Eclectic Views

    

Wondering what's up with the Hollywood writers' strike? Then join us for a
conversation with Guild member Howard A. Rodman, a screenwriter who's out
there walking the picket lines, and writer/author W. James Au, host of The
WELL's Screenwriters conference.
  

    
We're very pleased to open this forum with Howard Rodman, (rodman) on
the WELL, to offer his insights on the WGA strike.  But first, a short
introduction which should also explain why Howard's so uniquely suited
to discuss that topic:

A working screenwriter with a vast and varied career, Howard's
projects include a rewrite for *Takedown*, from the Miramax adaptation
of the Tsotumo Shimomura/John Markoff book that involves a famous hack
attempt on the WELL, and an adaptation of the Joseph Mitchell book,
*Joe Gould's Secret* starring Stanley Tucci, Ian Holm, Hope Davis,
Steve Martin, and Susan Sarandon.  

More recently, he's the writer of the upcoming *Savage Grace*, a
dramatization of the Barbara Daly Baekeland murder case, starring
Julianne Moore.  He is professor and former chair of the writing
division at the USC School of Cinematic Arts; a member of the board of
directors of the Writers Guild of America, west; and an artistic
director of the Sundance Institute Screenwriting Labs.  He's also
a regular contributor to the Huffington Post:  this link
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/howard-a-rodman> has a list of posts,
and a more extensive biography.
  

    
To launch things off, Howard, maybe it would help if we talk about the
strike in the language of Hollywood:  What's the strike's high
concept, and where is it in development now?  I.E., please give us a
short summary of the issues involved, and how it's progressing (or
not).
  

    
Thanks, CDB, for the invitation; and thanks, WJA, for being the Q to
my A, and for kicking things off with such a fine question.

In a word, what this strike is about is the future.

The Writers Guild, representing some 12,000 screen and television
writers, believes that the time to negotiate about what the
conglomerates call future technologies (like the internet) is now.  As
William Gibson famously said, "The future is already here--it's just
unevenly distributed."  

The notion, promulgated by the conglomerates in our negotiations, that
there as of yet is no business model for new media, and hence we need
to study it for three years before any compensation for writers can be
agreed upon, is at the core of what's in contention.

At the heart of the matter: we don't believe that when the
conglomerates stream whole movies and whole episodes of television
shows, with advertising, that writers should get nothing in
compensation.  (They call this "promotional.")  We don't believe that
internet downloads should be compensated at a rate determined for
videocassettes, back in the early 1980s, when DVDs were a gleam in
no-one's eyes, when the internet was just ARPANET and closed to
commerce, when George Michael was in Wham!.  And we don't believe that
writers of webisodes, mobisodes, minisodes, cable, animation, new
media, and "reality" should be out in the cold, without pension,
health, union minimums and union protection.

Where are we now?  The conglomerates refused to negotiate in any kind
of good faith and, last Sunday, walked out of the session.  They have
not come back.  We're on strike (a rally at Fox yesterday attracted
some 5,000 strikers and friends), and will be, until we get a fair
deal.

It might be a while.  I sure hope not.

We don't really understand why the conglomerates are being quite so
piggy here.  For instance: Michael Eisner last week called us "stupid"
for striking.  This is the same Michael Eisner who shelled out
$150,000,000 to Mike Ovitz to get Ovitz to leave Disney after five
months of service.  For comparative purposes: if the conglomerates were
to give us _everything_ we are currently asking for, it would amount
to less, over the year, for all writers, than Eisner forked out for one
failed executive.
  

    
Great start.  The immediate follow-up that comes to mind:

So what is the WGA specifically asking for?  What are the particulars
of what they'd call a "fair deal"?
  

    
We're asking for many things, but they're all part of the same larger
frame: it's about the future.  As the industry changes, we want to make
sure we're not left behind.

(1)  As more and more films are distributed via the internet, we want
a fair share of those revenues.

(2)  As the large media conglomerates (strike that: giant media
conglomerates) increasingly create material directly for the internet
and other new media platforms, we want that work to be covered by our
contract as well.  Otherwise: when the internet and television converge
completely, they'll just call it "internet" and we'll have a contract
covering nothing.

