11.01.07

Video killed Jimmy Hoffa

Posted by 3 at 10:53 pm in media, Domestic Abuse

So, as many of you are likely to know by now, the Writer’s Guild of America will go on strike. What does this mean? Well, for starters, any TV shows you may enjoy that employ WGA writers, will start dropping into reruns; talk shows and topical comedy routines will go first, as they’re largely written the day before they air, so no more Letterman, Conan, Daily Show, Colbert Report, etc. If it continues, the start of midseason shows like Lost, 24, Battlestar etc will likely be delayed, and shows currently in production will run out of written scripts and likely move into hiatus, or worse, start airing sub-par episodes which have not had substantial amount of editing done to their drafts.

 But other than that, what’s the big fucking deal?

Okay, everyone knows about trade unions, right? These valuable organizations help determine base wages and working hours for valuable jobs such as construction workers, teachers, and other constructive members of society. They help provide a buffer between raw supply and demand and people getting screwed by overzealous market executives trying to cut as many costs as humanly possible. The concept, however, begins to break down as we move into less concrete professions, such as writing for movies and television.

Back when VHS was still a very new thing, the WGA and the AMPTP (Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers) got into a rather notable spat. A collective bargaining agreement was drawn up that would give the WGA royalties from home video sales, albeit a somewhat disproportionately small sum. Back at the time, however, VHS tapes were expensive, hard to produce, and people generally didn’t like them because a single season of a show like Dallas would basically eat up an entire shelf’s worth of storage space. So, after an absolutely terrible season of Star Trek, the WGA and the AMPTP made up and everything was peachy.

But then DVDs came along, and completely changed the way we think of the concept of home videos; now there was a small, affordable medium which could be used to store entire runs of shows, and now millions of people are buying them. But because of the CBA written back in the era of the VCR, DVDs ended up being lumped into the same category as home videos, so now the writers are being paid the same disproportionately low royalties. Naturally, the WGA thinks they’re getting screwed, but because the CBA was still going, they couldn’t risk a strike.

However, the CBA expired yesterday, and with the advent of not just DVDs but streaming media and other new methods of internet distribution have basically given the WGA new reasons to renegotiate the royalties. And until they can make up with the AMPTP again, people aren’t going to be writing for the big or small screen for quite some time.

And that’s where the problem lies, because being a member of the WGA requires that you participate in the strike. That means, for the duration of the strike, if you’re a screenwriter, you’re basically unemployed. No network executive that was lucid would dream of paying anyone for doing nothing, but going independent or crossing the picket line to write during the strike makes you a scab, and that essentially fucks you out of a job the minute the strike is over. If the WGA found out you were scabbing, you’d be blacklisted, and would never be able to get a guild job again. To top it off, any network or studio that employed scabs would lose whatever WGA contracts they had, or whatever chance they had at getting one in the first place.

Now this is pretty fucking stupid for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that writing for entertainment is pretty low on the “necessary jobs for the progression of a stable society” list. Unions make sense because they keep factory workers from being raped by greedy executives, and detached boardrooms, but it’s a little harder to determine the relative worth of a profession as abstract as screenwriting. I can see where both sides are coming from, but I can also see where both sides are just being fucking stupid, so let’s point them out, shall we?

The WGA doesn’t seem to realize that essentially throwing thousands of people out of their jobs isn’t exactly one of the greatest tactics to use against the media juggernaut. While networks and studios will feel the crunch, their immediate response is still to make the most profit out of what they have, so renegotiation is probably an option that sits comfortably next to “the next hit reality show that conveniently doesn’t need fucking writers,” so in a worst case scenario, you’d have thousands of unemployed writers, and The Next Hit Reality Show That Conveniently Doesn’t Need Fucking Writers airing 8-11 every goddamn day (Who Wants to Marry a Kid Nation?) In the long run, unemployed writers trying to feed their kids aren’t really that big of a deal to network fat cats who don’t have good writers and yet are still stupefyingly wealthy.

Not to say that studio execs are any better at paying writers fairly, but treating Hollywood like some kind of unionized essential labor industry is just fucking stupid from both perspectives. In the end, the WGA strike combined with the collective retardation of the AMPTP is not only fucking guild writers who can’t get a job without forgoing their entire career, but is also screwing opportunistic independent writers and studios who will only get stamped into a fine powder by either money-grubbing executives or the vengeful WGA.

There is a bright side to all of this: if the studios do take the idiotic route and go all reality-TV on us, it might herald the beginning of the end for broadcast television and the heralding of a new age of direct media distribution through the internet.

Which is both an absolutely chilling thought for me, and also ironically the cause of the strike in the first place.

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