Sorry for the late post (and my first, too!). You’d have to be an idiot to travel on Thanksgiving weekend, right? Well, present and belatedly accounted for.
I suppose that being the newest member of Storytellers Unplugged I should take this opportunity to introduce myself. But, well, *@#% that. We can have polite chitchat later, or better yet, go out for a drink sometime. But right now I’m on strike, with the rest of the WGA, East and West, and today I’m here to tell you way.
I’ve been a WGA activist for six years, now including a term on the Board of Directors and founding the WGA’s unoffical message board, WriterAction.com. Because of my work with the WGA I’ve been living with strike plans and strike talk for three years, now. This has been a long fight, and it will be longer – as long as it takes for us to win.
It’s our future. It’s your future, too, if you’re looking for a professional career in anything relating to writing. It’s your future if you don’t want the corporations to be the sole determiner of entertainment content.
If you’re already glazing over, or just don’t want to read further, please at least watch one or both of these videos to get an inkling of what this strike is about:
The Heartbreaking Voices of Uncertainty
Every three years the Hollywood creative guilds – actors, directors, and writers, renegotiate their contracts – that would be the MBA, the minimum basic employment agreement - with the studios who employ us. The contract includes among many, many other things: minimum payments, residual rates (this is the screen version of royalties), and pension and health contributions, as well as creative concerns. If we don’t reach a fair and acceptable agreement, then really our only tool to sway the studios is to strike – to refuse to work until they negotiate fairly.
I say studios, but the fact is, the old style Hollywood studios no longer exist. Vertical integration has been a fact of Hollywood for going on twenty years now and the creative guilds are actually being forced to negotiate for fair payment with enormous, multibillion dollar, multinational corporations. There is a good argument being made that by now this is in violation of anti-trust laws. And the same vertical integration is increasingly a reality in the publishing industry, too.
There has not been a screenwriters’ strike since 1988 – before I was in the guild. There has not been a strike in large part because for various reasons, in the years when we needed to negotiate hard, the WGA has not been strong enough to even threaten a strike.
But this year, this contract, we needed all the strength we could get. There are dozens of important issues, but we are really only striking about one: internet downloads.
Anyone with half a brain knows that internet is the future of everything in entertainment. The corporations don’t want to pay writers, directors or actors for reuse of their work through the internet, and they think that if they squeeze us out of that now, that they’ll never have to pay us for that again.
That’s the bottom line.
Not only did the companies come to the bargaining table with a proposal that completely eliminated payment on internet reuse, but their initial proposal had 76 rollbacks of our previous contract, including separation of rights. Separation of rights is what screenwriters have instead of copyright: for example, it allows me to retain the right to publish a novel based on my original screenplay. It is one of the most cherished creative rights we have as screenwriters.
That’s just one of the proposals the corporations lay down which made it quite clear that they were not intending to bargain seriously or fairly.
That’s how weak they thought we were. We haven’t struck in twenty years and they probably assumed that we couldn’t pull it off this time. They thought this would be an easy win and they would be able to cut us out of internet profits once and for all time.
They were wrong.
As a former member of the WGAw Board of Directors, I have had the great pleasure of working with all of the current WGA west officers: President Patric Verrone, VP David Weiss, Secretary-Treasurer Elias Davis, WGAw Executive Director David Young, and most of the current WGA Board of Directors, and a great number of the WGA Negotiating Committee, East and West members, and they have been smartly and inexorably working toward this moment for three years, now.
Here’s when I knew we were going to win.
The strike of 1985 was a huge setback for the WGA in terms of residuals. Back then the issue was videotape residuals – videotapes were an emerging market and the WGA was striking primarily to get a fair share of the profits from videotapes. The WGA had previously agreed to a temporarily lower residual to help the companies build this “emerging market”. The “emerging market” had taken off for feature film releases and accordingly the WGA asked for the higher residual rate in the 1985 contract. The companies refused - making that issue a strike issue.
But the WGA has traditionally been deeply divided between screen and television writers. There are many, many more TV writers than screenwriters, and our issues are different. In 1985 there were no TV shows being sold on videotape yet, and the television writers perceived the videotape issue as a feature writers’ issue. A group within the television writers persuaded the other TV writers to cave on the issue and the WGA didn’t get the raised residual rates it wanted on cassette tapes. Two months later the original STAR TREK series was released on videotape and those TV writers realized just how badly they had miscalculated.
This year we have the same situation with the internet.
But we no longer have the divide between TV and feature writers. This is EVERYONE’S issue.
