Script Enabler

I’ve been closely (read: obsessively) following the contract negotiations as have many of my friends and colleagues. The press has generally characterized the roadblock to settlement as selecting which philosophy to use to compensate writers for their work.

John Bowman, chair of the WGA’s negotiating committee, as quoted on The Artful Writer said, “Writers are the cost of doing business.” Since writers don’t participate in profit sharing (for many reasons including the studio’s byzantine accounting system), they ought to be compensated for their work on a per use basis. This would include the repurposing of media for digital distribution.

Nick Counter, president of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, as quoted in the Los Angeles Times, October 16, 2007 said, “It is simply no longer tenable to be paying residuals on losses as we have for three decades.” Writing is done on a work for hire basis and once the work is paid for, only minimal compensation is required, if any.

This rift is just one more example of the eternal conflict between labor, which seeks to maximize their compensation for their work, and management which seeks to keep expenses as low as possible while maximizing profits. No reasonable person will argue that labor deserves to be fairly compensated but where and how that line is drawn is the subject of passionate (and sometimes vicious) debate.

Given the timing of the negotiations (the cusp of the current fall television season and the development of the next television season) and the unity of its members, the WGA has never been in a stronger bargaining position.

However, with vertical integration and the consolidation of the entertainment industry into a handful of conglomerates (a portfolio of companies in different industries with deep pockets), the AMPTP has never been in a stronger position to outlast the WGA in a battle of attrition.

Both sides are revisiting the war that was fought twenty years ago when studios were privately owned and distribution of entertainment was limited to movie theaters and broadcast television stations.

Today, pressure from shareholders force corporations to keep profits growing at an exponential rate. The internet provides a cheap distribution channel for anyone who wishes to create content. How do you make sense of an age when a two minute video made this morning with a home video camera by a teenager captures a million eyeballs in the same demographic as your $3 million television episode?

In all the negotiation rhetoric, many nuances are lost. Writing is a highly specialized skill that takes years to develop. Good writers are a commodity that is often unrecognized because we need skilled directors and actors to fully realize the work. Good writing appears easy and effortless to the layman. Writers rely on their uniqueness and productivity rather than productivity alone.

Producers are fighting to attract a loyal audience that has increasingly more options to entertain them. Getting someone’s attention is growing far more important than holding someone’s attention. Yet the film and television industry, despite its large profits, consistently provides less return on investment as compared with the rest of corporate America.

I don’t have a crystal ball. I have no idea how to resolve the DVD and digital pass through residual rate formula impasse. I’m not entirely sure if that’s the impasse that needs resolution. Is the way we create and consume entertainment in its dying gasp, ready to give way to a new paradigm?

As a culture, we are obsessed with productivity. The American Dream is that we, as individuals, have control over our destiny; that hard work will be amply rewarded. As a result, our leisure time has taken a back seat to our work. We fit entertainment into the cracks of our daily schedule.

“Necessity is the mother of invention.” “Form follows function.” “The medium is the message.” In this context, these clichés take on new meaning. The demand on our lives is changing and it is changing both the way we consume entertainment and the type of entertainment we consume.

In my lifetime, film and television has gone from a communal event to a personal one. I rarely watch TV or go to the movies with my family. I tend to consume my entertainment alone, eschewing crowded movie theaters, sporting arenas or concert halls figuring that I’ll catch it on my TV, my iPod or on DVD at my convenience. The traditional paradigm of film and television shows alone cannot satisfy my entertainment needs.

Sure, I enjoy the two minute diversions to YouTube but I also have five episodes of The Bionic Woman stacked up on my TiVo for my next bout with insomnia.

If the WGA/AMPTP negotiations were a movie, then we’re at the scene where the main characters are holding guns to each other’s head in a standoff while their house is burning down around them. Meanwhile a gang of marauding invaders is waiting outside, ready to assassinate both parties if they ever decide to exit.

Popular entertainment has always been immediately disposable and it is only over time when a piece of content’s value is discovered through nostalgia or its peculiar universality. Neither the WGA nor the AMPTP (nor anyone else) has a monopoly on this insight.