Guest Post By Thomas McKelvey Cleaver
[Editor’s Note: There’s been considerable interest this week in the Writer’s Guild strike. Carpetbagger regular Thomas McKelvey Cleaver offered to share some valuable insights on what the dispute is all about, and his helpful, detailed guest post is below. Morbo is off this week on a top secret mission. -CB]
I’d like to thank my friend Steve Benen for allowing this reluctant revolutionary the opportunity to attempt an explanation of the Writer’s Guild of America 2007 strike as best I can. For those of you who are our audience – the people who William Goldman once accurately termed The Ultimate Critics – you need to know this because the outcome will affect your life in ways that are different but no less profound than it will affect the lives of me, my friends, and our fellow screenwriters. As well as everyone else who works in our business.
First, a little background:
The cast of characters in this little play fall into two groups: the WGA, aka The Writers Guild of America, and the AMPTP, aka the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers. There are many synonyms for these latter folks; for now I personally prefer “the @#$%^%$#@#@!s on the other side of the desk.” It’s nice and generic and describes them all to a “T”. Of course, being a creative user of words and a veteran of the US Navy, I don’t use all those symbols for the many words I normally use to fill in that particular blank – none of which are fit to be printed here, inasmuch as The Carpetbagger Report is rated PG-13.
Writers are funny animals. Nobody in their right mind ever volunteers for the job assignment of “observer of life.” It’s the one you get when you’re seven years old and your hand-eye coordination is six months behind your contemporaries, so you don’t get chosen for the team out on the playground, and then you never get chosen again. And then you spend the rest of your life trying to figure that one out. Doing so involves much “observation of life,” which can result in you becoming a Writer. As a result of that event, many writers I know received many “does not work and play well with others” and “does not respond to properly constituted authority” marks on their school report cards over the years. This has everything to do with the nature of the conflicts between screenwriters and “the other side” over the past 78 years (ever since Hollywood created “Talkies” and discovered a need to put words in actor’s mouths).
I frequently tell the above to younger writers when I am trying to explain to them why they are writers; none of them ever like admitting there’s the slightest grain of truth there, and certainly none that would ever involve them – who wants to admit you were the uncoordinated dork who didn’t get chosen for the team?
Twenty years ago I had the privilege of a year long “grad seminar” in screenwriting that consisted of bi-weekly afternoon-long lunches with Billy Wilder at his office in Beverly Hills. Wilder was by then involuntarily retired from active film making but still had a lot to say – I’ve always suspected I got this gig because I was the only person he knew who hadn’t heard his stories ten times. When I told him this insight of mine, he replied it was indeed true, and that it was why “the bastards will never understand us.” (For Wilder, “bastard” was a synonym – among many far worse – for “studio executive.”) So like it or not, my fellow writers, a True Legend declared it’s true so it really must be.
The Writer’s Guild of America has a history of being the most cantankerous union in Hollywood – because it’s the Writer’s Guild (and because it’s full of the kind of people described above). A friend once explained the ecology of Hollywood thus: “Actors are people who hate themselves so much they want to be someone else. Directors are people who love themselves so much they want to be dictator of the world. Writers are people who are so pissed off at the world they want to create a new universe.” Writers are the only people in the creative process of making an show who start with Nothing and create Something – like it or not, everyone else is doing some variety of “et cetera,” and they don’t like admitting it (and I do not mean to belittle their contribution – when I see a good actor take my words and give them depth and meaning I wasn’t aware was there, words fail to describe how I feel in that moment, or how I feel when a director “gets it” and brings the page to life). They – particularly the “They” who live on the other side of the desk in all those story meetings – don’t want to recognize the role of the writer. Of course, with writers being the extremely socially-facile animals they are (not!), most of us can easily be seen by the others as some form of crank. As my friend and fellow writer Ken Levine noted in an article he wrote on the strike for the Toronto Star this past week in which he described the first strike in 1941 of the Screen Writers Guild:
Warner Brothers czar Jack Warner warned that any writer who joined the union would “find themselves out of work forever.” And he claimed this wasn’t blacklisting because “it would all be done over the telephone.” Darryl Zanuck of 20th Century Fox once shouted, “Throw that writer off the lot until I need him again!” Critic David Thomson says Hollywood writers are like divorce lawyers or private eyes. When you want them you have to have them, but later you despise them.
It is no wonder that the people who would take the lead in this fight are the writers. We can’t not do it. Standing up for the integrity of The Work is in our DNA – it is the one thing we can claim as ours.