Three years ago I saw the current WGA leadership begin a massive courtship of the most powerful TV writers we have, the showrunners – the producer/writers who create and control the shows. The studios can keep pumping out feature films indefinitely – they have a huge backlog of scripts that they can pull out of their vaults while the writers are on strike. But television is much more in the moment. A TV show needs product every single week to stay on.
The showrunners are overwhelmingly united this time around. And they’re not working, period.
More than three dozen TV shows currently have no more than one episode left to air before they will have to shut down production. We’ll be going into reruns and reality momentarily.
The corporations have billions and billions of dollars to wait us out. But they have no stories without us. And without our stories, they’re going to be losing money faster and faster.
How long can this go on? As long as it has to.
What we’re asking for, as the creators of television and film content, is a tiny fraction of profit from internet use of our work.
That will be our living, in the future, and we’re not giving that up.
And now I’ll post some links to far more eloquent summations of the issues.
———————————————————————————————————————-
FAQ:
WHY ARE YOU ON STRIKE?
Payment for reuse of our writing has been a key part of our earnings for half a century. Now the studios are using the growth of the internet as a tool to take that away from us.
WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT MORE MONEY FOR SPOILED, RICH WRITERS?
True, some writers are paid very well — but in any given year, almost half of the Guild’s active writers go without any employment at all. They count on residuals to pay their mortgages and feed their families between jobs. These new pay cuts will be particularly devastating to our most vulnerable members. And right now, most of the writing for new media isn’t even covered by the Guild at all — which means no minimums or pension or health insurance. That’s not fair, and it needs to change.
HOW LONG WILL YOU BE ON STRIKE?
Until we get a fair deal. Because the future — the internet — is at stake, this is the negotiation of a generation.
AREN’T YOU HURTING THE REST OF THE COMMUNITY BY STRIKING?
This concerns us deeply. But remember, we didn’t want this strike; it was forced upon us by management. In fact, we even went so far as to take off the table one of our most important issues — DVDs — in hope of averting it.
ISN’T IT TRUE THAT IN A STRIKE, NOBODY WINS?
We’re fighting not to lose. Management is trying to take so much away from us that if we don’t dig in and defend what we have, next time around they’ll be coming after our pension and health benefits. So we need to draw a line and stand up to them. In that sense, we’re fighting not only for writers, but for many others in our industry as well. We’re all in the same boat, and if we succeed, the pattern we set will benefit every other guild and union in Hollywood.
Strike Captains’ blog: United Hollywood
http://unitedhollywood.blogspot.com/
YouTube videos explaining the strike:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ55Ir2jCxk
The Heartbreaking Voices of Uncertainty: Media Moguls on the Internet:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=8a37uqd5vTw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFkFLf5OvpM
Heroes of the Writers’ Strike:
My hero - Howard Michael Gould
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beMNePzqpzQ
Jon Stewart on The Daily Show:
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=127766&title=moment-of-zen-torture
SNL writer Tim Kazurinsky on Chicago’s WGN explains the strike:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qd_x_ivCSKw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbzb_K8Ku0w</
WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP:
There are various online petitions that you can click on and sign to show support - I’ll link to some of them here.
http://www.petitiononline.com/WGA/petition.html
http://www.petitiononline.com/f4wga/petition.html
Keep up to date with actions at unitedhollywood.com (WGAw) and strikenotes.blogspot.com (WGAE), and I’ll update this thread with current actions for those who want to help.
Here’s another great site with suggestions for how to get involved:
http://www.fans4writers.com/participate.shtml
Here’s a viral pencil campaign for those who want to send a message to the corporations:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GggokNW-4c
Here are some virtual picket signs if you’d like to show support on your MySpace/Livejournal/Second Life, etc. sites:
http://community.livejournal.com/wga_icons/
A larger community with mega-graphics:
http://community.livejournal.com/wga_supporters/
And here’s the graphic people have been using to replace their main picture on Myspace:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v317/kullervo/wgamyspace.jpg
And we’re working on a T-shirt I particularly like:
SUPPORT THE WGA - HAVE SEX WITH A WRITER.
Anything for the cause, you know?
Great to be here, everyone.
22 Comments, Comment or Ping
Wayne C. Rogers
Alexandra,
Thank you for your poignant commentary on the WGA’s strike. It hits the nail on the head with regards to large corporations and how they treat the common man. For the most part, unless you’ve had a hit show or movie, writers have always been the lowest paid with the least rights, yet the most important part of the Hollywood creative process. While actors and directors are taking away huge salaries and profits based on the gross receipts, writers are still taking home salaries based on rates from the last century. You have to have a big success like Alias, or Boston Legal, or Pirates of the Carribean to be able to neogoiate higher payments for your work. The majority of writers don’t fall into that catagory, so its vital that they have a small part of the residuals that come from the Internet. I made the comment on another post recently that short story writers are still being paid the same rate today that writers back in the seventies and eighties got for their work, if not lower. The WGA has my full support with this strike. Stay with it till you get what’s necessary in order to survive. TV viewers can either put up with the reruns or learn to read again.
