The Writers Guild of America, East and West, have voted over 90% to authorize a strike if negotiations break down with the studios. Expect a barren Fall/Winter TV season and lots of “reality” shows.
Joe Straczynski sums it up on the B5JMS list:
First, to the non- or anti-union folks, a question: when you go into a book store to buy a copy of a novel by your favorite author, do you mind that roughly twelve percent of the price of that book goes to the author? Or do you feel that he’s entitled to that royalty?
Most folks, I would suggest, are totally okay with that idea. They wrote the book, the publisher published the book, they’re both entitled to get something back from the publishing of it. That seems only fair.
The situation with the WGA is really no different. It’s a way of ensuring that artists — who live in a very different world than the 9-5 universe everybody else lives in — receive some regular form of compensation to keep them alive and solvent during the often very long periods of time required to create the next thing.
Leaving off such catastrophic events as being laid off or fired…most people go to work every day in expectation of a paycheck that will come regularly. Writers don’t. They get paid when they a) write, b) finish what they write, and c) someone decides to *pay* for what they’ve written.
It’s not uncommon for writers to go a year, two years, even longer without working in their chosen field. Doesn’t matter who you are. After William Goldman won his first Oscar, he didn’t work again for almost five years.
The royalties formula in books, and the residuals formula in tv/film, is all that allows writers to keep doing what they’re in the period when they’re *writing* and not *selling*. Take that away, and many of the works of literature and film that we’ve come to enjoy would not exist because the writers involved would not have been able to create them, they would’ve been forced to go out and seek employment elsewhere.
Prose writers have the authors’ guild or SFWA or other organizations that watchdog publishers and provide assistance and information on royalties, contracts, health insurance and the like.
TV/film writers have the WGA, which is a much more complex organization because the permutations and ways in which monies can be hidden, and by which revenue streams are delivered, are all massively more complex.There was a time, back in the 30s and 40s, when writers got nothing more than a script fee for their work, even though it might take a year or more to write that script. And a lot of talented writers fell by the wayside. The creation of the WGA changed that and brought into par with the prose writers whose royalties you would seem to feel are right and proper.
And those can’t be negotiated person-by-person because the studios see us as individually replaceable. Only collectively can there be any impact.
I’ve had my problems with the WGA over the years, some of them have become nearly legendary with the WGA. But if the WGA did not exist, there would be no way for most writers to survive doing what they love to do.
As to this coming labor action, when you go into the store next and buy a DVD and a book, look at the two of them and know that the author of the book gets a full
twelve to fifteen percent of the price…and the author of the DVD gets, *at most* four cents per DVD, and most of the time literally and absolutely *nothing* for it…and ask yourself, “Why the difference?”That’s the question at hand at the WGA as well.
