[QUOTE=bordelond]
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?
[/QUOTE]
Just because your name isn’t on the manuscript, doesn’t mean that someone can’t figure out who wrote it.
[QUOTE=RealityChuck]
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.
[/QUOTE]
Oh man. This is ridiculous. I don’t know anything about you or what you’ve written, but to say that all writing is equally hard is 100% ridiculous. Are you telling me that massmarket paper back romance/thriller writers who crank out ten formula books a year are agonizing over each word to the extent that brilliant writers like Eggers are? How about the short stories in Highlights magazine? Are those ‘hard’ to write? how about the “10 Tips to Please Your Lover” in Cosmo?
You would have been better served to stop at your first sentence: Writing is Hard. Not everyone can do it. I’m trying to do it. It’s very hard work that I haven’t found success at, because I’m trying to put out good work.
[QUOTE=mks57]
Just because your name isn’t on the manuscript, doesn’t mean that someone can’t figure out who wrote it.
[/QUOTE]
:dubious:
I just don’t think it could possibly be that pat. WAG’s got a secret police staking out P.O. boxes nationwide or something?
Or take an extreme example for the sake of argument: say it was the first manuscript someone ever submitted. Ever. From an Australian writer … never in WAG. That’s traceable?
The WAG doesn’t have to have a secret police. An incident like that is going to raise questions in a small community. Such things can be found out without extraordinary efforts.
[QUOTE=acsenray]
The WAG doesn’t have to have a secret police. An incident like that is going to raise questions in a small community. Such things can be found out without extraordinary efforts.
[/QUOTE]
We’re thinking of different things, perhaps. You’re thinking of “an incident” where a solitary WAG member attempts to cross the line by a singular anonymous submission.
I’m thinking of a production company (or many) actively soliciting anonymous submissions from non-WAG members worldwide. Indeed, from entertainment-industry outsiders altogether. So think more of “many dozens” to potentially “many hundreds” of incidents.
Rather than “WAG will find out”, the hole in the plan here has got to be that, given the requisite ability and speed, few people want to do this level of writing regularly for no credit, which is what an anonymous submission system would be. Get paid, but cannot claim credit for the work (for many years, anyway).
[QUOTE=bordelond]
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?
[/QUOTE]
I’m sure it’s doable. For example, I’ve encountered SAG actors doing “off the books” work for game companies who are not SAG signatories.
The problem is that television requires a LOT of writing. You might be able to keep the identities of the scabs secret if it was just a few people here and there, but once you start talking about the hundreds of writers that would be required to get any significant fraction of production going again, there’s no way some names won’t leak out.
It’s WGA, not WAG, btw, ftr, fyi, fwiw and iirc.
As I posted earlier, we’ve been through this nonsense before.
In the thread Why the Writers Strike pisses me off, Dio made the same silly claims as people this thread are doing. He accepted a challenge to write a script himself. It took longer than he thought, and a pit thread, The Diogenes Teleplay, pounded him for that. He finally responded with a script for the tv show House, which can be found here. While the script was fun and seemed to please a lot of people, it was nowhere near a professional level script.
As for the other issue, of course not all writing is equally hard. There are two responses to this.
One is that not all writing is equal either. Many good novelists find that they can’t write good scripts. It’s a different medium and requires different skills. Novelists are often not good at nonfiction; science writers aren’t good at novels. Genre writers may not be good at literary fiction but most literary writers stink at genre. Poets are their own beasts and so are many children’s book writers. Reporting is an entirely different disclipline. And so on and on and on. Saying that you can write, therefore you can write anything is nonsense. The entire history of writing proves that over and over.
The other response is that even the so-called lesser genres of writing call for professionalism. The Romance Writers of America has about 8000 members. Of these, fewer than 2000 have sold professionally. The rest want to sell. They try. The RWA hold zillions of contests each year and the unsold write thousands of books. Most never break into the professional ranks. There is simply a gap between those who think, this is crap and so easy that anyone can do it, and those who can actually do it. Most people, even people who study and try and work at it, can’t. In any field of writing, no matter what that field is.
The notion that thousands of writers are just sitting out there who can whip off a professional script is preposterous. The notion that such scripts, even if professional, would be accepted is equally ridiculous as I’ve already posted in this very thread. People who are saying that know nothing about writing or the industry. Getting knowledgeable people to agree that this nonsense is true is hard, as hard as amateurs getting scripts accepted would be.
