The last lines sum it up.
Get Me Rewrite
By ROB LONG
November 9, 2007; Page W13
Wall Street Journal
Los Angeles
The day before the Writers Guild of America -- the Hollywood scriptwriters' union, my union -- called a strike against the studios, networks and media conglomerates that employ its members, I had a pitch meeting at a big broadcast network.
It didn't go well. Of course, it really couldn't have gone well -- the strike threat was hanging over everything, and nobody in the room was really paying attention to the pitch. We were all half listening, half fingering our BlackBerrys, waiting for them to buzz with the latest news about the negotiations.
When the pitch wrapped up, I walked out to my car. Pulling into the space next to mine was an old friend, a guy I've known for almost 18 years, when we were both starting our careers in Hollywood. I went on to become a writer and producer of television comedy. He went on to become a producer and creator of reality television. So I was walking out of the network -- a dejected scriptwriter, about to go on strike -- and he was walking in, a successful reality producer, about to pitch a new, cheap-to-produce reality show.
Out with the pricey scripted, in with the el cheapo reality. Which is all you really need to know about the current state of the entertainment business and the nasty strike now unfolding between the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers.
Writers are like farmers: They're almost always complaining about something. And a lot of the bitterness of the current trouble comes from the vague, inchoate fury most writers harbor in Hollywood about where they are on the status tree (low) and how skinny their slice of the profit pie is -- less than four cents of the $19 purchase price of a DVD goes to the writer. In 2006, DVD and videocassette residual payments to WGA members totaled about $56 million. And in 2006, when CEO Tom Freston was fired from Viacom, he received a severance package of $60 million. So, obviously, that makes us mad.
Not only that, but TV shows are available on iTunes, clips are watched on YouTube, networks and studios are distributing advertiser-supported content all over the Web -- the ordered, stately revenue paths of just five years ago are becoming a chaotic maze. It's impossible, if you're a writer, not to know deep in your bones that you're about to get screwed. That the studios are going to lie about Internet advertising dollars. That your work is going to get run and re-run without compensation. That the value, ultimately, of your creative product is about to go zooming down at the same time the studios and networks are crowing to Wall Street about record profits.
Still, there's something off-putting about the self-dramatics from some of the striking writers. It's true that most of the guild is unemployed -- the median income of guild members is, according to WGA statistics, somewhere slightly north of $90,000. But it's impossible not to roll your eyes when you hear certain highly paid -- well, let's say it: insanely highly paid -- striking writers marching around with picket signs chanting, "Hey hey! Ho ho! Corporate greed has got to go!" And when the Los Angeles Times quoted an extremely well-compensated writer and producer of one of television's monster hits describing his somber conversation with his kids, telling them that Christmas is going to be different this year, because, you know, Daddy is fighting the good fight, it was hard not to throw up, just a little bit.
What the writers and the studios don't realize is that their squabble -- over DVD revenues and, especially, the money streams from new media, streaming video and Web-based downloads -- is a family fight. Those are the worst, most bitter kind, unfortunately, and they keep the parties from realizing that the real enemies are Guitar Hero 2 and Facebook, where a lot of people spend the time they used to spend watching "The King of Queens."
The disagreement between the writers and the producers centers entirely on the value of the reuse of creative material, and the battlefield is not new. The recording industry has already been here -- fighting with Napster and iTunes, trying to preserve a once-lucrative business model. It, by the way, lost. But like the recording industry before them, the studios and the writers keep trying to tweak an old system when what they should be doing is tossing it out and creating a fresh one.
Drive through the elegant, plush neighborhoods of Los Angeles -- and there are a lot of them -- or gaze at the sleek office buildings of Century City, Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, and you'll wonder how all of it gets paid for. Most movies don't make their money back. Most TV shows fail. Most scripts don't get bought; or if they do get bought, don't get made; or if they do get made, bomb. Hollywood is a business of splendid inefficiency. Fortunes are made in failure. Actors and writers get paid, agents and lawyers get their cut -- all based on the riskiest of business models: that somehow, some way, at some point, someone's going to make a hit movie or TV show that will shower the studio with money, pay for all of the failed projects and start the process over again.
Until now it's worked, but no longer. With the accelerating amount of Web-based distribution comes an alarming amount of Web-based efficiency. More targeted advertising. Pay-per-use. The ability to quickly send and easily store digital content. Distribution, in the entertainment business, used to mean exactly that: sending out tin cans of film reels to each theater, mailing master tapes to each TV station, sending a salesman to each market with a glossy brochure of entertainment product to sell.
Last month, I had lunch with a French friend of mine, a TV producer based in Paris. He had already seen most of the new American TV shows this season -- on iTunes. No distribution necessary. Foreign residual payments used to be pretty lucrative. Maybe, at $1.99 a show, they'll still be. It's impossible to know. One thing is certain, though: What's happening right now between Hollywood and the guild isn't a negotiation. It's a murder-suicide pact.
Today there are an awful lot of millionaires marching around in circles outside the studio gates. There are an awful lot of millionaires, for that matter, running around in circles inside the studio gates. It's easy to giggle at the bottled- water-and-Prius vibe of the strike. But if this thing isn't settled soon, if the old system isn't replaced, the ruthless lean-machine of the Web is going to strip away the gooey inefficiencies of our sweet business and suddenly, tragically, we're all going to get paid in the worst, most crushing way: We're going to get paid what we're worth, and then only in success.
And no one wants that.
Mr. Long is a writer and producer in Hollywood, and a WGA member for the past 17 years. |
