Slippery Scribes Shaft Striking Screenwriters
Well, that didn't take long. No sooner did the writers grab their picket signs and head for Rockefeller Center than the New York Times belittled and mocked them, paragraph after paragraph. A bit painful, isn't it, this writerly write-down of writers?
In the first paragraph of its initial story, Times writers, who are not on strike, managed to include the pejorative "so-called" as a modifier of "new media." In the third paragraph the Times notes that the picketers were at times drowned out by fans of the Today Show across the street. The fourth paragraph speaks of the writers including the "trappings" of a real union strike. The fifth paragraph notes the striking screenwriters wore "arty glasses and fancy scarves."
In the sixth paragraph, striking children's show writer Sarah Durken says, "A lot of people probably feel like we are brats." I'm sure a journalist's question provoked that unfortunate frame. Then the Times writers made sure to include it high in the story.
Did you hear about the Hollywood starlet so naïve she slept with the writer? The truth is, the big money of the entertainment industry disguises an ugly truth in America: creativity is often regarded with suspicion and parsimonious neglect. The suits regard the truly creative type as a necessary freak, like a bearded lady in a carnival sideshow. You can't have a show without her, but don't split the take with her.
Why is this? One reason is that business-oriented minds don't spend much time reading Emily Dickinson or William Faulkner. Where's the practicality in that? People who are sensitive and imaginative are mysteries to them. This alienation is exacerbated by the fact that the creatives, typically motivated by values other than greed and power, don't have the right buttons to push. You would think that an aggressive business type would be relieved to be in the presence of someone who doesn't want his job. Instead, the creative type fills him with dread. "How can I manipulate the writer if he doesn't care about money and power?" he asks himself.
Anyone who's worked as a writer at a big ad agency or other bottom-line oriented enterprise has felt this awkward emotional distancing.
Which brings us back to the New York Times. Entertainment writers carrying picket signs in the streets of New York present a unique challenge to the self-image of journalists who feel themselves above the frivolous business of entertainment (until they get a story with enough melodrama to start a bidding war for the film rights). Civilizations, not ratings, rise and fall on the work of journalists. Circulation, of course, is irrelevant to the true journalist. They don't have opening weekend numbers.
Despite the characterization by the Times, the screenwriters challenge to the status quo is just as important as a miner's strike or auto-workers walk-out. There's something about the soul of America at stake here. We shouldn't forget that in Czechoslovakia, it was the creative cultural challenge to the Czech totalitarian regime by a group of entertainers, The Plastic People of the Universe, and their subsequent arrest and trial, that led to the famous Charter 77 protest in 1977 and, ultimately, the fall of the regime in 1989 and the democratic presidency of, gasp, a playwright, Vaclav Havel. Tom Stoppard's new play, Rock & Roll, is about this. It received a wonderful review in the Times.
Okay, I'm not saying we oughta elect a screenwriter president. But, then, why is it that we can make governors and presidents of actors who speak their words while dismissing the authors of the scripts that made them famous?
It's time America got over its antipathy toward the sources of the nation's creative power. Our poets die in obscurity, copywriters eat lunch alone, and screenwriters go unslept with. And all the while, the suits pretend they have accomplished something creatively themselves. No one in a suit ever drove a railroad spike, and not one will be published in a volume of the Library of America.
Let's drink to the hard-working writers. Spare a thought for the rag-taggy people. Glasses, scarves, and all.
Read more thoughts about the strike on the Huffington Post's writers' strike opinion page.
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Right on, Writers Guild!
With a play for new media residuals, they are right at the center of what all writers are facing, including journalists, some of whom (New York Times) have been less than sympathetic. Look at how the newspapers tried to deny free-lancers a share of profits when they reprinted their work on line, now slightly limited since Tasini vs New York Times. According to the National Writers Union (see http://www
That case and this strike are profoundly important for bloggers and other commentators who may want to sell their work from time to time.
Hang in there!
From a UAW union brother.
www.autopl
Considering that Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, Ava Gardner, Jean Harlow, Rene Russo, Jenna Fischer, and Amanda Peet all slept with the writer (the last three even married the writer) and have all done pretty well in the game, why do people continue to make that joke? If anything, it's incentive to write.
Soul of America? Not too melodramatic, are we?
Aren't we talking about a union in which half the membership earns over 100K a year? Aren't the vast majority of TV writers also receiving lucrative fees for producing these shows?
You are all free to attempt to get as much as you can for your work. This is America after all. I just wouldn't expect a great deal of sympathy from the gen pop (ie., your viewers), many of whom aren't nearly as well compensated as most of you already are.
Glenn -
Great piece - I don't think a lot of people who would agree with this strike even pay attention to the issue. Thinking about it; is there even another festival other than the Austin Film Festival that focuses on the writer?