[QUOTE=Pochacco]
The problem is that television requires a LOT of writing. You might be able to keep the identities of the scabs secret if it was just a few people here and there, but once you start talking about the hundreds of writers that would be required to get any significant fraction of production going again, there’s no way some names won’t leak out.
[/QUOTE]
That makes sense. Any secret scheme that requires 1,000 people to stay mum won’t stay secret long.
So, hypothetically … maybe a script for a TV movie or something could be produced on the QT by a lone anonymous non-WAG member. But a regular TV series … much tougher.
Something that just ocurred to me, but that would likely have been obvious if I actually were in the industry – the importance of access to immediate re-writes. Directors and crews don’t stick to a script slavishly – things are passed back to the writers all the time on the fly, correct? Without that back-and-forth … that way of produsing TV/film would be much less workable. Either rewrites would have to be done without, or you’d have to wait while some remote anonymous writer got to the requested rewrite, knocked it out, then sent it back (via snail mail for privacy?). Hmmm … seems like a problem.
[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]
The notion that such scripts, even if professional, would be accepted is equally ridiculous as I’ve already posted in this very thread.
[/QUOTE]
That would seem to be another problem with anonymous submission – SAG members won’t work on a film/TV show with such a script. And I’m sure that if the producer won’t or can’t tell the crew who wrote the script, it would be a huge red flag.
Just trying to work through the issues logically in my head. Mostly off the SDMB, some of the questions I’ve had about the WAG strike have been answered patly, with too much knowledge assumed (not realizing things they took for granted about the industry needed to be explained to outsiders).
Canadian writers are represented by the own union, which, judging by its web site , supports the WGA’s strike. I expect that Canadian writers want many of the same things the American writers are trying to get, and the Canadian union would probably not consider it to be in their long-term interest to help producers break the WGA strike.
[QUOTE=bordelond]
Something that just ocurred to me, but that would likely have been obvious if I actually were in the industry – the importance of access to immediate re-writes. Directors and crews don’t stick to a script slavishly – things are passed back to the writers all the time on the fly, correct?
[/QUOTE]
There’s that, but it’s also important to know that those rewrites start well before production even begins.
Take a typical movie. At some point, there is a first draft of a script. (Maybe it’s a spec, i.e. something a writer wrote on his own and sold. Maybe it’s a commission, something the producers thought up and hired a writer to draft. Doesn’t matter. What’s important is that at some point in the process, a script appears.)
Producers, studio executives, talent agents, hyphenates (actor-producers), and various other management types now begin perusing said script, and making notes. Maybe the notes are minor, like, “need funnier gag on page 54.” Maybe the notes are major, like “punch up the third act,” or “add a sidekick character.” This lasts weeks, months, or years, as the management players turn over and the script gets passed from authority to authority. Every individual player wants to put his or her stamp on the material, so everybody has notes. Often, the original writer gets fed up, and “ankles” (to use Variety parlance), thus requiring the retention of a new writer, or writers. Occasionally (or, arguably, usually), the suits don’t really know what’s “wrong” with a script, so they sort of bumble around during this phase. For instance, they might dump the first writer, hire two new writers to separately take a crack at a new draft, and then hire a fourth writer to blend all three drafts together. Eventually, a director is hired and casting begins, and the Big Dog asks for another rewrite, to tailor the material to his or her sensibilities. Maybe the Big Dog is a director, who rewrites it herself. Maybe the Big Dog is a movie star, with a short list of acceptable writers.
Examples of this whole process in action: The third Die Hard movie started life as a proposed Lethal Weapon sequel (squint hard, and you can just barely see it). Also, the first Flintstones movie used more than fifty writers, most of whom received no screen credit.
The significant thing to know in all of this: Most of the time, the management types organizing the rewrites like to have the writer at their beck and call, easily accessible to be on site, face to face, for notes meetings. Only the most successful writers, or specialized, get to live somewhere other than Los Angeles and its environs. The suggestion in one of your earlier posts (which you then withdrew, but bear with me for the benefit of other readers) that all of this could be conducted remotely via electronic communications is not reflective of the reality of the industry. These start-up scab writers would have to be in L.A., full stop.
And besides, after the fact, how do these scabs leverage their experience? If the work is somehow conducted in secret, if the issues above are somehow solved along with the problem you noted about not identifying the writer to cast and crew, then that work doesn’t go on the scab’s resume, right? So as far as anybody is concerned, after the strike is resolved, he’s just another schmoe, with zero leg up. He can’t even claim to know any of the people he met while working, because that, in itself, will raise suspicions. (“Hey, how did you and Joe Exec get so buddy-buddy all of a sudden?”)
