the WGA went on strike yesterday and all late-night talk shows are the first to go into reruns... Letterman, Leno, Daily Show, Colbert Report, SNL are all affected.. next are the sitcoms that havent finished filming their entire schedule...
Heroes already taped an alternate ending to this season, which means half of the season will be canned
I hadn't really thought about it. I guess that's why the Daily Show and Colbert Report were repeats even though they just got back from a break a week ago.
It depends on how quickly the Directors Guild makes a deal for us as to whether the the bulk of the (scripted portion of the) season ends up getting delayed or simply not done at all. If we have to sit out (and I say we because I am a member of the WGA) until we have some real leverage to make the AMPTP sit down with us again, it'll be next summer before this thing is resolved. Apparently most hour-long dramas have enough scripts in the can to get through January, if not February, and the networks held back some shows so they'll have content to start from there. And there will be more reality shows, and probably a few more news-magazine shows. The studios stockpiled a whole bunch of movie scripts, so you shouldn't see any real difference at the theaters.... actually, the movies might be a little better for a little while since studio execs didn't have as much time to needlessly tinker and hire, fire and rehire writer after writer, watering down the story until it becomes unobjectionable but bland.... but that may be my biases showing.
I read somewhere that Stewart was going to pay his writers for 2 more weeks of work out of his own pocket.
I read somewhere that Lost only has the scripts done for the first month of the show. Even if this drags on for a while, the director/producer or someone said they will play what they have on schedule and do repeats after that if necessary.
And in related news, the collective average IQ of our nation just dropped 15 points. When I looked at the fall schedule, I saw a lot of crap on it, but I told my self that at least they were actual TV shows rather than all this reality crap.
That sucks. So we wait 9 months for new episodes, get one month's worth and go back to re-runs? This new half-season strategy is teh suck.
On the strike: 1. I'm pro-union. I support any and all rights to workers to organize and negotiate as a group. That supercedes my #2. 2. I have a really hard time feeling sorry for Hollywood writers. I'm sure their negotiations will lead to more money for them and their families. That's fine. But they are already rich and they are already overpaid compared to so many others in our society. I support their right to strike; please do not ask me to feel sorry for them. I do not. On LOST: My post really had little to do with the strike. It had to do with the incredibly stupid, incredibly frustrating decision on the part of the network to take 9 months off between new episodes. The possibility of the writers' strike shortening the LOST season to four new episodes after 9 freaking months off is just icing on the cake. Hollywood sucks. They give us approximately one new show that is actually good every five years or so and this is what they do with it. I'd be perfectly happy if the whole industry went on strike and never came back.
There's probably a really wide range of income for writers. Plus, they should take a stand now...they should get a share of the money generated by their writing that appears on the internet. Do it NOW while TV and internet are still seperate enough. It's an easy and decent choice for the broadcast companies to make, some nerve to deny the writers their earnings
75k in Hollywood, California is not fairly compensated...especially considering their on-air TV counterparts make 6-7 figures an episode.
That's not my understanding of the LOST situation. They started shooting the season at the regular Fall season time, so they should already have more than a months worth of the new season in the can. They may only have a months worth of scripts left right now available to shoot, but that shouldn't be the total number of episodes they have to broadcast. To talk about some of the other points, the average working screenwriter makes $200,000 per year for writing. Roughly half the members of the WGA don't work in any given year. The strike is not at all over increased upfront pay, though. It's about residuals for reuse of our work on the Internet. The way it works is companies pay a flat fee upfront that gives them the right to use the work (a script in our case. Directors and Actors also get residuals) in the primary market (domestic theatrical for movie screenwriters. First-run broadcast for television). When the work is reused in secondary markets like syndication, pay television or home video, the companies pay a percentage of the revenues for that reuse. Several decades ago, the Guilds settled on a residual rate for home video that ends up being about .36%. Since the early 1980s when home video starting taking off, writers, directors and actors came to decide that small rate was a mistake and have been trying to get a bigger slice ever since. We have been unsuccessful at increasing that rate, however. Then the Internet comes along. As of right now, no residuals are paid on most kinds of Internet reuse of content. Fearful of setting a rate that we'll look back on for decades as a mistake, we've asked (the last I saw anyway) for 2.5%. The studios have basically countered with the same .36% they currently pay for home video (there's also some other stuff about promotional use that would pay nothing, but I don't want to make it too complicated and any more boring than it already is). There's other stuff still on the table like WGA coverage of reality shows and animation (animated movies and television shows are usually not covered by the WGA, though some like "The Simpsons" are), but those are side issues that likely won't end up changing in the end. Personally, I think the strike was a bad idea. We rattled our sabers for two years making noise about how we might strike, which gave the studios plenty of time to make arrangements to have stuff they could put on the air or movies they could put in theaters. We'll have to stay out until summer before the studios really start feeling the pinch from a lack of scripts (some shows will not get their full seasons this year if the strike goes that long, but the studios have a lot of stuff to fill the void). The threat of a strike was our only leverage. Once we actually went on strike, we shot our wad and will have to wait until summer before we have any real leverage again. In the end, I think we could've eventually gotten the same rate we're going to end up getting had we simply stayed on the job. Instead, we're costing ourselves and a lot of others a whole lot of money in lost wages, and I think it was unnecessary to do so (plus, I'd personally be happy with the home video rate on Internet stuff). The shows that the actors are making 6-7 figures an episode also usually have pretty highly paid writers, many of whom are paid not only for their writing services (which factors into that $200K average) but also as producers (producer earnings do not factor into the $200K average). Plus, we're striking to get an Internet rate that the actors will also get. So, nothing we accomplish in this strike (if anything gets accomplished) will close any earnings gap between actors and writers.
Hmmm, maybe I'll just downloand more Chinese shows then, though I must admit the writing for most TV series are pretty bad (but the movies are amazing, and I'm not talking about Kungfu movies, but all the indie looking films that people here never heard of) On a side note, how hard would it be for Hollywood to hirer new writers? Are all writers part of WGA? There's got to be some writers that are currently out of work. I'm completely ignorant of how the industry works, but it seems to me that this would be a highly pursuited job where the number of open positions < number of talents for the job.
