Ars Insumptuosus
Now that I’m driving myself to and from my Sunday night games, I’ve had occasion to catch a bit of late-night news radio. The parts that I’ve picked up have been about lessons for Iraq some British officer feels the US should have learned from his personal experiences in Bosnia and a looming writers’ strike in Hollywood. The former just feels like blithering, but I got curious about the scriptwriters, so I asked Eileene about it. She knows more than I care to learn about the business of Hollywood, so she’s a good resource. Between the radio show and her explanations, this is what I’ve managed to piece together.
The argument is over money, specifically over whether the scriptwriters should enjoy royalties on new media outlets that threaten to cut into traditional revenue sources—DVD sales of television series, for example, in an age when the TV shows themselves are losing ad revenue. Contracts can vary considerably, so hasty generalizations can be dangerous, but typically, scriptwriters don’t get royalties at all; they get a chunk of money up front for their scripts, and that’s the end of it.
This model exists largely because script appears very early in the production process, well before the hiring of actors and director, before the laying out of budget specifics, and before the assembling of the studio’s resources. A lot can happen between script and final shipping of the film to cancel the show. The risk of a script never reaching the screen is enormous; a large majority of scripts die before filming despite getting the green light. In light of this risk, the writers have collectively decided to take the money while they can, instead of holding out for a percentage of the gross, which could be enormous, but probably will never exist at all. Fair enough.
But this means that the risk is shifted onto the studios. The pay for a script takes this into account. Because the film is unlikely to be made, the script is unlikely to earn the studio any money. The studio therefore pays the writer a smaller share of what the script could potentially be worth, retaining for itself what the writer might deserve for a blockbuster script, instead paying a flat fee that, presumably, compensates the writer for his expected contribution. (And if not, why the hell did he accept the contract?) His contribution to a blockbuster film might amount to ten million dollars, that is, his script might result in a movie that makes ten million dollars more than another script would. But if the chance of the film becoming that kind of blockbuster is only one in ten thousand, the writer’s expected contribution is one ten thousandth of that, that is, a thousand dollars.
Perhaps scriptwriters want royalties because an increasing share of the profit for shows are likely to come from long-term showing as reruns and DVDs and the potential for web releases, writers want a share of these revenues. Also fair enough.
The rub lies in the writers’ insistence that they should get royalties without any consideration on their part. If a writer wants to argue that he deserves a share of the gross for a successful film, I would agree. However, as things stand, the writer is already receiving, up front, money that reflects his expected contribution to profits. If a writer wants a cut of the pie when his script becomes a blockbuster, he ought to be willing to relinquish some portion of his current pay for a script, the portion designed to compensate for the potentiality of blockbuster status.
The issue is clouded by the generally low pay and low status of writers in Hollywood. Eileene tells me the writers are undervalued; perhaps they are. I, for one, recognize the difference script quality makes to a movie, typically as much difference as a director or starring actor makes, in my mind. Even successful writers don’t enjoy anywhere near the income of successful actors, and they certainly don’t enjoy as many of the perks of celebrity. But if writers are undervalued, it is due to the laws of supply and demand. Hollywood is choked with wannabe writers, more than the studios need—or, to put it another way, not enough studios exist to go around. In a just world, writers might deserve to be paid more, but in a free market economy, they deserve to be paid what they can get. If the writers don’t enjoy a large share of the profits for a film or television show, it’s largely because their colleagues are willing to work cheap. If they’re willing to work cheap, the writers cannot properly claim to be paid unfairly.
Ultimately, of course, the strike, or threat of a strike, will establish whether they are being paid fairly. The only real remedy to low wages is to lower the supply of workers. If the writers collectively are willing to work for expected income X, but not for Y, the studios will need to cough it up or do without the writer’s guild. I expect that the studios, ultimately, will cough it up, but that’s their decision—if they don’t cough it up, but hire scabs instead, the writers value themselves too highly. What I fail to understand is the framing of royalties as a moral question, that somehow writers are being cheated by not receiving royalties. If the royalties are that valuable, writers should be willing to take a hit to their up-front pay for a piece of that action. And they’re not.