Perspective: Does writer's strike have middle ground?

Andrea Sarvady & Shaunti Feldhahn
Woman to Woman
Published Sunday, December 02, 2007

Are the Hollywood writers justified in their strike demands?



Late-night talk shows are in reruns, and America is getting more sleep especially since the writers' strike itself sure isn't keeping anyone up at night. After all, the thinking goes, why do a bunch of rich Hollywood writers need a union anyway?

Yet take a closer look at this labor dispute and you'll quickly see that this is about more than an opportunity to catch Jay Leno passing out doughnuts in a picket line.

A central bargaining system helps both management and staff in an industry with countless separate productions. Yet don't imagine both sides have equally deep pockets. A misleading statistic bandied about is that the average Writers Guild of America member makes $204,000 a year. Yet the far more significant number is the median writing income a whopping $5,000 a year. In other words, skim the millionaires off the top and the picture shifts dramatically to one of many underemployed creatives, hoping to stay in the middle class through moonlighting and residuals.

When the Writers Guild agreed to paltry residuals for DVD sales, it reluctantly bought into the assertion of network and studio executives that this was an unproven market. Writers instantly regretted their compliance; DVDs brought in $24 billion in revenues last year alone.

The biggest sticking point now is new media residuals for work seen on the Internet, cell phones and iPods. Once again, management is pulling out the tired old claim that they would absolutely love to compensate writers more, but it sees new media profits as unpredictable. Meanwhile, industry executives are saying just the opposite to investors and the public. Typical is Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone's claim, caught on videotape, that "Viacom will double its revenue in digital."

Yet what if the new media bonanza is indeed a shooting star, dying as soon as it soars into sight? This is where management's argument totally falls apart. Think about it: All the writers want is a small cut should massive profits once more be realized. As industry blogger Jan McLaughlin put it:

"Five percent of nothing is nothing. ... If Internet- based entertainment makes money share. Share with the people who helped you make the magic happen."


The people who help make the magic already get residuals from permanent and pay-per-view digital downloads. As a writer myself, I empathize with the writers' requests for more of the new media pie, but there's a bigger issue at stake. This is about the development of a whole new industry requiring speed, flexibility and lots of research and development cash assets notoriously hindered by cumbersome union contracts.

To Hollywood studios, the burgeoning new media era looks a lot like what happened when IBM first sold something called the personal computer. A whole new industry! The Wild West! A new frontier with dozens of competitors rushing to get a patch of land without getting killed.

Imagine if a hypothetical programmers' union had said in 1989: "This whole 'software' thing is going to be huge. Our union contract should codify that for the next 20 years, we'll be paid 'X' percent for every line of code." That would have been ludicrous. Programming evolved so quickly (requiring fewer lines of code, for example) that cementing something during the Wild West period would have been counterproductive.

In the same way, Hollywood producers and studios find it impossible to define the new media Wild West enough to set in stone what the writers' union was initially asking for. We didn't even have cell phones playing video clips just a few years ago! Who knows how profitable those videos are going to be in just one year, much less 10?

It's also misleading to say that "Five percent of nothing is nothing," since it's not easy to define which profits writers should get a share of. Producers and studios take all the risk and are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into program development and new media infrastructure. As Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers president Nick Counter told Screen International magazine, producers want to be able to at least cover the cost of an individual project before paying residuals.

Writers absolutely deserve a piece of the new media action, especially once the industry settles a bit. But there has to be a way to get it without risking new union contracts or impeding Hollywood's ability to leverage this new industry.