OK … so from what I’m reading, the producers/management/whoever can’t win in the end. Why then, hold out the internet profits at all? All the leverage seems to be on the WGA/SAG side.
Well, just today the WGA announced that they’re backing off on their demands regarding reality television and animation and heading back for more talks. (article here) Sooner or later, the funds for paying strikers and those affected by the strike are going to run out and good will might be lost, and people will want their jobs and paychecks back. The AMPTP is gambling that will happen before the AMPTP runs out of mounds of doubloons to rub all over their sweaty hairy chests.
Most of the big businesses are either privately held or have other means to make a profit outside of the entertainment industry. So… a writer is likely to starve on his meager strike pittance before any of the stockholders or management starves. Contrast that with, say, an electrical contractor. If his guys walk out, he’s likely to starve with the rest of them.
Yep. Writers want to write for a living, not for one or two months.
There is a range between “capitulate immediately” and “terminate them all.” Each side will try to find the most favorable point in that range that they can attain. The producers have a ton of money and they can afford to lose money for a longer time than writers can go without income.
If the bolded part is absolutely true, then the producers need never give an inch. I’m missing something here, obviously.
Keep in mind, too, that there are some work-arounds. Late night television, for example, has resumed. In the case of Letterman there was a deal cut. For Leno, well, Leno’s a writer and apparently it’s within the rules of the WGA, the strike, and so forth that Leno can write his own material for his own use - so presumably the jokes he’s using are those he wrote himself. He’s not a scab, he’s a writer playing by the rules and exploiting a loophole.
You know, this is not the first labour strike in history. This is not the first time that management and labour are weighing their options and trying to hold out for the most favourable agreement possible.
Just because they can afford it doesn’t mean they will. There’s a limit to how much money they’re willing to lose. The studios are owned by huge multibusiness, multinational conglomerates. They could just say “fuck it, we don’t want to be in this business at all,” but when it comes right down to it, they want the profits they can get from the business. This fight with the WGA is, for the producers, merely about margins – how much am I willing to lose in the near future to get more in the medium and distant future? And the numbers here aren’t hard-and-fast calculations either. To a large extent, both sides are running on faith.
I know, but much of the discussion (largely off the SDMB) of the WGA strike is couched in absolutes. Hard to see what’s going on in the grey area.
From here, it looks like there’s no win-win solution … seems like one side or the other is going to feel jobbed. Dunno, though.
I’ve been following one of the writer’s side blogs, (United Hollywood,) and something like this question has come up. There’s a provision for being covered by the guild and not being bound to the full duties of membership. The term that they use is ‘financial core.’ Any WGA member can go fi-core and not be bound by guild policy in any way - including crossing picket lines and writing for an AMPTP member company during the strike.
Downsides are that it goes two ways - when you’re fi-core you don’t have a say in guild policy either, no vote or anything. It’s a permanent decision, and you do still have to keep paying dues. (That’s the ‘financial’ part of it.)
Not sure what WGA policy is about a new member signing up and then immediately going fi-core, or indeed if they have to take any new writer who applies for membership. Does being a ‘guild’ and not a union have any impact on the federal laws that Balthisar mentioned?
I’ll give you my standard answer:
If you think it’s so easy, you do it. Write a professional quality script.
Yes, there are shows that are utter crap. But it is no easy skill to write, say According to Jim (a show I detest). Sure, many of the lines aren’t particularly funny, but even those are pretty difficult to come up with. And coming up with several stories a year that aren’t even triter and lamer than what you see on the air is extremely difficult. I wouldn’t be able to handle it for any weekly show, and I’ve had some real success as a writer.
Writing is hard. And all writing is equally hard.
Further, most people have put an overinflated value on their own writing. Just because you would like your script does not mean anyone else would.
I guess that depends on your definition of “win.” The WGA has publicized studies purporting to show that if the producers gave in to all their demands, it would have negligible effect on the producers’ bottom line. The “win” the producers are looking for is not the marginal difference between one contract and another but rather it is the breaking of the union altogether.
Ha!
heh.
Perhaps you didn’t see enough caveats in that statement :rolleyes:
From a financial perspective, it would be pretty hard for me to write a show that was worse than the current ones TO ME (as per my quote,) because currently television gets zero of my advertising eyeballs because I don’t watch any commercial television.
On the other hand, if we got a new batch of writers in, 3 things could happen:
- They bring something fresh to the table, in which case it’s an unmitigated plus. But I don’t have much faith in that outcome.
- They are so bad I tune in just for the trainwreck, in which case it’s still a better outcome for the producers than before.
- They’re still pretty bad, in which case the stations haven’t lost money vis a vis me.
The difference to me between “professional”-quality scripts and nonsense is so small, even when I happen to be seeing it, that it may as well be the same to me.
Is this an informed statement or a supposed one?
Someone got some fanfic links for **Ludovic **to see what depths “nonsense” has really sunk to? 
From the perspective of getting me to watch is what I mainly meant from the statement that it “may as well be the same to me”.
But no, I don’t read fanfic, either. But I wonder if professional TV script writers are better than B-movie script writers. I like the amateur energy and inventiveness that sometimes works in B-movies, but I’m not sure if it’s the acting or the writing, because the acting sure is amateur as well, and a good actor can make a bad line a little better (or worse, if you’re watching it for its awfulness.)
I’ve been wondering what the deal is with two exceptions I’ve seen:
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I believe I read in an interview that the Stargate series wouldn’t be affected much by the strike because most of the writers are Canadian and therefore not part of the WGA. So why don’t more tv series hire Canadian writers? There’s plenty of series being filmed in Vancouver…
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One of the “correspondents” on the Daily Show mentioned that they weren’t legally allowed to strike because they were there on a work visa.
I think the writer’s strike is a little different from other strikes – everyone in the industry (okay, maybe just actors & directors) are on the same side as the writers. The writers are striking because of issues like compensation for future electronic distribution. This issue has been bubbling up for a decade or so, and I think they’re making as strong a stand as they can, because otherwise it’ll be the middlemen in the industry who make all the money.
IIRC most TV writing is ‘work for hire,’ meaning that the writers don’t have any copyright claims – they get only what they negotiate. (Exceptions are people like JK Rowlings who come in already owning the rights to characters & stories they created outside the movie & TV industry). From my own experience (talking to a handful of writers at parties where someone accidentally invited both industry types and aerospace engineers), copyright issues are something writers think about almost constantly.
I think the actors & directors (and some of the producers) are siding with them because the writers are acting as their proxies in this fight.
I don’t think that potential ‘scab’ writers would want to basically sell their own futures down the river while alienating the actors and directors who they’d need to work with in the future.
I’ve read a lot of stuff (fanfic, writer’s workshop drafts, wannabee submissions) that doesn’t meet even minimal professional standards. The gap between the normal crap you see on television and the absolute crappiness of a lot a amateur stuff is much larger than you think.
The producers are not a monolith. Some have very deep pockets, some less so. Plus, don’t forget that movies are part of the deal as well. The television stations can keep puttering along with reality shows and reruns, but without new releases the movie industry is dead in the water. If producers start caving and signing independent deals (like Letterman did) that increases the pressure on the holdouts.
Question: what prevents non-WAG scab writers from writing anonymously? I’m thinking the payments for the work could be made to an anonymous account of some kind … maybe I’m wrong about that?