Nov 24th, 2007
Alexandra Sokoloff
Thanks, Wayne, and I could agree more with all of what you’ve said. The really criminal thing, too, is that even the brilliant and acclaimed writers of Pirates of the Caribbean aren’t even acknowledged by Disney as the creative force behind that series - they weren’t even MENTIONED in the congratulatory letter Disney sent out to the entire studio when POTC broke box office records. The studios have a vested interest in promoting the illusion that they create content. It’s a travesty, and it’s very deliberate.
Nov 24th, 2007
Janet Berliner
Good to have you with us. Thank you for the clear information
and for the work you’re doing on behalf of all of us. –Janet
Nov 24th, 2007
Dave Wilson
In the Hollywood arena, it IS ridiculous that the directors and producers push aside the writers so consistently and easily, and that the studios and big-wigs seem not to even comprehend that without well-written scripts, none of their big-money actors, directors, or producers would be worth their weight in spit. I hope the strike is resolved soon, and that the public awareness of the problem rises at least a little, but I am not optimistic that huge changes will be made.
Wayne, there is a single huge difference between short story writers and screen writers. In the 70s and 80s most of the markets for short fiction had larger circulations than they do now. A lot (particularly in the genre world) have dried up completely - and I don’t see the publishers pocketing huge piles of cash and leaving the authors out of it - there simply isn’t the same sort of money on the table for fiction as there is for film.
The Viacom CEO shot himself in the foot with his own claim that there is a 500 million dollar a year download market and that “you just want to get paid for your work” — and doing all of that on film.
Fair is fair, and this is a wonderful first posting. Welcome aboard Alexandra.
David
Nov 24th, 2007
Wayne C. Rogers
David,
You’re absolutely right about the huge financial difference between film and fiction. Still I have to disagree somewhat with what short story writers are being paid today as compared to what they were being paid thirty-and-forty years ago. Two-hundred-and-fifty-dollars for a story was a lot back in the early seventies when Stephen King was selling his work to Cavalier, but the same amount of money today for a story just doesn’t cut it, and $250 is usually considered a decent sale nowadays. As another writer on this excellent blog remarked, artist and printers are being paid wages at the 2007 rate for their services. Why are writers still being paid at the 1975 rate or lower? Does that mean I would refuse a check for $250 for one of my stories? No. I would take the rascal and cash it and apply it to my monthly bills. Does it mean I get all excited when an editor offers me $25 or $50 for a short story that may take two-or-three days to write, or longer? No. Sometimes I opt to sell my work for what’s being offered, while other times I may choose to give the story away in the hope that it will help to promote one of my novels. As another writer just wrote, the real money is in writing novels and by real money, I’m referring to may one-to-five thousand dollars, if you’re lucky enough to sell your book. Maybe more if it picks up a fair amount of readers through word of mouth along the way. Only a small percentage of fiction writers actually make a living doing what they love. The rest of us, along with many screen and TV writers, are simply struggling to make ends meet as we work a full-time job to pay the bills, while striving to fulfill our dreams of being successful writer. True, the markets for short stories have dried up over the last twenty years, but that doesn’t mean writers should be taken advantage of by magazines that are depended upon them for material. At least the screen and TV writers have a union to help protect them. Fictions writers have no one. It’s certainly a lonely road to travel.
Nov 24th, 2007
RCJ
Your insider view has provided more useful information than all the news stories I’ve read or seen on the strike and its causes. My compliments on your excellent first posting, and I wish you every success in the strike that will effect all of us.
RCJ
Nov 24th, 2007
Alexandra Sokoloff
Thanks for the welcome, everyone.
RCJ - I’m thrilled to have been of some service. It’s a lot to take in when you haven’t been in the trenches, but this is certainly the most important stand writers have taken in the last 50 years. It’s my fervant hope that many other unions will benefit from our stand.
Nov 24th, 2007
Dave Wilson
Wayne,
I wasn’t saying that it wasn’t bad that we still get those same wages, just that it’s a different dynamic. The publishers aren’t making any more money on your short story now than they were in 1975 on most short fiction markets. Anthologies barely break even in most cases and sell poorly. We aren’t getting the short shrift on payment, there just isn’t a profitable market there. That’s why most of us have turned to novels, where you can at least get a reasonable return on your words.