(3)  We want jurisdiction over things written but not acknowledged as
written, or not acknowledged as deserving of union coverage.  This
includes cable; "reality" (a word, as Nabokov maintained, that only
makes sense within inverted commas); quiz shows; animation; independent
film...

What the media conglomerates want can be summed up in the conversation
between Jake Gittes and Noah Cross at the end of Chinatown.  Gittes,
[courtesy Robert Towne] asks of Noah Cross, "How much better can you
eat? What can you buy that you can't already afford?" Noah Cross
replies, "The future, Mr. Gitts, the future."

Well, we want some of that, too.

What's a "fair deal"?  One which acknowledges that this is not longer
a media world limited to network television and theatrical
distribution.
  

    

(NOTE: Offsite readers with questions or comments may have them added to
this topic by emailing them to <prevue-hosts@well.com> -- be sure to include
the words "pre.vue" in the subject line)
  

    
Thanks, Cynthia-- and also feel free to jump in with questions of your
own, WELL-ians.  BTW, the WGA put out a good YouTube video with an
animated summary of the case Howard laid out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ55Ir2jCxk

Howard, what fuels the conglomerate's resistance to negotiate?  Is it
partly because they're afraid of opening the flood gates, worried that
if they give in to the WGA, SAG and other industry unions will also ask
for Internet residuals?  Is it also because they're still nervous
about the Internet as a viable and controllable distribution model?  My
sense is the studios are more concerned about "piracy" and adding DRM
to their content online, than actually making it a central part of
their business.
  

    
I honestly don't know what's behind Big Media's failure to negotiate. 
Last Saturday we received strong assurances from two CEOs that there
was a deal to be had, and that if we dropped our DVD proposal (long
thought to be a 'strike issue' for them) we would receive something
workable in internet downloads.  We put in the quid, but in Sunday's
session never received the quo.  Then they stormed out.

It is true that whatever they give us, they have to (as a result of
what's called "pattern bargaining") have also to give to the DGA, and
SAG, and the other unions.  In short: every penny we get in residuals
probably means another penny to the DGA, three cents for the actors,
and five cents for the below-the-line unions.

Even so: at the moment, all of the talent combined, above and below
the line, gets 20 cents per DVD.  Double that and you've got 40 cents
per DVD, which is still less than the 50 cents the companies pay for
the packaging.

I suspect that the other side is genuinely nervous about just how much
money, how soon, there is to be gotten from the internet.  Still, our
proposal is simple: you make money, we make (some) money.

Even as Big Media claims, to us across the table, that there is no
business model for new media, they're claiming to the world, and to
their stockholders, that there's a gold mine out there.  See
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8a37uqd5vTw&eurl=http://unitedhollywood.blogspot.com/>

Right now, the companies claim the right to stream entire movies, and
entire television episodes, with advertising, as "promotion," with no
compensation to the artists whatsoever.

When Big Media doesn't get paid, it's "piracy."  When we don't get
paid, it's "promotion."
  

    
That brings me to another question I asked you in e-mail, but figure
we should share it with the group:

- In the early 90s, during a strike against the San Francisco
Examiner, a bunch of pissed off staff writers started up their own "web
magazine", which seemed like a weird idea at the time, but it became
Salon.com, now a site with more readers than most newspapers. (And
owner of the WELL!)  What's to stop WGA writers (especially those
associated with well-known TV shows and movies) doing that with
YouTube?  Create new short video series a la Lonely Girl, and spin that
off into a TV pilot/movie (if the strike is ended), or even just end
up staying indy with new revenue models?

- If such a route is feasible, what advice would you give writers who
go that way?
  

    
Writers write--it's what we do.  We can't help ourselves.

Right now, with a 20-hour-per-week picketing schedule, we're all
pretty busy.  But there has been a proliferation of weblogs (a partial
list can be found in Anne Thompson's Variety blog at
<http://weblogs.variety.com/thompsononhollywood/2007/11/strike-watch-ro.html>
.  HuffPo has a whole section devoted to screenwriterblogging
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/writers-strike-opinion> . 