I can tell you right off that I didn’t want this strike, and I don’t know anyone who did. “Bourgeois Bolsheviks” we aren’t. I went through the last one, at the outset of my career, and what I lost could never be made up. Had things turned out differently then, you wouldn’t know me just for having written the “cult classic” Roger Corman movie The Terror Within, and a certain screenplay I wrote back then wouldn’t be known today as “the best unproduced Vietnam screenplay in Hollywood.” Things would have been different. But I don’t regret that we made the fight. We had to, regardless of the outcome.
The studios, and their attack dogs in Righty Blogistan would have you believe this is all some sort of temper tantrum by a bunch of overpaid (damn lib’rul) whiny schmucks. The AMPTP pushed the “spoiled rich kids” story in 1988, and they’re doing it again. As with everything else the Right believes, this is wrong. (The Right is wrong! The Right is wrong!). Disney News (ABC) and General Electric News (NBC) and Viacom News (CBS) and Murdoch News (Fox) are flogging that one hard, but here’s the truth they want to ignore:
We’re a bunch of people who would like to not lose more ground than we already have, who would like to do what we love and get paid a fair recompense for our efforts.
Just as the Treaty of Versailles laid the groundwork for World War II, the end of the 1988 strike laid the base for this one. We struck then to get payments for the then-new videocassettes that would equal what we got in our other residuals.
We didn’t win. Not only did we not win, but the world we had lived in was destroyed before our eyes, and we couldn’t stop it. Before 1988, there were no “free options.” Writers who weren’t on the “A-list” got paid for developing their story ideas. Before 1988, the rules of the Minimum Basic Agreement were observed by everyone on both sides. No more. And when writers complained about this, they have found themselves not only unemployed but subsequently unemployable for being “difficult.” (Henry Fonda once said “they call you ‘difficult’ when you give a damn about what you do.”) The money paid to writers before 1988, that stopped after the strike when the system was ignored, didn’t disappear – you can find it today in the six-figure salaries paid to “development executives” two years out of college. And the money the studios said they couldn’t compute for videocassettes – and now DVDs – is more than equal to the income received from showing their movies in theaters.
My writing mentor, the late Wendell Mayes (look him up in the IMDb, he wrote some good movies), died in 1992 at age 78, six weeks after turning in the last screenplay he was hired to write. No writer I know today will ever likely have such a statement made about them. Now, at just about the time that one has observed enough life to actually have a clue what’s going on, at the point one has enough experience to finally be good at the job and able top get it right the first time, you’re declared “too old” to connect with the audience. “Too old” is defined as “over 40.” People I know in their late 30s will go to meetings and say nothing that will “date” them in the eyes of the 20-something development executive they’re meeting with. People are amazed that guys like me – who didn’t make them a bazillion dollars before we were 40 – even try to work, let alone find any. I personally know only five writers working today who I knew as fellow writers 20 years ago – they’re still good (one of them wrote The Elephant Man and got an Oscar nomination for it) but they don’t get much chance to do what they still can do, that they can do better than they used to.
In 1988 at the outset of the strike, the WGA announced – in an effort to prove we weren’t a bunch of greedy rich crybabies who wanted more more more – that the average union member earned $50,000 a year, a tidy sum but nowhere close to rich. That was arrived at by dividing all the money paid to union members by the membership, which at the time was 7,500. Recently, the guild tried that again, announcing that the average member made only $60,000. That’s a figure that doesn’t even keep up with inflation from the 20-year old number, but it’s even worse than that since the membership is now 10,000. Back then, 80% of the membership qualified for health insurance at any given time, meaning they had sold the equivalent of a 30-minute sitcom script in the previous 12 months – in those days $14,000. Today the majority of the membership does not qualify for a health plan that is a shadow of the old one, having not sold that 30-minute script in the previous 12 months – which today is $21,000 (not even twice the federal poverty level for a single adult).
There are indeed a number of characters in the script for this latest drama who can be labeled “Rich Greedy Bastards #1, #2, #3, #4, #5 and #6.” The WGA aren’t they. The reports in the media that the “average” TV writer makes $200,000 per year are as accurate as the reports that Hillary didn’t tip the waitress. Even the staff writers (less than 10 percent of the number of TV writers) are hard-pressed to hit those numbers.
This past week while the strike was breaking out, a writer friend of mine attended the American Film Market over in Santa Monica. This is an annual event where those who make what he called “the more proletarian product” go to sell their ideas, their projects, their shows, to foreign buyers. Today, the foreign market is at least 55% of the total market for American entertainment. Traditionally, AFM was a good place to go and get the final part of the financing for your project, once a domestic distributor had ponied up the 50% that was usual. You went there and sold territories, and raised the other 50%. My friend reports that, at this year’s AFM, that was hard to do.
