found
that they can stream entire TV shows on their web sites with
advertising embedded in the shows. You can watch these suckers for
free! As long as you don’t mind watching the ads. Ads that the
networks/studios make money from.
What do the writers’ make?
0/0 of a cent.
In other words, a writer can make more money turning in a soda can than having their work streamed on the Internetz.
The studios say that writers don’t have to be paid for their work
because these streaming freebies are not broadcasts. They are
“promotions.” You know, like the promotions you watch on TV for hours
on end every night.
In the near future, it’s pretty likely that more and more consumers
will be turning to the web, in its various formats, for entertainment.
The people who write that entertainment would like to be paid in
something more than wampum. Although we appreciate the colored beads
and trinkets offered to us by the AMPTP, it’s very hard to get change
for a beaver pelt at a 7-11.
Now, a lot of people argue that writers shouldn’t see profits from
their work after the initial sale. The standard argument is “If a
plumber fixes my toilet, I don’t pay him every time I flush my toilet.”
No, but if your plumber invented the toilet, he’d get a piece of every
toilet sold…and he probably would become so flush that he’d quit being
your plumber, Nimrod.
Writers who pen books get royalties depending on sales. Writers who
craft screenplays and teleplays get residuals based on revenue. It’s
not a bonus. It’s a deferred payment. It’s that simple. The
studios/networks/conglomerates want to pay the least amount of money to
the folks who invented the product. Why? So they can make a bigger
profit. It’s standard operational procedure. Believe me, if Fox could
outsource writing to India, they would.
Another bomb lobbed in the writers’ direction is what they’re paid. The
Guild minimum for an original screenplay is slightly over $106,000.
That’s a lot of money. However, you don’t get that money all at once.
You get it in installments, based on work completed. If it takes a
studio three years to get your script done to their liking, you earn
about $30k a year, less agent, lawyer and manager fees.
I once sold a script to a major studio that I wrote in two weeks. It
took me three years to UNwrite it to their liking. By the time I was
done, even I didn’t recognize it. It was never made. I went five years
between jobs.
A TV writer earns about $20k for a prime-time comedy and $30k for a
prime-time hour drama. But, again, if you make one sale a year, that’s
it, folks. This is why residuals are so important. A lot of the time,
they pay the rent and tuition. And it was the members of the WGA who
fought long and hard for residuals over four and a half decades ago.
The writers who put the words “Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do”
into Desi’s mouth and allowed Bogart to intone, “Here’s looking at you,
kid” never made a penny in residuals.
There seems to be two trains of thought running through a lot of the
reporting on the WGA strike: one is an anti-union bias (a lot of the
editorials against the strike regard unions as being a thing of the
past); the other is an anti-“Hollywood” attitude.
The anti-union riff is prevalent in this country, right now, and it
should alarm EVERYbody; nurses, teachers, autoworkers. Make no mistake
about it, if the conglomerates manage to steam-roll the WGA, it’s
really going to be open season on all unions…if it isn’t, already.
The anti-“Hollywood” routine would be amusing if it wasn’t so lame.
Hollywood (as seen on TV) doesn’t exist. The myth of Hollywood was
created by publicists years ago and encouraged by old time studios, to
manufacture a glamorous place of Mount Olympus proportions in order to
sell movie tickets and fan magazines. It’s pretty much the same, today.
It’s a façade spruced up for gala events to titillate the tabloids both
televised and in print.
And it’s a helluva target.
Last weekend, when fires destroyed over forty homes in Southern
California, Reuters ran a headline: “Wildfire destroys homes in ritzy
Malibu.” Um, excuse me. Ritzy? If you’re hit by a car does it matter if
it was a Corvette or a clunker? It still hurts. (Just a thought. Had
those homes been owned by conservative Halliburton honchos would they
still be considered ritzy?)
Most writers are about as glamorous as a member of the old High School
AV club. We don’t hobnob with the stars. We can never find our glasses.
We traffic in index cards, not caviar, and our offices usually resemble
a mass sticky note suicide. (Note: and our offices, usually, are the
only room in the house with a carpet that hasn’t been cleaned in ten
years.)
Yet, when the writers’ strike started, “The New York Times” actually
ran a news article “critiquing” the strikers! “For a time, the pickets’
chants were drowned out by the roar of the crowd that was assembled for
the ‘Today’ show across 49th Street,” the reporter sniffed. (Actually,
it took three reporters to write the article. I guess one was in charge
of nouns, another verbs and the other attitude.)