In addition, there have been a bunch of YouTube videos (some
documentary; some comedic).

At the start of the beginning of the second week of the strike, our
Lonely Girl, our Dziga Vertov, our salon des refusees, has yet to
emerge.  Give it time.

More conjecturally, the Googles of this world, the Mark Cubans of this
world, the Jeff Skolls of this world, might see an opportunity to work
with world-class writers, without having to take 30 percent off the
top as the studios' distribution fee.  Increasingly, as the studios
want you to come to them with a script, with stars, with attachments,
with financing, the question becomes, what's the value added?

That question will be asked, more and more frequently, and more and
more loudly.  Big Media's refusal to bargain and end this strike only
assures that this question will continue to be asked--until some brave
and imaginative soul answers it.  Loudly.
  

    
Don't the studios still hold most of the distribution-- ie, movie cinemas (where the money 
is?)  
  

    
If you want to open a film on 3,000 screens, you most certainly have
to do it through one of the major studios.  No one has yet figured out
a way around it.  That's the bottleneck, to be sure.

And although there have been some real triumphs of nontraditional
distribution (Passion of the Christ, for instance), bigtime theatrical
distribution is the studios' game.

But that's not necessarily where the money is.

The studios will tell you that theatrical exhibition, given the
enormous costs of marketing, is a loss leader for the DVD, the cable
sales, the foreign, all the ancillaries.

Whether this is true--whether, in fact, the typical studio-size film
loses money or at best breaks even in its initial theatrical run--is an
issue best left to theologians, or, failing that, forensic
accountants.
  

    
Hi Howard, and thanks for talking to us here. I've been following the
United Hollywood blog, and also discussing this a bit in the Well's own
<media.> conference. One item I read yesterday and haven't seen
discussed yet is this post from Marc Andreessen on his own blog.  The
post starts out this way:


Rebuilding Hollywood in Silicon Valley's image

Last week I posted a rather pointed polemic titled "Suicide by strike"
in which I argued that the big entertainment companies were acting
suicidally in picking a fight with the writers at precisely the wrong
time.

In this post, I more dispassionately outline my theory of why that's
the case, and what I think may happen next.

The writers' strike, and the studios' response to the strike, may
radically accelerate a structural shift in the media industry -- a
shift of power from studios and conglomerates towards creators and
talent....

------------------------------

The entire post is much too long to reprint, and hard to summarize.
You can read the whole thing at
<http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/11/rebuilding-holl.html> if you like. 

But his belief is mainly that this strike will be or could be the
springboard to a new structure entirely for disseminating content, a
structure that would eventually eliminate the studios as roadblocks and
put control more directly in the hands of the creators. 

What do you think of this idea?  He believes and states (in an earlier
post linked in the one above) that the studios are committing suicide
by taking on the writers in this way. I'm sure it doesn't feel that
straightforward to you, but I'd love to hear your comments on this.
  

    
I think Andreessen's speculations are provocative, sound, lovely. 
I've been forwarding it all over the place, in hopes of jump-starting
this discussion. 

We speak of Big Media as the leviathan.  Perhaps it would be more
optimistic, and more accurate, to think of Big Media as the dinosaur,
at the very end of its era.
  

    
I'm really happy to hear that Andreessen's piece is getting read. 

Another item I picked up from United Hollywood, one which really
disturbed me, was a report by one of the writers of Battlestar
Galactica about the "webisodes" that were put out online last year.  As
a BG fan, I was really happy to have those bits of the show to watch,
but didn't realize that the writers and actors had to fight to get
paid, and were denied credits or residuals for their work. That's
astonishing to me, and I felt kind of bad for watching them.
  

    
A NY Times story (Screenwriters Seek Bigger Slice of Half-Eaten Pie)
at  http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/business/media/12strike.html

suggests that "much of the income - past and future - that studios and
writers have been fighting about has already gone to the biggest stars,
directors and producers in the form of ballooning participation deals. A
participation is a share in the gross revenue, not the profit, of a movie."

Do you see any validity in that?
  

    
Slippage.

