Like, Strike, Dude: The Hollywood writer-worker - possible Writers Guild of America strike

National Review, Feb 19, 2001 by Rob Long

The only thing worse than being in a meeting with three writers is being in a meeting with 300 writers, which unfortunately describes a meeting of the Writers Guild of America, West.

Every few years, the WGA-the putative trade union of screenwriters-suffers an institutional nervous breakdown as its members, made up entirely of writers and therefore unable to agree on anything, attempt to agree on the terms of a new contract with the studios. The current contract expires on May 1, and for the past few months Hollywood has been thick with strike talk.

The sticking point invariably centers around some new profit source exploited by the studios-DVD sales, say, or pay-per-view satellite broadcasts-that they have neglected to pass on to the writer. The working writers-and that number is considerably smaller than 100 percent of the membership of the WGA, West-tend to be philosophical about these issues. Sure, we get angry and bitter. But we're writers. We were angry and bitter before we got into this business. In some cases I could mention, anger and bitterness were the primary inspiration to saddle up and move to Los Angeles in the first place. I know one guy who became a television writer simply because it afforded him the opportunity to write on a cop show and name all the strippers, crack whores, and nude female corpses after his mother.

The non-working writers are a more querulous lot. Some are retired and living in affluent boredom. For them, a messy writers strike is an exercise in self-dramatics. What fun to glide over to the picket line in their BMWs and Bentleys and get into a Clifford Odets-style working-class dustup! And how nice to be able to do it in temperate Los Angeles, so warm and dry and generously supplied with upscale lunch spots.

The second group of non-working writers are the unemployeds. These are writers who haven't sold a script or drawn a writer's paycheck in years, but who remain passionately involved members of the guild and its hardest-to-satisfy voting bloc. For some reason, years of unemployment do not lead to difficult personal decisions ("I must stop dreaming of success and riches. I must stop talking to my friends about my next big script sale. I must realize that my job at Blockbuster is not just 'temporary' or a 'great place to people-watch and get material,' but, instead, my true livelihood, and I will begin to treat it as such by arriving on time and in uniform, and not waste a customer's time criticizing his rental choices"), but rather to a stubborn and highly irrelevant obsession with the writer's potential share of hypothetical ancillary revenue generated by a script that hasn't been written, and if written won't be sold unless the writer is represented by an agent, who won't sign him because-and this is crucial-his scripts do not sell. Did I mention that this is the largest segment of the voting population of the WGA?

Freed from the burden of actually having to show up to a job every day, they look to the occasional strike to round out their social calendar, to catch up with old friends on the picket line. And since all writers crave excuses for not writing, what better excuse for being unproductive than a strike? Writing? Not me. I'm honoring my brother and sister scribes! I'm taking part in the labor movement! Lazy? Untalented? Nope. Just committed to social justice. Rarely has sitting on your ass outside the studio gates, carrying a picket sign while eating a ham sandwich, ever seemed so glamorous.

So, the working writers-especially the young ones-hate strike talk. A strike means television- and movie-production halts. Paychecks stop coming. Writers with cushy studio deals (ahem) find that their contracts enter something called "suspend and extend," which means, essentially, no money until the strike is over, which won't happen until the unemployeds are satisfied that if they somehow write a script that somehow gets sold and somehow gets produced and somehow makes enough money to somehow generate "ancillary revenue," they'll get their fair share.

"Suspend and extend" ripples across the Hollywood economic landscape, as the cash flow pinches to a trickle. Without the regular greasing of a studio paycheck, a lot of writers and producers and executives (did I mention that everyone's paycheck stops?) will start hearing the squeaks and screeches of money trouble. First go the guys who clean the pool and wax the cars. Then the personal trainers, the dog walkers, the yoga dudes. Next, the housekeepers and nannies and car leases. Ultimately, the five-figure mortgages turn into polite calls from the mortgage companies, which turn into not-so-polite calls from the mortgage companies, which turn into frantic calls to the real-estate agents, which turn into a collapse in the real-estate market as all denizens try to unload their debt bombs at once.

Because, at base, the entire industry shares the same cut-it-close paycheck-to-paycheck goofy optimism of the unemployed writer, there are a lot of folks out here who aren't sitting on the commonsense cash hoard. Because hypothetical riches are so easy to generate, why bother to conserve actual cash? Why save for a rainy day? Out here it rains only ten days a year.