One thing that impresses me about British television is that the writer is credited right up front, in the opening title graphics. They understand, as I do, that the writer is the ultimate creator of what appears on the screen, not the director or actors, and not the producer or studio.
While many writers in the American system are well paid for their work (but by no means all of them), there is something inherently… wrong with a system that effectively pushes the writer into the background and denies the full fruits of his or her labor. For instance, DVD sales are often far more profitable than initial airings of television shows or theater screenings of films; yet the writers are paid from the initial presentation of the program and residuals paid from DVD sales are, as I understand it, negligible. The studios claim that the internet is too new to pay writers residuals from internet sales. New? Well, heck, perhaps writers should be denied residuals if they used a computer to write their screenplays. No residuals for programs produced in stereo! It’s too new!!
I don’t know much about how the Writers Guild works, what the deals are with studios, etc. I don’t even pretend to understand what the effect of a writer’s strike will be on the hundreds (if not thousands) of other workers it takes to produce written entertainment; but I do understand one thing: the writer is probably the most important person involved in the process. Without the writer, that popular actor wouldn’t be nearly as popular because he’d have no clever lines to speak. Television would be completely turned over to “unscripted” drivel such as reality shows. We’d never see out-of-the-box fare like “Pushing Daisies” or fun and frothy stuff like “Ugly Betty.”
Don’t believe me?
Try making up a tightly-paced 42 minutes of “Ugly Betty” on your own. Go ahead, try. I dare you.
Fair is fair. If you create a piece of art, whether it is written or painted or whatever, you deserve to be compensated fairly when a big corporation mass produces it and sells it around the world. It’s simple as that. At least, to me.
We will all begin to have a new appreciation for writers in the days to come as our favorite programs begin to disappear off television (assuming a strike lasts that long). Within 6 months all we’ll have is a bunch of actors standing around saying nothing, doing nothing; and a TV landscape covered with Joe Schmos eating scorpions or Jane Does swapping husbands for a week. Good times.
