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Why Newspapers Love the Striking ScreenwritersFor the same reason journalists love themselves.

By Jack Shafer
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2007, at 6:13 PM ET
Writers guild of America on strike. Click image to expand.

Don't pity the poor pitiful striking screenwriters—let the major daily newspapers do it for you.

Perhaps not since the air traffic controllers' strike of 1981 has the big press lavished such intense and generally sympathetic coverage on a labor dispute. Both the Washington Post ("it hasn't been easy for movie writers") and the New York Times ("my greed is fair and reasonable") have run op-eds by screenwriters demanding that the entertainment industry compensate Writers Guild of America members for digital use of their work on the Web, iPods, cell phones, etc., the sticking point of this strike.

In the opinion pages of the Los Angeles Times, writer-producer Marshall Herskovitz lectures about how corporate domination of Hollywood inconveniences him, and a nonscreenwriter laments the powerlessness of today's scribes ("there is nothing without the writer").

The news pages of these dailies likewise abound with supportive accounts of the strikers' plight. No story goes so far as to declare solidarity with the strikers, because it doesn't have to. The saturation coverage says it for them.

Given the number of stories it has run on the clash, the Los Angeles Times must think the Writers Guild strike is to it as Hurricane Katrina was to the Times-Picayune. Even before the strike, the paper was running a weekly column about the craft of writing for movies called "Scriptland."

In its desperation to find a new angle on the strike, the Times reports in its Nov. 9 edition that "The writers strike has all but cleared out L.A.'s coffee shops and other havens for Hollywood's laptop jockeys." Did the Reuther brothers win such slavish treatment from the Detroit dailies when they established the United Auto Workers? Also in peril, the piece reports, is "the Office," a Santa Monica joint that rents out space to screenwriters. "If the strike keeps up, I could lose my business," said Office owner Aleks Horvat, over the telephone. "After all, I am a luxury, not a necessity." Oh, the tragedy!

Besides coffee shops, motion pictures, and TV dramas, soap operas are threatened, too, the Times reports. For the complete overview of the paper's work, explore the gigabytes of data clogging its "The Strike Zone" Web page. There you'll find three "PostScript" columns about the strike filed by screenwriter Peter Tolan. (At least one of them has made it into the paper.) Tolan predictably sketches the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers as the villains and the Writers Guild of America as the victims. "[The AMPTP] lie every time they use the word 'negotiate,' because they haven't done it," he writes in the standard unionese that wouldn't be out of place in a plumbers' union newsletter.

Over at the New York Times, we learn that some of the screenwriters who don't live in Los Feliz mansions reside in third-floor Brooklyn walk-ups. But the Times' Mr. Walk-Up, a struggling former staff writer on HBO's Oz, maintains as much writerly pride in his craft as does Robert Towne. "To have your work go into living rooms and reach millions is a thrill that you never get tired of," Bradford Winters tells the newspaper.

The Ocala Star-Banner matches the Times story by locating its own native son, who has made it big writing in Hollywood. "We are paid well, but, at the end of the day, this is an industry where people are often unemployed. There's no job security," Brad Copeland tells the Star-Banner. "But the reality is, if you look at all the writers in the union, a lot of them are unemployed."

Why the journalistic fixation on the strike? The national impact of the strike (even a lengthy one) won't be great. But dailies such as the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, whose bottom lines depend on movie advertising acreage, will feel the pain if Hollywood closes shop.

Newspaper reporters tend to identify with their cinematic brethren because writers tend to look out for other writers no matter what genre they work in. One New York Times article from this week noted with no irony how book authors will suffer if Steven Colbert and Jon Stewart's shows, now crippled by the strike, don't get back into production soon. Also, from a distance, the Writers Guild strike shimmers with heroism for liberal journalists at the Los Angeles Times (which has no union) and the New York Times and Washington Post (which have weakling unions). They're living vicariously through their comrades' glorious struggle.

This identification runs deeper than labor politics. Where their predecessors once hoped to write the Great American Novel, too many of today's newspaper reporters and editors will confide over drinks the big screenplay they want to write based on that murder story they covered, that business takeover, that guerilla battle, that crime caper, that city hall corruption saga, and so on.

Some of them have even been contacted by Hollywood at some point in their careers about the stories they've written, and keep copies of one of Syd Field's screenwriting guides on their desks at home. They daydream of joining Nora Ephron, Paul Attanasio, William Broyles Jr., Cameron Crowe, Joe Eszterhas, David Simon, David Mills, Aaron Latham, or even Peter Landesman as journalist-screenwriter hyphenates.

For the daydreamers, writing about the strike is pure fantasy league.

Addendum, Nov. 14: Dan Akst adds Paul D. Zimmerman and Kurt Luedtke to the list of journos turned screenwriters. Allow me to add Jay Cocks.

