Writers Strike: Worth It?

What was THAT all about? A three-and-a-half month strike. $2 billion hit on the LA economy. Thousands put out of work. About 70 "housekeeping deals" - writers put on retainer - killed outright. Dozens, hundreds of shows shut down.

In the very cold light of dawn, the new deal doesn't really look all that great given the fall-out. On the page, the numbers actually look kinda puny. After all that - all that picketing, too - here's (part of) what writers ended up with: "residuals [will be] paid at 0.36 percent of distributors gross receipts for the first 100,000 downloads of a TV program and the first 50,000 downloads of a feature. After that, residuals are paid at 0.7 percent of distributors gross receipts for television programs and 0.65 percent for feature films.”

And that's just in the third year of this deal.

Now, let's get out my calculator - five of the most dangerous words in the English language - and see what this comes to. If we're talking (hypothetically) about "The Office" which goes for $1.99 (although it's no longer available on iTunes, but just stay with me here), and you reach the threshold of 100,000 copies downloaded, then that comes...to the grand total...of...$720.00.

In Los Angeles, I believe, that's the typical weekly grocery bill.

That's if you get to 100 large. Most shows don't do that well. Few do in fact. Of, course, my math could be all wrong (probably is) and I'm prejudiced by what appear to be very picayune figures. The Writers Guild would say that I've missed the point. This is about the FUTURE. This is about erasing PAST INJUSTICES. This is about GETTING OUR FAIR SHARE and tapping into the DISTRIBUTION PIPELINE OF THE NEXT DECADE. In that sense, they're certainly right. The producers wanted to indefinitely delay any new media payout pending a "careful industry study." Oh, yeah, we know all about THOSE careful industry studies.

For writers, the crucible that this strike was forged upon were DVDs. Twenty years ago, scribes pretty much abdicated any significant residual stream from videos because they were an unknown new business, and who the heck knew what they were gonna do? Videos boomed, then DVDs; writers got chump change from this revolution. Ironically, DVD residuals ended up taking a back seat in this negotiation because the Guild was hell-bent on getting Internet residuals.

A stray thought here: What if the real cash comes from DVDs in the next ten years, while downloading and streaming remain small potatoes? Clearly, the "distributors' gross" from the sale of a DVD is going to be far higher than an Internet sale simply because DVDs cost more.

One more stray thought: I think this battle was as much about the past as the future. Knotted deep within the DNA of Hollywood is distrust between writers and suits. Writers always think the suits are trying to screw them over - either financially or creatively; suits think writers are whiny layabouts who dress badly. Both camps hate each other and almost always have - though you have to go way back to the '20s when the first stirrings of this antipathy occurred. It's a fascinating, complex, serpentine story, but I think this latest strike proved (once again and thanks, Faulkner) that the past isn't dead - it isn't even past.