Uhh…because the discussion was about capitalism and what you’re talking about has zero to do with my original point?
I think the system has shown that it can, yes. I like what you did there, by the way, putting words in mouth. That’s gotta be worth at least an extra penny for you writer-types.
I’m sorry I don’t quite understand this sentence. Are you saying that the current union system has shown that a union-free system will be better for all? If that’s what you’re saying, I think I’d need an elaboration.
How did I do that, exactly? I asked you to reconcile your wish for the demise of the union system with your conclusion that the writers are getting screwed as it is.
I think that if there were no contract, and every writer and producer and whoever just negotiated each one on a case-by-case basis, a lot of writers, especially new writers, would get screwed. They’d get slightly better upfront money, yes, but either horrible or no residuals, and the new writer, thinking that the upfront money he has is good enough, and that if he makes that much with every script, and he makes X scripts per year, he’ll make tons of money! Wow!
Of course, he won’t, because odds are he can’t make as many scripts as he thought, and can’t sell them as easily as that first one. He should have asked for less up front and some residuals, but being new to the game, he didn’t know how it works and only saw a big(ish) upfront payment and was like “gimme gimme gimme!”
I’d like to hear more of this. Is it like in the subliminal ads, where they say “without perspective, it looks like this guy’s giving that lady upstage a tap in the crapper”?
Seems like a win-win to me.
Wow.
Just wow.
For actors SAG productions have to employ SAG actors, and SAG members can’t work on non-union productions without a waiver. (My daughter had to get one to work on student films.) Are there non-union productions which non-WGA writers can work on? Can WGA writers work on these also?
As for me, since I’m actually a programmer, I’m going to pound some code which will take a short story, reformat it into screenplay form, with the dialog converted, and then, by the Dio theory, I can do adaptations in minutes!
Who wants a copy? 
I swear I’ve read novels where all of the descriptions were done via dialog, like this:
“As you know, Betty, I am 49 years old and a little shorter than you are at 5 feet 2 inches,” Helen said.
“Yes, Helen, that’s true. While I am 36 years old and nearly 5 feet 5 inches tall. Despite my glasses, with my corrected vision I see that you have put out some new tasteful pieces in your extremely large collection of blue 18th century dinnerware. I know that you really like to shop for those piece, even going so far as to shop during your lunch breaks from your job with Dewey, Cheathem, and Howe, a high-powered legal firm that has employed you since 1982 as a paralegal,” said Betty.
Free market capitalism, then. The idea is that you are remunerated for services rendered not because you managed to prevent anyone else from even tendering, but because you could do it for the best combination of price and quality for the customer.
But, whatever. Debate the actual point or nitpick terminology as you see fit. Arguing against some regulation-free extreme form of capitalism is as much of a red herring as the dullards who drag out Marx whenever modern socialism comes up. The point is that in our modern capitalist societies, we tend not to like exclusionary arrangements which damage competition. Just ask Bill Gates, or the guys from de Beers. And here in socialist old Blighty, compulsory union membership is actually forbidden. Weird, eh?
I tried to watch some legal drama that was new last year, can’t remember the name of it. It starred Victor Garber, who I really like, so I gave it a whirl. The dialogue between the lawyers was like this in explaining various aspects of the law, and it was painful to listen to. “As you know, according to the principle of double jeopardy, a person cannot be tried twice for the same crime…” Oftentimes, they were referring to things a lawyer wouldn’t even have to point out to another lawyer, and if they did, it would be a brief reference, not a long explanation. I could just picture the other lawyer saying sarcastically, “Double jeopardy? Wait, explain it again, I’ve never heard of such a thing!” I get that they are trying to be sure the viewer knows what’s going on, but OMG, it was so painfully stitled I couldn’t stand to listen to it. L&O does a little of this as needed, but not nearly in such an obvious manner.
If writing scripts is so easy, there would be a lot more good shows on TV, IMO. 90% of what is out there is crap, and half of the good shows these days are reality shows, which may require crackerjack story plotters and editors, but don’t require any writing of dialogue.
“So You Think You Have an Original Idea.” Starring Hilarity N. Suze as the first one to get shot down. Heh.
I, for one, am eager to see DtC’s script. He might be able to pull it off. It’s been known to happen. I don’t know that I will see it, assuming it even gets written–but I’d like to.
And Lucas had to pay huge fines just to run the credits the way he wanted on the later Star Wars films, so he quit the DGA in protest. Given how freely “the suits” at studios like to screw over the talent (Samuel L. Jackson has had some choice words about “the suits” and what he thinks of them), I can understand why the unions are needed, but in some cases, the unions are no better than “the suits” they’re sworn to protect the talent from. (I should point out that the folks who started the DGA, WGA, and SAG had it easy compared to the folks who started other unions. Those folks, in some cases, paid with their lives just to get the union recognized.)