Addendum, Nov. 15: Silicon Alley Insider Managing Editor Peter Kafka directs my attention to his publication's tough love for the striking screenwriters: "Hollywood Writer: Screw SAI, The Web Looks Great!," "Er, "Go Writers!": The Role of Unions in a Competitive World," "Another Writers' Strike? (CBS) Why No One Has Sympathy," and "Hollywood Writers' Strike Explained: $7.2 M Apart On Digital." Alex Parker adds Roger Ebert to the list of journalists turned screenwriters. David Samuels does the same for William Monahan.

******

Kim Masters and Troy Patterson, who have nothing in the way of an IMDB profile, have written about the strike for Slate. Defiant (and successful!) whore Neal Pollack is another issue altogether. Why should screenwriters participate in Web revenues, anyway? Brooks Barnes explains in an August New York Times news story that it's a historical accident that residuals exist in the first place. Did I miss any important contemporary journalist-screenwriters in my list? Send nominations to . (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum, in a future article, or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

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Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.
Photograph of striking writers by David McNew/Getty Images.
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Remarks from the Fray:

While Shafer notes a truism about the secret aspirations of journalists, he might have done well to research the coverage from Hollywood trade publications and insider blogs. Many of the striking writers have expressed consternation at what they consider to be a favorable view of the AMPTP—not the WGA or writers--by publications such as Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. They've complained about the publications' slant in favor of the AMPTP, citing the publishers' fear of losing the studio's large ad revenue as to reason why they willingly have published and not challenged their press releases and statements. Valid or not, the atmosphere in the press has hardly been one of unanimous support.

--cedmunds

(To reply, click here.)

Maybe the print coverage of the strike has been excessive and "unbalanced" but it's worth viewing things from the proper perspective. When you look to the core of this issue the writers have a very simple, straightforward, and reasonable claim, if someone is making money off work that they did then they would like to be compensated for it. The networks and studios do not think the writers deserve a piece of the money that their work generates. Part of the reason that the coverage of the writers has been so one sided is that when you strip this argument down to its essence, the studio's claims are repugnant.

Almost all of the arguments I have read against the writer's guild seem to draw on a couple of key ideas, all rooted in emotion. Most often repeated is the assertion that the writers are whiny rich crybabies. Boiled down to its essence this argument goes something like "Some people dig ditches, go cry me a river." Well fair enough, but right or wrong a lot of people in our society consume the work that the writers produce, and as such that work generates vast amounts of money. You may not think the work is particularly important, but it is work and more to the point that work is making someone rich. The writer's are asking for a fraction, literally a small fraction, of the wealth generated by their work, and it's worth noting that writing for TV and movies is a specialized skill that not too many people in America are able to do. It's easy to rail against TV and Movies and say they are awful, but writing even bad television takes skills that most people in America simply don't have. Again, that might not be very meaningful if not for the fact that TV and movies make so much money, and so absent of all other considerations this dispute comes down to a question of paying the writers a fair cut of what their work generates.

What irritates me the most about this article is that it seems to be built on the premise that the coverage of the strike is unwarranted because this stuff just isn't that important. By making this argument in concert with the idea that the writers are a bunch of over privileged children Jack Shafer pulls off the impressive trick of being a culturally elitist snob while at the same time showing a simple minded, stereotype driven, prejudice against cultural elites. Like it or not our society cares a lot about its entertainment, and mass coverage of the entertainment industry is here to stay. If that is a given I think that we should be grateful that the coverage of the industry right now is focused on a major labor dispute rather than on Britney Spears and her lack of underwear, because in spite of what Shafer says this dispute is going to have some serious repercussions for most Americans whether they know it or not and it is important.

Shafer may not like it, but Americans watch a lot of TV and movies, and anything with the cultural and economic impact that these mediums have is worthy of a lot of attention. Additionally, film and television are one of America's most culturally and economically significant exports. So it's fine to say, "this is just about TV and movies" but consider for a moment what that really means.

Even if you are unmoved by the cultural significance of TV and film you should still care about the writer's strike because of the economics. California's economy is, in large part, built on the TV and movie business, and it is already being affected. Thousands upon thousands of people are already out of work in Los Angeles and that is going to hit the economy in a very bad way. As new film and television shows dry up there will be a ripple effect that will spread across the country, and if you think it won't effect you just because you don't like TV and movies that much then you have your head in the sand.

Even more importantly, though, the writer's strike is important because it is going to be a test of whether or not we as American workers are going to be able to stand up for ourselves against the sprawling cooperate machines that will inevitably take over the world of work in the US. This is going to happen, it is inevitable, and the writer's strike offers us a window into how we all might be able to fare as corporate interests continue to dominate our professional lives. I'm not calling the writer's heroes or anything, (they aren't ditch diggers after all) but their fight is important precisely because they are part of the "cultural elite." If these people can't get a fair shake from the corporate interests they work for then none of us can. Believe it.

--mattcable

(To reply, click here.)

(11/17)

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