Your Monday Morning Reading

FIRST OF ALL, John August has a very clear, very straightforward take on "Why Writers Get Residuals." I'm not even going to excerpt any of it. You just need to go and read the whole thing now. We'll wait.

Okay. That was good, huh?

Secondly, House writer Doris Egan has a lovely long essay up about writing in Hollywood today:

There is one place left in the world where some writers can make a decent living, some of the time. That place is Hollywood, California, and the Hollywoodesque enclaves of film and TV around the world.

It hasn't always been easy. Bob Carroll and Madelyn Pugh wrote the first four seasons of I Love Lucy. As you read this, that show is playing somewhere in the world, but Carroll and Pugh never saw a dime of residuals from the huge amount of money their scripts made. That money still rains down today on a huge conglomerate, where no one in the executive offices has any connection whatsoever with the series, let alone contributed to its success. It's simply free money for them, forever and ever. This is one reason I would go back in a time machine and stop Hollywood writers from giving up copyright, for with copyright went respect and fair treatment; but you can never wrestle from the hands of a corporation that which they now believe is theirs. Carroll kidded an interviewer, before he died at the age of 87: "If I had residuals, would I be here?" But this was a business where Jack Benny didn't give his writers credits on his show, because it was believed the audience thought actors and comedians made everything up on the spot. It was a business where, one ancient director told me, when a movie stopped for the night, the crew could be locked up in a barn till daylight.

A lot of people went through hard times getting the WGA and IATSE and the other unions together, and putting an end to horror stories like that. The horror stories now are coming from a different angle: from the age of giant conglomerates. The AMPTP is often referred to as "the producers," but they are not. They are huge corporations which own many different things. And the executives the Guild is striking against are not the executives we work with on films and TV shows. This all basically comes down to six CEOs and a corporate culture that seeks to maximize profit as though those profits did not emanate from people actually making things. There is a big disconnect between the people doing the making and the ones keeping the books, and there's little incentive to run things reasonably in a world where the salary of a single CEO surpasses the entire amount of DVD residuals paid to the entire Guild. And where none of these companies will open their books so their accounting can be examined.

The companies are both answerable to no one and wildly bloated; it's not unusual, in launching a TV show, to get notes from twelve or more executives, some of which are mutually contradictory, but all of which must be obeyed. (There was a day when notes were few, and left to the discretion of the executive producer. That day is no more.) The result, as I have personally witnessed, is often incoherence. Then too, when twelve or more people read something, anything non-generic will "bump" one of them. This is a simple statistical fact, not a reflection on the executives involved -- give a script to any twelve people, including other writers, and the results will be the same. It won't be the same person bumped each time; but by the time your script is ready to shoot, it will have been smoothed down, like a rock under a waterfall, till all that's left is what's expected. (And yet, it's still incoherent. This is not an easy result to achieve: it takes the work of many people.) I'm lucky in that I work on a show that's up and running, whose executives go out of their way to give us space to create, and trust that our mistakes will mostly be small ones. But after ten years in this business, I can tell you that it's by no means something you can count on. The structure of this contraption is just too unwieldy.

Here's something else you should know: writers are not famous for their self-esteem. I'm sure there must be some out there with a sense of entitlement, but I haven't met them. I have never heard a discussion of salary, on any show, that didn't have writers pointing to average compensation across the country and saying we were lucky people, at least this year. (Just as I've never heard writers discuss actors and casting without sympathy for what the actors go through.) Writers are very, very aware of what the world is like -- what's more, we tend to be vaguely grateful to be paid at all, because it's for writing, and we've been beaten down by the world to think that isn't a serious and valuable thing. (By the way, I'm not at all sure this understanding goes up to the CEO's office; how can it, when that CEO can be handed sixty million dollars just for quitting? Someday I must tell you the story of the famous exec who said, "Why not make this character middle-class? Let's say he makes $300,000 a year -- " and the writers all stared at him.)

Egan points out something that you should remember, and remember well. All of the unreasonable money we're talking about here, the total money it would cost to give writers what they're asking for on DVD and the Internet, is less than the salary of one of the six CEO's of the mega-conglomerates who have forced this strike. One salary, or an entire community of creative professionals who get to be middle class and who create things you love.

What will it take to embarrass the Peter Chernins et al to do the right thing? Are they capable of shame anymore?

(H/T to DeeKay for the links)