There’s lots and lots of reasons hiring scabs is a non-starter. They did try it in a previous writer’s strike (to write the soaps, as I recall), and the quality was so incredibly bad that viewers started abandoning the shows even faster than when the shows were in reruns. (See the second-season finale of Star Trek: Next Gen for an example of what happens when a script is created under non-normal circumstances.) Believe me, if writing were easy, the producers would be happy to do it themselves. They know they need the writers for their talents. But as acsenray says, this is not about a short-term business decision; this is a long-term strategy to weaken and eventually break the unions. The strike in 1988 was forced for the same reason, and got them a step closer to the goal (the writers were forced to accept a truly shitty deal); this is another attempt at further incremental progress.
Basically, the studios have billions of dollars in the bank (their own, or as backed by the parent conglomerates), and are in it for the long haul. The writers have mortgages and car payments, and can’t sustain a long strike. But the studios still have a responsibility to their shareholders (again, either their own or those of the parent corporations), and cannot torpedo their cashflow forever. They believe, however, they can last longer than the writers, which is why they forced this strike.
Despite the DGA’s new agreement, I don’t see this wrapping up any time soon. The studios will make a deal either when they believe they’ve made their point, or when the writers roll over and show their bellies, and not before then.
[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]
The notion that thousands of writers are just sitting out there who can whip off a professional script is preposterous. The notion that such scripts, even if professional, would be accepted is equally ridiculous as I’ve already posted in this very thread. People who are saying that know nothing about writing or the industry. Getting knowledgeable people to agree that this nonsense is true is hard, as hard as amateurs getting scripts accepted would be.
[/QUOTE]
I agree that there are not “thousands” of marketable scripts, but to espouse that just by virtue of being in the WGA or having been produced at least once that these are the ONLY marketable writers is straight up stupid. There are hundreds of excellent writers out there, many of which are rejected because they formatted something wrong, or addressed it to the wrong person, or wouldn’t sleep with so and so’s friend and so they’ll never work again. There’s much more to getting hollywood writing work than simply turning out a good product, and if you don’t think that’s true then YOU know nothing about the industry.
I don’t write scripts, so I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I resent the idea that just because i haven’t been published YET that I must be writing miserable, unsaleable shit.
[QUOTE=fatgail]
I agree that there are not “thousands” of marketable scripts, but to espouse that just by virtue of being in the WGA or having been produced at least once that these are the ONLY marketable writers is straight up stupid.
[/QUOTE]
The vast majority of those great non-WGA writers are going to aspire to become members of the WGA. They know what’s in their interest as well.
[QUOTE=acsenray]
The vast majority of those great non-WGA writers are going to aspire to become members of the WGA. They know what’s in their interest as well.
[/QUOTE]
I’m not speaking of the strike or scabs or anything, but merely the idea that just by virtue of BEING a working writer, you’re the ONLY good writers there are.
[QUOTE=fatgail]
I’m not speaking of the strike or scabs or anything, but merely the idea that just by virtue of BEING a working writer, you’re the ONLY good writers there are.
[/QUOTE]
And who espoused this idea?
[QUOTE=acsenray]
And who espoused this idea?
[/QUOTE]
a young man I like to call Expano Mapcase who said
[QUOTE=fatgail]
I don’t write scripts, so I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I resent the idea that just because i haven’t been published YET that I must be writing miserable, unsaleable shit.
[/QUOTE]
I hate to say this, but the real world is sorta kinda like American Idol.
Thousands of people audition for the show. A few are obviously only doing it for the goof, a few are clearly deranged. Most somehow seriously think they can sing.
We laugh at them, but they are sincere if deluded. Most can be dismissed instantly. A somewhat smaller group are better but the professionals can still tell at once that they are lacking some important quality.
Out of all those who audition, a handful make the real show. Only a fraction of those have any real quality.
Substitute writers for singers and you have the professional writing world. Those who know what the slush pile look like know that at least 90% of submissions can be dismissed by a glance at the first page. Amateurs really do all the silly things you hear stories of - turn a page upside down or hide money between pages - to test whether their submissions are really being read. Editors know all these tricks. They don’t care. Any professional can tell instantly whether the quality is professional or not.
