The Strike

There are some excellent videos on YouTube and elsewhere describing the current screenwriters' strike going on in Hollywood. Here is my favorite one:



It's an interesting situation. Obviously, I think writers deserve a huge chunk of television and movie profits, due to the fact that they are, along with the directors, the individuals most responsible for "creating" the content. What I don't agree with is the back-and-forth going on between people I know in the movie industry about who is the greedy backstabber putting the industry at risk. The fact is that this doesn't adequately describe either side. The producers and writers made an agreement, a long way back, about profits from video. The writers guild agreed to what was already a pretty bad deal back then, and has slowly devolved into a phenomenally, criminally unfair deal. Even worse, there was apparently no solid date set for renegotiation of the deal. Now I know that none of us could have predicted the way that DVD and the internet have changed motion picture media, but I would like to think a lot of us could have predicted that things would change in the past twenty years, enough that the terms of the contract might need to be revised.

I support the strike, but I think I support it for a different reason than a lot of writers. I refuse to get into the class warfare arguments I hear back and forth, and I really don't see greed as the issue. I see the strike as a good way of correcting a bad deal that was made a long time ago, and I hope that it will end in the writer's guild (who hopefully have smarter people working for them than they used to) making a better deal.

Basically, I side with the writers, and with the guild, but I hope that guild members realize that they should be as unhappy with their old leadership, who put them in this situation, as they are with the studio producers who have kept them in it. I also hope that people on both sides who are doing well financially are willing to buy a lunch every once in a while for the hundreds of crew members and skilled laborers who are out of work because of the strike. There are rich writers and poor writers (much more of the latter), but there are no rich key grips, and I hope for their sake as much as anyone's that the strike doesn't last too long.

In other news, Norman Mailer passed away. He was, by most accounts, a sexist and overall a fairly mean and unpleasant man, but even if all he ever did was co-found The Village Voice, one of the best independent newspapers in the world, I take my hat off to him for that. I was honestly never a huge fan of his books, but that is one hell of a paper, and I thank him for it.