Many of the news reports on the strike summarize the issue in such a way that it feels irrelevant; your article puts it in a way that will stick in readers' minds...
Unscrupulous Scabs Shaft Striking Screenwriters
Jack Warner on signing William Faulkner:
"I've got America's best writer for three hundred dollars a week!"
After a lifetime of struggling as a writer, I declare, hear!hear! to this post.
I only do it because I cannot do anything else, dammit.
When kids tell me they want to be a writer when they grow up, I urge them to please reconsider. It's no kinda life I tell them. No kinda life at all.
The NYT's Hollywood beat writers show every sign of having been seduced by studio/corporate bigshots. Their coverage of the issues around this strike has been, to put it politely, naive and less than thoroughly researched. Less politely, I'd call it flat-out ignorant and full of factual errors.
It is also in keeping with the NYT's somewhat provincial NYC bias that nothing to do with Hollywood can be taken seriously, everything is ridiculous -- and therefore, by definition, must be held up to ridicule.
They don't take entertainment very seriously as a major industry, as a major export, as a major plus in the U.S. balance of trade, as the only tool for U.S. public diplomacy that has any wide reach or penetration worldwide(God help us) or as an important part of 21st century culture. All of which it is.
Wait, you said an executives attitude towards writer is, in essence, "How can I manipulate the writer if he doesn't care about money and power?"
Do writers care about money? Of course they do. And the fact that they operate in such a lucrative business makes it harder to stay true to the artistic ideal, and maintain any revulsion towards such pedestrian rewards as DVD residuals. Who wants to write a movie for Will Ferrell for half a million, while he's making twenty for basically running around naked for ninety minutes?
It will be hard to elicit sympathy from the populace however, who don't regard writing as the truly excrucating work it is, but as a hobby, or diversion for dilettantes, and gauging the fare we're getting out of Hollywood these days, who's to say they're wrong.
You would be hard pressed to prove a qualitative standard exists amongst the writers of the WGA. You could point to the ten television shows that are watchable, whilst ignoring the seventy that aren't, but the truth of the matter is, writing for film and television is no longer skilled labor.
The Hollywood powers that be don't undervalue the writer, the American public does.
Forgive it, it's a particular mode. Times writers are prone to this terrible nameless disease, which is sort of - the place tends to make them terminally smug, weary before their time, skeptical without having put anything on the line. For many of them, the job is the last place they'll ever work, and many of them too wear funny glasses, though I think the scarves might be a no go. I like to remind the Times folk that they gave Judy Miller a pass on the war for so long, that there were days the place seemed like merely a branch of the publicity room at Dept. of State. Indeed, the lifers at the Times often seem like weary diplomats, caught in a sort of limbo of doubt, good taste, and British manners.
Enthusiasm is rare there, for it would mean that attention would have to be paid. Frank Rich, Paul Krugman and a few others have been inoculated by the fact of their empathy and humanism. I know so many of them, have watched them go from bright young things, to hardened judges of the day.
But what happens to them? These lifers? Everything starts to taste slightly less fresh. Colors are less vivid.
You know what people are gonna say before they say it.
You go dead inside.
Stand outside their new building, and watch the staffers go in; tired and tight-lipped, and perpetually watching to call out those who try.
I'm a Writers Guild member and a working writer, but I believe the strike is a tactical mistake. The Guild won't get crushed, but we'll end up striking for very little in the end. I consider myself very pro-union and don't have anything against striking, but like invading other countries, if you're going to do it you should at least be relatively certain that you're going to win. The problem is that the Guild can't beat modern-day corporations with a 1950's union. You need to have much greater mass over an industry or a company than the writers have. The Guild should have a) gone out with other unions (actors, directors, editors, etc), b) vigorously recruited more members, even in areas "tangential" to writing (and even at the expense of pliant unions like IATSE if need be) and c) instituted a slowdown prior to the strike, instead of rushing to finish things up. Instead we failed to unionize reality workers, we failed to link up effectively with other unions (the DGA might in fact undercut us), and we ended up stockpiling scripts anyway - wasn't that what going out now instead of next year was supposed to prevent? I wish we had a leader like SEIU head Andy Stern, who understands the recruitment and groundwork required to muster critical leverage over an industry and make real gains.
Wax poetic Smith, well done and true to the core! It seems our bards are in the sad position of being on the bottom of the totem pole in film. One has to only read Faulkner's take on Hollywood to get a feeling for the madness of it all.
What you don't hear in any media about this is corporate conglomerates OWN all the media that is reporting on the strikes. So they get their version out like a well oiled Republican Think Tank.
I found a good quote or two that sums this up for me.
"For all those folks who aren’t writers and get a regular paycheck, it’s really important to understand the plantation-like economic model that powers—and enriches—Big Media:"
http://www
And as always, Jon Stewart comes to the rescue with his brilliant cut through all the bullshit summary on what this strike is about:
http://www
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