Dear Paul:
At 4 o’clock on Friday I was walking back to my office from the little Starbucks kiosk on the Paramount lot, and through every office window I could hear the same thing: CNBC reporting live from the press conference at the WGA headquarters, announcing that the strike had been averted. No lie: I actually heard a couple of whoops for joy and at least one audible sob of relief.
I’m not sure, though, that anyone was cheering the details of the agreement. (For one thing, the details hadn’t yet been announced.) I think what they were cheering was an agreement—any agreement—that meant a) work would continue on pilots, series, movies, etc.; and b) that the paychecks would keep coming too, to water the soil that grows the debt that most people around here seem to live with.
The dirty secret in Hollywood is that writers—in television, anyway—are often part of the management class, earning their money primarily as “producers,” which is a meaningless title but is best described as a kind of head writer/boss. Think Rob Petrie crossed with Mel Cooley. The career path of a TV writer leads directly to that job with a creepy name: “showrunner.” And showrunners—members of the WGA, every one of them—get paid HUGE money to create, produce, and administer large multimillion dollar enterprises. We hire other writers (and rewrite them at will), hire and fire directors, fight with the network, fight with the studio—the kind of thing that really isn’t discussed in these periodic contract negotiations.
Which is sort of the problem with the WGA as a whole. The members aren’t really tied together by any set of core shared interests—”respect” is an issue dear to a feature film writer’s heart; for a TV writer, who has an enormous amount of power and creative control, it’s kind of irrelevant—and so the negotiations tend to focus entirely on what we might call “free-lance TV writers’ concerns.”
Because if you’re on a writing staff of a TV show, you’re already getting paid a large per-episode fee for your work—negotiated by your agent—in addition to the money you get for writing a specific draft. All those people listed on the end-of-show crawl—the story editors, co-producers, script consultant, etc.—get a separate, largish salary to work on the staff. When they write a specific draft, though—one that despite subsequent rewrites and changes and edits has their name on it—they get something called “guild minimum,” somewhere around $18,000. When that episode is rerun the first couple of times, they get about 80 percent of that fee each time—what we call a “residual.” This is in addition to their regular salary. So, residuals aren’t even the gravy. They’re the gravy that we make out of the gravy. And for this we were going to strike? As my Episcopalian grandparents might say: “Oy!” Why so many of those people feel abused, and why so many of them make noisy, spittle-flying Waiting for Lefty-style speeches at WGA meetings is a mystery. To me, anyway.
But a free-lance TV writer lives and dies by those minimums. Without a staff salary to rely on, they eke out a living writing from show to show. But this isn’t a realistic career, really. It’s sort of like wanting to be a free-lance airline pilot. I mean, I guess you’ll get some work, but it will never be enough to build a secure future on—and certainly never enough to live reasonably well in the 310 area code. Not that that should be everyone’s dream, of course, but even if the WGA got everything it wanted in the recent negotiations, it would still be a bitch—and a nigh impossible bitch at that—to make a real living writing free-lance TV episodes.
The best way to help the greatest number of writers in Hollywood—showrunner, staff writer, free-lance, feature film, whatever—is to ensure that the current high level of production continues. More movies and series mean more writers employed more of the time. What bothered me so much about the prospect of a strike was how easily the members of the WGA accepted this incredibly prolific and beneficial atmosphere as a given, or worse, as a right. I mean, we now have six networks and six cable channels buying episodic programming, at least six other cable channels regularly making TV movies, mini-studios and independents making low-budget, script-driven movies—this is a great time to be a screenwriter! There is more work, more money, more of everything for the writer, compared to my first year in the guild, back in 1990. The coffers of the WGA are practically bursting with loot—the dues of a fat and prosperous membership of plutocrats disguised as working-class heroes. You wanna make some real money in this town? Start a tony private day school. Accept only the children of WGA members. Retire early.
A final word about the possessory credit: Yes, it’s a drag to see “A film by Rob Reiner” on a movie poster. (Actually, it’s a drag for a whole lot of reasons …) But it is an accurate depiction of the power grid for the feature film business—after all, it’s a director’s medium, as irritating as that is. The most important thing in the filmmaking process isn’t the script, it’s what happens on the set, as anyone who’s ever read a great script, then seen the awful movie made out of it can attest. (The opposite is also true: Sometimes a so-so script can be a pretty good movie.) If feature film writers want more power, they’re going to have to do what writers in television do: produce. Or better yet, direct.
Well, I’d better go. My assistant just brought me my tuna sandwich and caffeine-free Diet Coke for lunch. Like all writers, I find it easier to complain on a full stomach, it’s just that when your stomach is full, you have less to complain about.
Rob
