This video says it all.
I've also been keeping up with the WGA strike coverage on my comrade Lee Stranhan's blog. Lee's son has been on the picket lines every day, interviewing all kinds of people, and doing a much better job of covering the issues than the mainstream media... naturally!
He quotes Robert Towne in his first post: "Until a screenwriter has done his job nobody else has one."
I feel that line good and plenty, and I would take it even further… in any communication enterprise, there is no “there there” until the writer does their job. And yet writers are bamboozled into thinking they're “disposable.”
I support the WGA for many reasons, but one in particular is that we so rarely see a place where writing gets noticed at all, as if it is something of value.
Most writers who make money for others get paid: nothing. A tiny fraction of working writers get paid pennies for their hours (I'm in that club). And the only writers who have organized power are in the film/TV business, because of labor organizing that was hard-won decades ago, and would be difficult to imagine now. That's why the studios are so optimistic about union busting, and never paying a dime on new media profits.
But I still hope... I hope the WGA pins the studios to the wall, and that I get to see a “trickledown” effect!