The top ten percent does get read. Or at least gets read beyond the first page, if not necessarily to the end. Ninety percent of these too will get rejected. Those outside the industry may not understand why, but few insiders will disagree.
Only that last one percent has a chance of making it. And selling once gives no guarantee of selling the next time. The ones who make it big in writing are a handful of a handful.
fatgail, I have absolutely no idea where you fit in. You may be inexperienced, you may be utterly hopeless. Some people who are good enough don’t make it because their timing is wrong or their attitude is bad or they don’t work hard enough or though sheer bad luck. That’s a tragedy and a waste but it’s not the norm. The myth that huge supplies of professionals in any field exist but are somehow shut out is a myth. The best people who persist normally make it. The worst never get their foot in. There is some overlap at the border but that’s a tiny fraction of the whole. This is true for every field in every society, from politicians to football players.
Here’s reality. If you haven’t made it in a field, the odds are overwhelming that you are either young or bad. People who become doctors in their 40s or marathon runners in their 50s or painters in their 70s make the news because they are such exceptions to the norm.
The way to break into Hollywood is to go to Hollywood and obsessively work to get recognized, not wait for a strike and think, I can do that. The way to break into any other area of writing is the same.
You’ll either make it or you won’t. New people break into every field every year. They are small in number compared to those already in the field, though. That’s always been true. Always will be.
I’ve been writing for over 30 years. I’ve been to writers workshops, writers classes, writers groups. In all that time I’ve seen a handful of unpublished writers make their first sales. Even fewer have become full-time writers. A few others were good enough but didn’t persevere. The majority never got it. Never even got why they weren’t getting it. Maybe some of them are reading about the strike today and thinking that they could writer better stuff than what’s on television.
They’re wrong.
[QUOTE=Balthisar]
However federal law provides that in every, single state of the union, you can’t be forced to be a member of the union in order to work. In non-right-to-work-states, you still have to pay “agency fees” instead of the full dues.
[/QUOTE]
When I encountered this situation in the 80s, I was told that I had two choices: join the teacher’s union and have dues automatically deducted from my paycheck, or don’t join the union and have the exact same amount of money deducted from my paycheck. You can use whatever weaselly phrasing you want, but I was basically forced to join the union.
[QUOTE=acsenray]
Ultimately, a union contract and union workers do benefit employers.
[/QUOTE]
Nope. Don’t buy it. I’ve seen both sides: when I was teaching (college) and when my wife chaired a school board (K12). In both cases, I felt that the union hurt the schools: incompetent teachers couldn’t be fired to make room for better ones (tenure); disciplining disruptive and insubordinate teachers was next to impossible, which made the work environment harder for everyone; the union fought for the union, not for its members. There are lots of benefits to (some) of the members, but the employers were well and thoroughly screwed.
[QUOTE=RealityChuck]
Lack of talent.
Good writers are hard to find, and you can’t shake a tree and find people with the skills necessary.
[/QUOTE]
I agree that good writers are hard to find. I make a living as a writer. But your dog just won’t hunt, Chuck.
There are many highly competent writers that aren’t WGA members. They may be from other countries, or doing different kinds of writing at the moment, or retired, or whatever. But you can’t make a blanket implication that all non-WGA members lack talent and expect it to go unchallenged. It’s a slap in the face to many thousands of good writers around the world.
And, just for the record, there are some pretty bad writers that are WGA members, too.
[QUOTE=fatgail]
a young man I like to call Expano Mapcase who said
[/QUOTE]
A:
B:
B does not follow from A. Exapno Mapcase is not saying that the current members of the WGA are the only good writers in the world.
But there are not enough good writers who have the knowledge and experience and skill to step into the job such that replacing the WGA wholesale would be easy. Yes there will be a small number of people who could just step in and do fine and there would be a slightly larger group who are excellent writers who would do well with experience in the profession. But there would be a relatively small number of them.
There are a large number of good writers, but the vast majority of them wouldn’t be well suited to do Hollywood screenwriting.
And, if I might say, Fatgail, you seem to be taking this point a bit personally. I don’t think that’s warranted. The members of the WGA are in general a set of highly skilled and highly experienced screenwriters who would actually be difficult to replace en masse. I am a professional writer, too, and even though I occasionally believe that I could write better scripts than most of the ones I see on television, I do realise that I don’t have the requisite experience and probably not the specific set of skills required. As the WGA Dopers who have posted about the strike have tried to illustrate, being a good writer is not enough to be a good Hollywood screenwriter.