Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

Well, Hollywood's writers are on strike, and have been for several days now, though in truth I'm not sure who apart from other writers has actually noticed. I'll go on record as supporting them—writers should certainly be paid more, as writing is foundational: Performing cannot happen without writing, and any competent scriptwriter is worth ten competent actors. (It really isn't the singer. It's the song.) That said, I hope the Writers Guild of America isn't expecting any significant public sympathy. Scriptwriters who have anything like steady work make a great deal of money compared to the public in general and especially writers in other fields. The work isn't always steady, and the money distributes itself as it does in mainstream fiction and (to a somewhat lesser extent) nonfiction: 80% of the money goes to 20% of the writers, and everybody else fights over the scraps. (Though in scriptwriting, even the scraps dwarf what people get for short stories or, God help us, poems.) When writers making over $100,000 a year walk a picket line, people will roll their eyes. Get used to it.

That's another discussion, however. What I never hear talked about much is why the Writers Guild exists at all. There is no Novelists Guild, and certainly no Computer Book Authors Guild. The answer is relatively simple: There is a lot more money at stake per project, and screen media companies have no better idea what will click with the public than any other species of publisher. An established book publisher has to front perhaps $30,000 - $80,000 to field a mainstream midlist book. The failure of any single book (or even several of them) may be regrettable, but not fatal. A single episode in a TV series can cost several million dollars, and the series as a whole represents a lot more money than the sum of the episodes. And movies, heh. The Golden Compass will have cost almost $200M by the time it's done. The schedules are unforgiving, especially in TV. There's not a lot of time for making mistakes and doing things over. When there's that much money on the table, ya gotta be careful.

Screen media is careful. They can only steer future efforts by past results, and even though that's no guarantee, they are desperate to put the odds in their favor any way they can. What they want in their writers is a sort of cultural uniformity: Not only do they want people who understand the business (which is not unreasonable) they also want people who belong to a common culture and for the most part think the same ways about life and especially about entertainment. The Guild does that for them. It's a closed shop and a very tight one. You don't get in just by asking. In a sense, you don't get in unless and until they recognize you as one of their own, in terms of both ability and culture. I've met a few scriptwriters over the years, and they have been uncannily alike—far more alike than science fiction writers or technical writers. The Guild's goal is not so much to keep quality up—it's unclear how much that can be discerned before the public actually votes with their remotes—so much as to keep the product consistent.

So unlike heavy industry, where companies consider their unions a costly nuisance and would love to rid of them, in screen media the companies would feel naked and fiscally vulnerable without the Guild to keep the pool of writers predictable. The relationship isn't adversarial so much as symbiotic. If the Guild didn't exist, the industry would have had to create it.

This doesn't mean the screen media companies aren't doing some maneuvering. The ongoing move in TV from sitcoms toward reality shows isn't accidental, and isn't entirely a matter of public taste. Reality shows are far cheaper to produce than sitcoms, adventures, and dramas. Among other things, there's just less writing involved, and what writing there is tends to be a lot simpler and less dependent on constant inspired wit. (Being funny is one of the hardest things I've ever tried to do, and I feel I've succeeded only infrequently. I powerfully respect those who succeed most of the time.)

What will happen is what always happens: The writers and the media companies will snarl, bitch, and moan at one another, and then meet somewhere not in the middle, but about two thirds of the way toward the companies. There will be no armageddon. The writers will get a little more money, and the companies will make it up by continuing to steer the industry in directions where there's less writing necessary. Both writers and companies know they're not in a strong position in the public mind—TV and film are losing audience slowly but steadily every year, to video games and nonunionable things like YouTube—but they want to keep the party going as long as they can.