Ridiculous portrayals of professions on TV

[J.Michael_Straczynski]

@RealityChuck

As a former treasurer of the Science Fiction Writers of America and the one who made decisions about membership during my tenure (and who was on the membership committee for several years after that), I can say with authority that Straczynski is wrong.

SFWA is an organization of book and short story authors. If he got a book or three short stories published, he would be we eligible for membership. (Alan Brennert, for instance, makes most of his money as a Hollywood screenwriter, but is eligible for SFWA because he has also published novels and short stories).

Further, SFWA makes no judgment on the quality of anyone’s writing. You can be a hack or a Nobel Prize winner, but you still need to meet the qualifications of the organization.

Saying he was kept out is like saying that a science fiction book author was unfairly prevented from joining the Writers Guild of America, which Straczynski is a member of. He would never let me into the WGA because I don’t qualify; he can’t join SFWA for the same reason.

Straczynski is welcome to join if he meets the qualifications. No one says he’s not a real writer, just that, as a screenwriter, his interests are not the same as that of book and short story writers.

SFWA once let someone in and ignored its own rules for qualifications. The resultant shitstorm means that we do not bend the rules for anyone.

This statement hasn’t the slightest relationship to the facts. As I pointed out, Alan Brennert makes far more money with screenplays and is a member (I seem to recall he was an officer at one point).

Ummm…no.

No on several levels.

SFWA did not say that I was not a real writer in terms of writing short stories and fiction. Second, I was a member of SFWA for some time, so I met their technical requirements.

But that did not, and does not, mitigate against the inherent prejudice against TV and film writers that was rampant at that time, the late 80s.

Specifically: Harlan Ellison, DC Fontana, Michael Cassutt, David Gerrold and I and many others were lobbying for the restoration of the Nebula for Best Dramatic Presentation, which had been eliminated back in 77. It was in requesting this that many SFWA members went berserk, declaring in the monthly SFWA publication that TV and film writers were not real writers, that we were all hacks, and that a screen story wasn’t a story. They said that it was impossible to tell what was the writer and what was the director in a finished movie (even though scripts would have been made available), and that reading a script was incomprehensible to outsiders (which is sheerest nonsense). The amount of vitriol and outright hate mail aimed at media writers was breathtaking in the extreme.

Time and time again it was hammered home in those pages and at SFWA gatherings: writing for TV and film was not real writing. Period.

That is not opinion, that is cold fact: anyone with a collection of SFWA publications from that time can freaking look it up. It was this prejudice that led me to finally resign from SFWA. Loudly. (SFWA refused to publish my letter of resignation, saying it was “too long,” despite the fact that there were regularly published letters of much greater length. You can find a follow-up to that resignation at

http://www.jmsnews.net/msg.aspx?id=1-2596&topic=Marvel%20Comics

Another piece about this, also from a few years later:

http://www.jmsnews.net/msg.aspx?id=1-2597&topic=Spiderman

And before anyone starts yelliing about vested interest: as noted in the links above, all of us who were pushing for the creation/restoration of the Dramatic Nebula stated that we would disqualify ourselves from ever receiving the thing. We were interested in getting the form the recognition it deserved, not getting it for ourselves.

As for the difference between film/tv writers and prose writers: one is no more a hack for writing for lots of money than one is noble for taking less…that simply doesn’t enter into the equation on a day-to-day basis. I know many prose writers who churn out books at a few grand a throw as fast as they can to make the bucks and don’t really care about the quality; I know lots of film/tv writers who have walked off shows and away from projects, sacrificing hundreds of thousands of dollars, when they felt the integrity of the script was being compromised.

You have sellouts and saints, whores and madonnas, madmen and geniuses on both sides of the prose/script line, and any attempt to lump all of those on one side or the other into a specific category of professionalism is the worst kind of bigotry.

Eventually, the Dramatic Nebula was reinstated – I think it was 98 or 99 – but it still raised enough of a sense of resentment that it was eventually withdrawn again in, I think, 2008. The “TV/film writing isn’t real writing and thus isn’t eligible for a Nebula” won again and designated a second-class-citizen award (despite being named after a first-class writer), the Ray Bradbury Award, which went first to Jim Cameron, then, ironically enough, to me.

So to the first poster on this: no, it wasn’t that I was rejected by SFWA because I wasn’t a real writer for prose based on my tv/film rep; I was a SFWA member. It was the prejudice toward my script work that caused that to be stated, not just to me but to other SFWA members and outside the group as well.

And to the treasurer: sorry, but that prejudice was there, was stated, was recorded and published for posterity, and to varying degrees still exists to this day. Some of it is even on display in this thread, in the characterization of film/tv writers as lazy and never doing their homework. (I spent two *years *researching *Changeling *in the dark halls of LA City Hall, the LAPD archives and elsewhere.)

I’ve always seen, and treated, writers as just writers, regardless of the venue or the genre in which they work. That seems to me common sense. It’s a road I recommend to others as well.