I have done pretty well recently on short stories, though, and rarely write for less than six cents a word these days, so maybe I’m just lucky.
Still, ghost-writing pays better than short stories, and that’s not good…
I wish the market would support better pay for writers, but you can hardly blame publishers who are barely making any money on the books for not upping the ante.
D
Nov 24th, 2007
Teresa
Thank you Alexandra! I’m so stoked to see you here. It makes me even prouder of my participation at Storytellers — even if as just a reader– to see the unity of purpose and support between writers, whatever their chosen medium.
I have been reading the fine blog of Canadian Denis McGrath to keep at least peripherially in the loop.
you may want to pay him a visit at
http://heywriterboy.blogspot.com/
I will be advising him of your outstanding contribution here. Welcome Alexandra!!
Nov 24th, 2007
John B. Rosenman
Welcome, Alexandra. A great wake-up essay, and it’s good to have you.
Spoiled writers? Hah! Except for a few fat cats, many of even the more successful are concerned about keeping bread on the table for kith and kin. Thanks for a clear statement of the situation. The Internet, indeed, is the future, unless we get blown up first. One only has to think of Napster to realize how important this is.
Gigantic mega corporations — it reminds me of the end of NETWORK. Anti-trust laws be damned. That’s the way the modern, post-studios world works these days.
Nov 24th, 2007
Alexandra Sokoloff
Thanks, Teresa (especially for your solidarity avatar..) I hadn’t been aware of McGrath’s blog - I’ll link him on WriterAction.
Nov 25th, 2007
Alexandra Sokoloff
Right on, John, and Napster is indeed the ultimate example of what we’re talking about.
Nov 25th, 2007
Frank Wydra
Prudence tells me I should keep my mouth shut, or at least my fingers stilled. But, being from Detroit and seeing first hand how union demands can wreck a segment of the industry, I can not but think there is another side to the story.
Here the UAW got what it wanted. Then, sensing opportunity, foreign competitors came in and built non-union plants in Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, and elsewhere. the people in those states loved the jobs–best jobs they ever had. The billion dollar corporations that were the life blood of Michigan lost–and are still losing–billions of dollars. And our unemployment rate is the highest in the nation–all this while the economy is booming. The UAW? It’s down to 50% of its former size. Unintended consequences.
So, what’s this got to do with writers?
Writers earn what they earn because of the basic economic laws of supply and demand. If there are a lot of people willing to do something for a low wage, a low wage will be paid. Yazzzah! Everybody’s got a story in them!
But, if the talent to do a thing is so scarce–such as the skill to run a corporation or act in a manner that will attract millions of viewers–the price goes up. Think Rowlings, King, Pitt, Lopez, Patterson and Snoop Dogg.
One way to control scarcity is through a restrictive agreement, such as a union contract. But contracts are always short term distortions of the markets and entrepreneurs will find ways to free themselves of the constraints–usually with devastating, unintended consequences for those who thought they were “protected” by the contract. Ask the auto workers.
There is always the argument that when supply exceeds demand most who make up the supply will not be able to live on the product of their work. Probably true. Some actors, musicians, artists, dancers, and writers starve. And some make it very, very big. Most of the time what happens is that those who do not succeed do something else to make a living–as do most writers I know. It’s not a phenomenon unique to the arts. It’s supply and demand.
So, in the end I wish the writer’s union well. I hope they get what they want. But I do this knowing full well that they will visit unintended consequences on us all that will eventually come back to bite us all in the ass.
Frank
Nov 25th, 2007
Wayne C. Rogers
Frank,
There have always been “pros” and “cons” for unions. The fact of the matter is that the corporations want to see a higher profit so that their stockholders and CEOs can live in the kind of comfort that you and I only dream about. The corporations aren’t becoming poorer, but richer as they farm out jobs to India and Mexico where the average wage is a $1.50 per hour. Should the unions fight for higher wages for their members or cave in to the corporations out of fear that their jobs will be given to other countries where the wages are so low? That’s a tough question to answer. It’s the same with film and TV writers. Why should an actor get paid twenty million dollars for a movie, plus a percentage of the gross, while the writer only gets paid a hundred thousand for the script? With the studios making hundreds of millions off the DVD and Internet markets, it’s only fair that screen and TV writers see some of that profit, too. They’re not asking for a large amount, just a fair amount. What the studios have always failed to realize is that without scripts, there are no movies or television shows, other than news and reality programs. Writers are the heart of the industry, yet they’re constantly treated like red-headed step- children. This has to change one way or another.