I was thinking about this subject while in Amazon a few moments ago
looking up the available Doctor Who DVDs.  Off to the side is a flag
that tells you that every episode is available for a little under $2 to
download. Every. Episode. of Doctor Who. Even if the writer of an ep
got only a penny of that $2, ... mind is boggled. Have to go lie down
now. 
  

    
Sorry. What I wanted to ask was, is there something in place now that
at least gives you (the writers, actors ect) a piece of the pie for
downloads? Or is that, as I think it is, one of the things being dealt
with in this strike?
  

    
If the studios labelled the Dr. Who episodes "promotion," the writer
wouldn't get anything.  If they paid at the DVD rate, the writer would
get less than one cent.

To put this into perspective: I wrote the film Joe Gould's Secret.  If
you bought it on DVD, I'd get four cents.  That's a penny less than
I'd get from an empty can of Coke. 

If you bought fifteen hundred copies of Joe Gould's Secret for fifteen
hundred of your closest friends, and paid full retail of 29 bucks
apiece, I'd get--

Just about enough to buy a tank of gas.

[Comparisons via the great and good Doug McGrath.]
  

    
Right now, the studios have proposed (and are, we think, paying,
though they refuse to break out the figures[!]) at the DVD rate of one
third of one percent.  Except if they deem it "promotional," in which
case they pay nothing--even if they have advertising.

They have said that they're willing to give us some residuals on
streamed shows--but no residuals at all until after a "window" of six
weeks (i.e., when there's little or no revenue left).
  

    
So they've already parsed the economics of this very carefully. They
know just where the revenue drop-off is. 
  

    

> pay nothing--even if they have advertising

That short phrase certainly conveys the unfairness of the situation.

Do union members and staffers feel the issues are getting out there in a
desirable simplified form to the viewing public?  
  

    
> ballooning participation deals
> a share in the gross revenue, not the profit

It occurs to me to wonder what percentage of the dollars paid out this way 
goes to members in good standing of the Church of Scientology.
  

    
Hey, Rodman!

This is all becoming rather reminiscent of Tasini et al vs. New York
Times et al, the big lawsuit in the '90s in which a bunch of writers
collectively sued a bunch of publishers for using their written work in
ways far beyond what their contracts called for. On the positive side,
the case went all the way to the US Supreme Court, and in the end, the
writers won their argument that the publishers did not have the right
to continue using (and making money from) their work in electronic
forms which did not exist at the time their contracts were written. But
on the negative side, the publishers responded by starting to offer up
contracts that included more rights, more ways to use the work, more
ways for the publishers to make money off the writers' efforts --
without paying the writers a cent more. And because there are so many
people who think of writing as a privilege and not a career, the
publishers are getting away with presenting these craptastic contracts
and saying, "Take it or leave it, and remember, there are a hundred
other folks falling all over themselves to take it."

Is the WGA worried that the same thing is going to happen here -- that
the studios or conglomerates or whatever they are will simply say,
"Fine, you won't take our deal, we'll find other writers who will"? And
if the studios do start to say that, how does the WGA plan to fight
back? 
  

    
> Do union members and staffers feel the issues are getting out there 
> in a desirable simplified form to the viewing public?  

As Borat would say, we've had "great success" in getting our issues
out in non-wonky formats.  Our best version of this, a counter to the
AMPTP frame that the internets is still a mystery, is called "Voices of
Uncertainty," which has been viewed over 150,000 times, and can be
viewed at 

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8a37uqd5vTw>

A fine followup to this can be found at 

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjGbHHtbZP0>

A lovely history of Writers Guild struggles, put together by Board
member Phil Alden Robinson (Field of Dreams) can be seen at

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqrrwxfP29o>

We've also been quite effective in getting the word out through

<http://unitedhollywood.com>

In the court of public opinion, we're winning.  An ABC poll in Los
Angeles found that among those who knew about the strike, 69% supported
the writers, 8% supported the companies.  A larger survey by
Graziadio/Pepperdine, conducted across the US, found 62% supporting the
writers, 4% supporting the companies.

That means that four times as many people believe in UFOs as believe
in Nick Counter.