Some Notes about this Writers’ Strike

[nuncstans]

I am unable to follow what is actually happening in the Hollywood Writers’ Strike, if in fact that is actually addressed in any news source. Perhaps there is only, in fact, the same inane story angle everywhere, which appears to be the attempt to assuage the nightmares of vulnerable, frightened masses of TV zombies with the fact that shitty TV

Comments

[pomo_drunkard]

It's hard not to sympathize with the writers, since their basic point is: "When you get paid for the work we do, we would like to get paid as well."

And the studios' response to that is a collective, "Hmmmm, no, that doesn't work for us. Let us study ways in which we can pay you less, okay?"

[franzeska]

With a nice side helping of "But we're not making any money off of New Media, so we need a contract that gives you 0% of $0 instead of 3% of $0". The whole thing is just embarrassing.

I hate myself

[nuncstans]

See, you guys apparently understand what the writers' strike is actually about. My eyes just glaze over, and then I spend the time it would have taken to learn something and probably also get some work done to write about how I feel about not knowing it. In my defense against myself, I have a fever and I hate working.

Re: I hate myself

[franzeska]

Heh. Well, assuming you're actually confused about what's going on and not just kidding (or for anyone else just hearing about all this)...

As I understand it, it's actually pretty simple. It's just that the studios don't want to explain the fact that they're horribly greedy in terms that the public can understand.

In essence, a couple of decades ago, the writers negotiated an ok rate for syndication residuals and a very bad rate for video tapes. I assume they thought that this would be a sensible compromise since no one knew whether videos would make a lot of money. Then VCRs became a staple of American homes and the writers gnashed their teeth at being deprived of income. The bad video rate was later applied to DVDs.

Recently, tv shows have started to be shown online as a "promotion" (but notice that we're talking about full episodes with commercials and everything), sold on iTunes, shown on cellphones, etc. This business is small at present when compared to normal tv viewing, but the writers aren't getting paid at all for

[messy_hair_girl]

This morning I heard someone say that industry experts were all excited to see what viewing outlets people will turn to if all of television turns into re-runs. How dumb is that? I will tell them what we'll turn to -- Netflix, PBS and cool on-line stuff. This is exactly what giant piles of us are doing already now that "Two and a Half Men" is allegedly the number one comedy.

[pomo_drunkard]

I, for one, have been experimenting with books and the outdoors.

[messy_hair_girl]

Books! That's dangerous. It's like playing with matches. You might have ideas!

[constintina]

Don't you read Entertainment Weekly? Didn;t they explain it?

[nuncstans]

Yes! But seriously, I'm just dumb about this kind of thing. My eyes glaze over and my eyes keep reading but my brain starts thinking about where to eat. I can't even follow my own union's negotiations. I've been a union organizer and I can't process the details of these things; they bored me to tears. I'm only good at singing "This little light of mine" and marching in a circle, pointing out the flaws in institutional logic via dramatic historical analogies, and coming up with (to me) interesting ideas that always get vetoed, because today's agenda is the 3.4% increase versus the flat increase at two out of three campuses that will catch the sciences up over zzzzzzzz.......

[constintina]

But union negotiations are more interesting when they're about movies and the internet.

This is so funny because I was just wanking about how I felt like "public opinion" and "media" were more sympathetic to the writers this time around than they were to SAG like, a bunch of years ago, when they almost struck (striked?) over almost the same issues. As I recall, the core was royalties and downloading movies/TV shows and same thing, but it was like oh boo hoo, brad pitt wants more money in THE FUTUREZ when we DOWNLOAD tv wtf...it was alot more abstract then. Networks didn't stream shows, iTunes didn;t have TV and movies, pretty much the only tv/film downloading going on was serious nerds file sharing and whatnot...it was HARD to get a watchable movie on the internets. Also people think "actors" = people getting paid millions a movie, and obviously that's a tiny percentage. So people were resentful, and media stoked this with the same "what about that Michael Bay movie you were looking forward to? What about Friends? HOW WILL

[nuncstans]

Well I just keep reading the stories about it that come up in my headline news feed for the bbc and nyt and they all seem pretty scare-mongery, but then again maybe that's the only part that grabs my easily-fluctuating attention.