The reason it was hard to do was because the domestic distributors (read: the membership of the AMPTP), as a condition of funding half the project, have been demanding the internet rights, as well as all rights forever to new media “now known or to be created,” from the people who want to make the movie or the show. For the foreign buyers, this destroys the value of the project – if it’s already been on the internet by the time they get their chance to distribute it, why spend money for something you can’t use? Those demands are in the contracts of everyone who writes a screenplay for anyone now. They’re in the contracts of every big studio movie any producer signs on to make. And the AMPTP claims no one has any idea of the value of this new media.
This. Is. Important.
This is what our strike is about. It’s about what kind of entertainment you are going to see and how you are going to see it for the rest of your life, and about how those who create your entertainment are to be recompensed for their creativity.
I remember ten years ago when I first got on the net. It was all dial-up, and graphics were a Big Problem – they took forever to download and they looked worse than an over-cranked silent movie. Today, with computers that have 1.7+ gig processors, 600+ MB of RAM and 40+ gig hard drives, you can watch animated graphics that are light years from what you could see three years ago. Today you can go to your local home electronics emporium and buy a big screen plasma TV. Ten years ago, big-screen TVs were enlarged regular TVs that delivered a picture that looked like crap, like a photo blown up to the point where the grain of the film got in the way. Today, with HD, those big-screen TVs give a better picture than the 10 year old small-screen TV that dominates the living room here at Le Chateau du Chat. Not only that, but they cost one-third what the bad old sets cost, and their prices are headed downward.
Within the next ten years – likely within the next five – you will download whatever show you want to see directly from the internet to the wall-size big-screen TV in your living room. Those providers who don’t recognize this will not exist then.
As Ken Levine put it at his blog:
I got a check recently from American Airlines. A royalty check. For the past several years as part of their “in-flight entertainment”American Airlines has been showing episodes of Cheers, M*A*S*H and Becker that I wrote along with episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond, Frasier and Dharma & Greg that I directed. Considering the number of flights and years I’d estimate they’ve shown my shows 10,000 times. My compensation for that: $0.19. That’s right –– 19 cents. I figure at that rate, in 147 years I’ll be able to buy one of their snack boxes.
An episode of Frasier I wrote is out on DVD. I make nothing. The script is included in a book. I make zilch. Soon you’ll be able to download and watch it on your iPod or iPhone at IHOP. The only one who won’t make money is “I”.
Are you sensing a pattern?
The Writers Guild of America is asking the mega-corporations that own the entertainment industry in America and the galaxy to compensate its members fairly for this highly desired product they create. Just a piece, that’s all. More than nothing. And without sounding greedy, more than nineteen cents.
Via-Uni-Time-Corps-Ney would rather have a strike.
The studios could generate about $158 million from selling movies online and about $194 million from selling TV shows over the Web. So you can see why paying writers even a small royalty would financially destroy them.
And forget syndication. Networks aren’t even rerunning primetime hits. Writers could always count on a nice residual from a second network run but now popular shows like 24 and LOST go straight to the net and don’t even get a rerun.
The producers say we already receive royalties from DVD sales. There are no less than fifteen box sets of TV series with my scripts in them. I haven’t received a dime.
“They” may have it not as easy as they thought.
The Showrunners have done a gut-check and have remembered they are Writers first. What’s a showrunner? They’ re the folks who create the shows you watch. Their creative vision makes the show the show you want to watch. They choose the directors, the cinematographers, the casts, they supervise the editing. For you political types here, as an example of how important a showrunner and his or her vision is, consider the difference between the first seasons of “The West Wing” when it was run by its original creator Aaron Sorkin, and the final seasons that were run by John Wells. Both good. Both very different. That’s what a showrunner is.
This past weekend, showrunner Tim Kring left “Heroes.” General Electric TV (NBC) wanted him to remove storylines that could not be wrapped up in the existing episodes that are now being finished. Before “Heroes’ became the most original show on network television last year, Tim Kring was “Tim Who?” outside of a circle of people in Hollywood. It’s his baby. He gave his heart and soul to create it and get it on the air. And he’s leaving it.
Last Sunday, Shawn Ryan, creator of The Shield and The Unit published this:
“As you all know by now, we are on Strike. It’s sad that we have arrived here and I don’t know each and every one of your opinions, but I wanted to share my personal plans for what I intend to do until we have a fair contract.
I am currently quoted in today’s Hollywood Reporter as saying that I will do some producing work, but won’t do any editing as I consider that to be writing. While I said something similar to that earlier last week (I’ve learned you can’t trust a word of what these trades report), that was before I went to the Showrunners Meeting yesterday and became very crystalized in what I need to do. Like many of you I have spent the last week contemplating what to do in case of a strike. What are my responsibilities to my writers, my cast, my crew, my network and my contract? How do I balance these various concerns?