IMHO, the smart thing for WGA members to do now, since everyone in Hollywood, except for “the suits” agrees with their position, is to start working on web content now and begin offering their own content for download via the web. Obviously they can’t do the same shows they were working on for the networks, but I imagine most, if not all of them, have other ideas kicking around in their heads they could develop. If they do something like this, making their own content available, sans the networks, with big stars (shouldn’t be too hard to get them to help out, as the actors have been in the picket lines), they’ll no doubt attract an audience. This will enable the writers to have a source of income while the strike goes on (which many of them probably can’t afford), they’ll be able to show that web content does generate revenue, and they’ll (hopefully) bring the networks into the 21st century.
I remember an episode of The West Wing where Josh says to Donna, “Social Security is the Third rail of American Politics. Touch and you die.” I wanted Donna to answer, "Um, yeah. I know that. 'Cause I’ve been working in the White House for the past four years.
“I’m glad you called me to ask me out for a drink, like you do from time to time when you feel we haven’t had a chance to talk enough lately, ir when you’ve hd a particularly bad day at work, or, as I suspect is the case tonight, when a new man has entered your life and you want work out how you feel by talking to me about him,” said Helen.
Betty replied, “Yes, as you know I have been dating a Devin for six months, who is an architect, about 6’ 1” tall, that I met at a fund raising event for my non-profit organization that provides jobs for feral cats, whioch I have been head of for 3 years now. Anyway, I think I am falling for him in a big way, since we have sex and enjoy each other’s comany. The problem is, he is allergic to cats and I have four cats named Azrael, Butters, Chimpy and Columbo. So see that is the conflict I have and now I am wondering what the resolution of this conflict will be."
Hey! No fair! DtC is supposed to be writing the script himself and you guys are providing him with dialog! Stop it! 
While I think Dopers are a more intelligent and more literate bunch than most, being sure you can write does not mean you can do it. I spent a summer reading scripts for Nickelodeon and TNN when I was in college, and if you think the scripts that get made are horrible - and don’t get me wrong, I say that a lot too - you should see some of the stuff that doesn’t. I read some really horrible jokes and dialogue back then. The best things were really trite, “Juwanna Mann” was in the middle, and the worst thing I read used “I woulda shot his dick off!” as a running joke. And that only captures about half of the awfulness in that script. I still remember the names of the authors; one has since died.
Heh. That’s like the traditional way of explaining things in 1930s science fiction stories which went like this.
John went to the light, and threw the switch. “As you know,” he said to Robert, “when I move this lever up to the on position, it completes an electrical circuit between the house wiring and the incandescent light bulb in the fixture on the ceiling. This allows electrical power to flow along wires running from this house to a power generation station, where coal is burned, creating steam and creating electrical power according to the equations of James Clerk Maxwell, …”
Unless they put this into footnotes. SF stories back then had footnotes, and not funny ones like pTerry’s.
ETA: Scientific errors in the above are intentional. I wanted to make the dialog authentic.
I’m sorry I missed out on this thread yesterday. I was up in the Bay Area pitching some videogame ideas to management.
It’s been amusing to read the “anyone can do it” posts. I’ve done a fair amount of game writing (probably enough to qualify me for an associate WGA membership) and it’s much harder than it looks.
It’s interesting to compare the television and movie industries (which are unionized) to the game industry (which is not). Most game companies operate on a salary model like the old studio system. You may get paid a bonus if you ship a hit title but that’s entirely at the whim of management and there’s nothing contractually to prevent them from not giving you a dime.
Because individuals don’t have a guarantee of downstream revenue, you’ve got to keep people on staff year round. Movie and TV productions have the luxury of assembling teams and then dissolving them when the job is done. It puts a greater focus on individual talent and finding the right person for a particular job. With games you often find developers working on titles that don’t particularly suit their talent set just because they have to make salary every month. There’s tremendous pressure to keep stuff in the pipeline all the time.
I would argue that the guild and union system is actually a better approach for mass-producing creative product. It puts the economic focus squarely on the creativity of the individual members of the team where it belongs.
Just an update on this for those who are curious. I’ve got the cold open written and the first few pages of an A story. I’m still trying to settle on a B story. The formatting, pacing, dialogue, etc. Is coming pretty easily and more naturally than a I thought it would (it’s kind of liberating to be free of having to “show” everything as with normal prose style and just be able to outline things and focus on basic action and dialogue). The aspect that’s giving me trouble isn’t the actual writing, but having to research the medical details. It’s not easy to come up with a medical condition that can believably fool a hospital full of doctors with misleading symptoms, plus I have to make sure that the diagnostic criteria, symptoms, treatment, complications from bad treatment (they always have to make it worse before they make it better) are all somewhere in the ballpark of reality. I can see why this show tends to stretch the boundaries of medical pluasibility a lot. You kind of have to if you want to have a show.
I can also see why they like using lupus as a red herring a lot. It’s hard to diagnose and has a million symptoms that can be mistaken for a million other things.
Anyway, back to the saltmines. This whole masturbatory exercise is turning out to be kind of fun. If I didn’t have to keep reseraching the fucking medicine, I’d be going a lot faster.