EDIT: STRIKE AVERTED! YAYYYYYYY!
When you look at the impending writer’s strike, this is what you see. An industry making 51 billion dollars while many writers are struggling to pay their monthly rent. At first glance, that doesn’t seem fair. But I also know numbers can be deceiving. 51 billion isn’t the profit margin. It’s the revenue. Let’s not forget how much money goes into prep and production and expenses and advertising. And let’s not forget all the TV shows and movies that fail, costing studios billions of dollars (hits pay for misses). 51 billion dollars is a big number. But it doesn’t tell the whole story.
Also, the writers have to see the studios’ side. If the studios paid everybody – actors, directors, above-the-line, below-the-line – what they wanted, there wouldn’t be any studios left. They’d all be bankrupt. There has to be some acknowledgement that these people are running a business and nobody’s in business to break even.
We also need to take into account perspective. We tend to see problems the way they relate to us and us only. Writers, obviously, feel like they’re vastly underpaid. But it’s not like we’re perfect. Tell me how you’d feel if you just paid an A-list writer a million dollars and they turned in a shitty draft, forcing you to hire another A-list writer with another million dollar quote. I’m assuming you’d feel like you just got screwed. And that happens all the time.
Look no further than Michael Jordan for a lesson on perspective. As a player, he routinely complained about how cheap his owner, Jerry Reinsdorf, was. Jordan’s team was winning Reinsdorf championships yet Reinsdorf was notoriously stingy during negotiations. It infuriated Jordan. Now that Jordan himself owns a team, he’s known as one of the thriftiest owners in the league, eschewing big contracts for his players and, yes, being notoriously stingy during negotiations. The ceiling is the roof.
Perspective is important because unless you understand the other person’s side, you’re convinced you’re getting screwed, and that’s what turns negotiations personal, which is how these things spiral out of control and everyone loses money, or worse. I’ll never forget when a writer told me during the last strike that his friend, who was also a writer and had a mortgage, a wife, and three kids, was thinking of committing suicide. After that moment, I started seeing the strike from a completely different perspective.
With all this said, there’s no question that writers are underpaid. In fact, they’re vastly underpaid. And it’s something I’ve never understood. Without writers, THERE WOULD BE NO ENTERTAINMENT!!!!!! There would be no Star Wars. There would be no Breaking Bad or Sopranos. There would be no Guardians of the Galaxy 2 this weekend. There wouldn’t even be reality TV shows. How is it that the people who give life to every film and TV show are so undervalued? Not to mention, hundreds of people become employed every time a writer writes a good script.
The answer to this question may be that writing is the least visual of all the processes in the medium.
You can watch an actor create a great performance right in front of your eyes. You can see a director organize and block a scene. You can see the cinematographer frame a shot, the gaffer put the lights in place, and the audio guy mic up the talent. But nobody sees a writer write. And if you can’t see something, is it real? If a tree falls in a forest…?
It’s why, whether you like their writing or not, people like Max Landis, Damon Lindelof, Diablo Cody, and (going old school here) Joe Eszterhas, are important to the writing industry, because it reminds the industry that we’re here. Writers are real. I would love for more screenwriters to market themselves in this digital “look at me” age. It’s not a ridiculous proposition. Legendary writers like Truman Capote and Ernest Hemingway were masters at marketing themselves. As is Stephen King today. We need to be visible because out of sight = out of mind.
It doesn’t help that everybody thinks they can do the writer’s job better than the writer. You hear a bad line in a movie and you say, “I can do better than that.” And based on that one bad line, or one bad scene, you’re convinced that you’d do a better job screenwriting than the professionals. That ignorance isn’t limited to the average audience member. The majority of people in production feel the same way.
None of these people realize just how much goes into writing. That it isn’t a line that defines a story, but the 385 choices made that lead up to that line. Look at a show like Breaking Bad. What the average person doesn’t know is that Vince Gilligan’s choice to build the entire story around a dramatically ironic premise (Walter White keeping his meth business a secret) ensured that three seasons down the line, when they had to shoot a quiet family dinner scene, that scene would still have tension and suspense, since Walter is lying to his family every moment he’s with them.
Someone who doesn’t understand screenwriting would NEVER think of that. But this is what screenwriters do. This is what we bring to the table. Knowledge of story, structure, characters, conflict, suspense, theme, dialogue and a million other things! We may not always hit it out of the park, but I guarantee you we’ll do it more than Joe Moviegoer.
We are in an age where screenwriting is more important than ever. On the feature side, instant social media reaction has eliminated the scam of fleecing audiences on opening weekend and riding that box office buzz to a respectable take. The social media rejection of films like Fantastic Four, The Great Wall, Pan, Now You See Me 2, The BFG, Ghost in the Shell, Ben-Hur, and many others, prove that.
On the TV end, what was once being heralded as the golden age of television has now become one of the most competitive arenas in business. There is so much content that the only way to stand out is excellent writing. It’s why shows like Mr. Robot, Fargo, Big Little Lies, 13 Reasons Why, Westworld, Atlanta, The Americans, to name a few, have found success. Great writing. If the people writing these shows can barely pay their monthly expenses, it’s only so long before they move on to something that does pay.
What the writers are asking for isn’t much. They’re asking for more than 1 step deals on the feature side, not to be held hostage all year for a short TV series, and, finally, a better health care package. Nobody’s asking for 5% of the gross of Fast and the Furious 9. I feel like this is totally doable. And I hope it gets done by the end of the day. Because strikes are unpredictable. For us to be a couple of months down the line with no deal in sight would be a tragedy.
Let’s get this thing done today!