After stating that all the trappings of a union protest were there
(thanks, guys), the article went on: “But instead of hard hats and work
boots, the people on the pickets had arty glasses and fancy scarves.”
(Arty glasses? Are we talking Elton John, here?)
Later, one of the investigative journos became upset that picketers on
the West Coast were walking in silence. “Why wasn’t anybody chanting
union slogans or even, for that matter, talking to one another? As
writers, why didn’t they come equipped with witty sound bites?”
Bite this, ace. Suddenly, the NYT’s love affair with Judith Miller makes sense.
Reporting like this is very close to the erudite: “Why don’t yooze guys
get real jobs?” so popular on anti-WGA blog spots. I wish Samuel
Gompers were still around.
For the record, writers don’t use jack-hammers, welding materials,
cranes or forklifts in their work. (Unless they are very bored.)
However, the product writers create is just as integral to American
society as anything you can purchase and hold in your hand and,
probably, break. Think of all those widescreen TVs being sold this
Christmas. Now, imagine them all with nothing on the screen. Picture
going to the movie theater just for the popcorn. We fill those screens,
big and small.
One criticism of the writers’ walkout has been something along the
lines of “If you’re so good, how come so many TV shows and movies SUCK?”
I will now reveal a secret, a secret so shrouded in darkness that not
even “Access Hollywood” has dared to shine a light upon it.
99% of writers do not control what the finished product looks like!
There! I’ve let the cat out of the bag! Ahahahaha!
It’s true. You can work and slave on a script of your own and produce
“The Mona Lisa.” Once your masterpiece is purchased, however, you are
likely to get notes along the lines of “can you give her bigger tits
and have her play a lot of volleyball?”
I once wrote a science-fiction comedy script that, basically, concerned
world peace. It was bought. Swear to God, the studio exec beamed “I
laughed my ass off. I loved it! Can you lose the world peace angle?”
Writers get notes like “make it funnier,” “make it bigger,” “try something else” and “a 400 foot wasp wouldn’t do that.”
We have the shelf life of an unwrapped slice of bread. (Most writers
over 40 have other jobs. A lot of older writers, myself included, take
an early retirement to pay the bills and, yes, keep writing.)
We’re pretty solitary.
We have no job security.
We live from gig to gig.
So, why don’t we just give up and get a real job? Why do we still want to write?
Beats the hell out of me. Why do musicians play? Why do actors act? Why
do painters paint? It’s something that has puzzled parents, wives,
creditors and mewing children for centuries.
Personally, I wanted to write since I was a kid. Even before
kindergarten, I’d pencil in my own “thought balloons” in my Little
Golden Books. If it was a Mickey Mouse tome, I’d sign my own name right
under Walt Disney’s on the title page. When I was older, my parents
made me go to a teacher’s college so I’d “have something to fall back
on.” I worked full-time for years, writing at night. Books. Features.
Newspaper columns. Then, I thought I’d give screenwriting a shot at the
advanced age of 32.
It sort of worked out.
No one on the picket lines is enthused over this strike. It’s both a financial and personal hardship. I know it is for me.
Ironically, in the last two years leading up to this strike, I managed
to fall in with an independent film company filled with the kind of
people I’ve wanted to work with for the last twenty-five years. They’re
dreamers. They’re risk-takers. They love making movies as much as I
love writing stories.
And that’s what this strike is about, really.
It’s about thousands of dreamers who love corralling their dreams onto
paper and risking everything to share them with other folks. We want to
make you laugh. We want to make you cry. We want to scare you. We want
to inspire you. We want you to dream, too.
If studios can make a profit from our dreams – that’s great!
But they should never forget where the dreams came from.
They should never forget how the words got on the page and who put them there.
Yet, they plead poverty. The writers are the greedy ones. Who needs
writers when there’s reality TV? They insist that TV audiences won’t
mind sitting through a TV season resembling a collision between
“American Idol” and “Pimp My Ride.”
How can anyone wrap their head around that sort of logic?
Words fail me.
And will continue to do so until the AMPTP acknowledges the contribution of writers and treat us fairly.
Writings 
With stories of war, governmental avarice and global calamities hitting the news cycles hourly, sometimes a story slips by that, while important, doesn’t have the immediate sting of a catastrophic event. 
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