At the Showrunners Meeting it became very clear to me that the only thing I can do as a showrunner is to do nothing. I obviously will not write on my shows. But I also will not edit, I will not cast, I will not look at location photos, I will not get on the phone with the network and studio, I will not prep directors, I will not review mixes. These are all acts that are about the writing of the show or protecting the writing of the show, and as such, I will not participate in them. I will also not ask any of my writer/producers to do any of these things for me, so that they get done, but I can save face.
I will not go into the office and I will not do any work at home. I will be on the picket line or I will be working with the Negotiating Committee. I will not have an AVID sent to my house, or to a new office so that I can do work on my show and act as if it is all right because I’m not crossing any picket lines.
I truly believe that the best and fastest way to a good contract is to hit these companies early, to hit them hard and to deprive them of ALL the work we do on their behalf.
How do we ask our staff writers to go out on strike as we continue collecting producer checks? How do we ask the Teamsters to respect our picket lines if we won’t ourselves or if we’re sneaking around to do the work off-site?
Just so you all know what I am prepared to give up…
Tomorrow, we begin to film the Series Finale of The Shield. I think it’s the best script our writing staff has ever written. This is the show that made me. This is the show that is my baby. If the strike goes on longer than two weeks, I won’t be able to step on set for the final episode of the show. I won’t have a writer on set, as I have had on every episode since the fourth episode. I won’t be able to edit this final culminating episode. I won’t go to the wrap party that Fox TV and FX are paying for. You can’t tell me that any episode of television is more important than this one is to me, and I am ready to forego all those things in order to strengthen my union.
Tomorrow, we begin filming a new pilot, “The Oaks,” that I am Executive Producing. It’s an amazing script that David Schulner wrote and I signed up to help him make this show. Until we have a fair deal I cannot do that now and it kills me.
We are currently filming Season 3 of “The Unit,” a show that does fairly well, but against House and Dancing With The Stars, usually finishes in 3rd place. We have no guarantee that we will back for a 4th season. I just gave a director friend of mine his first TV directing gig. I’d like to see him succeed. He’ll have to finish the show on his own now without a writer on set, or my help in the editing room.
Some people have made the argument that if they don’t do this producing work or this editing, that someone else will do it, and this act won’t hurt the companies. I respectfully disagree. If we ALL stop ALL work tomorrow, the impact of this strike will be felt much more quickly, much more acutely and it most likely will end sooner, putting our writers, our cast and our crews back to work sooner!
I spent nearly 12 hours today in the Negotiation Room with the companies. I watched our side desperately try to make a deal. We gave up our request to increase revenue on DVD’s, something that was very painful to give up, but something we felt we had to in order to get a deal made in new media, which is our future.
I watched as the company’s representatives treated us horrendously, disrespectfully, and then walked out on us at 9:30 and then lied to the trades, claiming we had broken off negotiations.
I can’t in good conscience fight these bastards with one hand, while operating an AVID with the other. I am on strike and I am not working for them. PERIOD.
You will use your own instincts and consciences to decide your own actions.”
It was reported on Monday that Fox was preparing to sue Ryan for Breach of Contract.
On Tuesday, the major studios stated that they were canceling the contracts of all the major writer-producers they had deals with, throwing them out of their offices and putting their staffs on the unemployment line. They said they would sue every showrunner who acted as Ryan had.
On Wednesday, all the working showrunners in television stood in front of the Disney studio in Burbank and publicly stated they would not work on their shows, that they would take the same stance Ryan had.
By the first week in December, there will be no new shows on network television. On cable TV, forget watching the final season of The Shield or Battlestar Galactica.
On Thursday, a leader of the AMPTP was quoted as saying that the WGA strike would have “no effect” on the quarterly reports of the corporations that own the major Hollywood studios.
Bullshit.
There are now no “November sweeps” for the networks to use in tallying their viewership to set their advertising rates. If this goes on another three weeks, there will be no February sweeps. The strike could go on to June, which means there would be no May sweeps.
The Masters of the Universe who run these intergalactic corporations may indeed think we’re “schmucks with laptops” (Jack Warner famously called screenwriters “schmucks with Underwoods”), but ultimately they answer to big institutional investors who don’t give a damn. They want their money and they don’t like losing it. Whether these folks go to synagogue on Friday night or church on Sunday morning, they all worship The One True God, and His Name is Mammon.
As Bob Dylan once said, “money doesn’t talk, it swears.”
This past week a lot of people who aren’t in the business have asked me what they can do to support the strike. It’s really simple, folks:
Turn off your TV. Don’t watch a damn thing. Kill their ratings (most particularly Fox, since Rupert Murdoch is the Dark Lord pushing all this so far). Turn off their money spigot.
They’ll get the message.
Thank you for your support.