Dave,
I think you and I agree on the same thing. We’re just seeing it from different prospectives.
Nov 25th, 2007
Janet Berliner
“Writers earn what they earn because of the basic economic laws of supply and demand. If there are a lot of people willing to do something for a low wage, a low wage will be paid. Yazzzah! Everybody’s got a story in them!”
Oh Dear Frank. Such talk slips easily from your tongue. Indeed the laws of supply and demand have much to do with all business. However, in the arts particularly, the issue is this: There is an endless supply of so-called and wannabe writers. They don’t care about the other little piggies. They fill whatever demand is there. But what about quality? When any old thing will do, quality generally dives into the dumpster.
I, for one, can’t have a day job and write. I mean I physically can’t. Leaving aside the issue of why I should have to do that, I want to be paid for what I believe I do best. I had a movie that came out in the mid-fifties. I was not experienced enough to think about residuals or foreign sales. There were no video stores, no e-businesses. That film has been running for 20+ years. I don’t get a dime out of it. T’ain’t right.
Yes, scripts and cars are both products, but it simply isn’t the same. I think of it as closer to an embargo. Certainly the common man is the one who feels most pain. But only when the common man rises to say to its government, “Enough” will anything fundamental change.
So says I, for better or worse.
–Janet
Nov 25th, 2007
Janet Berliner
P.S. That movie was in the mid-eighties.
P.P.S. Frank: the second problem with Detroit was that they skimped on quality, which had nothing to do with the unions. Japanese manufacturers made more reliable, more efficient cars for a lower price. Better product for lower price = more sales.
Nov 25th, 2007
Frank Wydra
I guess we believe what we want to believe.
Wayne, corporations need to make a profit to provide a return on invested money AND to provide the funds that will allow them to compete in the future. Little if any of the motivation is to provide execs with a fancy life style. That outcome is a residual of the success they have had in providing a return on investments. There are exceptions, but in the main, that’s how it works. Execs and Actors get the big bucks because they can do things others can not do. No different from NYTimes authors who suck the cash from the mid list. In the end it has nothing to do with “fairness” and a lot to do with competitive economics.
Janet, I feel for you. Honest. No glib talk there. But the fact is the time to negotiate the residuals on that script were when you took that job. If you did not have the expertise to watch out for yourself, then a few bucks on a lawyer would have helped. The ugly truth is that establishing industry-wide contractual language will force entrepreneurs to find other, less costly, ways to get what they need to satisfy demand. It won’t happen in a year or maybe even a decade, but it will happen.
As to quality, quality is not–as the saying goes–free. It requires investment of time and money. Foreign auto makers were able to improve quality AND lower prices because they were not burdened with the Detroit cost structure.
As I said earlier, I wish the writer’s union well. I hope they get what they want. But I do this knowing full well that they will visit unintended consequences on us all that will eventually come back to bite us all in the ass.
Frank
Nov 25th, 2007
Janet Berliner
I do believe in using agents and attorneys. Sadly, they don’t always do their jobs. Had I known then what I know now…. I think we’d have fun drinking and debating, you and I, but we’d rarely see eye-to-eye. The problem, as I see it, is that you don’t understand that I do understand big business and how it operates. Did you know that it’s possible to be a full-time writer and still have both left and right brains operational?
Be well, Friend. –Janet
Nov 25th, 2007
Alexandra Sokoloff
I don’t know, Frank - I don’t see your analogy translating to the way Hollywood does business. Are you saying that finally, recently, there has been a flood of writers willing to work for less, and that’s empowered the corporations to make these demands? Um - no. There’s always been a flood of wannabee writers trying to get hired in Hollywood and the studios aren’t showing any more interest than they ever did. There are a whole lot of bad writers out there, and there always have been, and while many workers can do the manual labor of building a car, very few writers have the skill set required to write an electriying story.
In practical fact, the studios’ answer to a work stoppage by writers has not been and is not being to go out and hire non-union writers. Instead, what they do is amp up their production of reality shows. They can’t put on the dramas and comedies without real, experienced writers. And even as we speak, major motion picture shoots are being shut down because major actors like Brad Pitt are walking off because the scripts aren’t ready and the actors won’t shoot until after the strike is resolved and they can get real writers back again. Their professional reputations are at stake.
Janet is altogether right - writing and building cars are just not in the same universe.
Nov 26th, 2007
Alexandra Sokoloff
Here’s the Variety article on Pitt:
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117976498.html?categoryid=13&cs=1
Nov 26th, 2007
Reply to “Why We Strike”