“That sound like a good deal to you?�

No, but thats the deal most people get when they go to work everday, why should writers have it any better? I grew up with people in the entertainment indusrty (not all successful, mind you) but they all earned at least a comfortable living working no more than 9 months out of the year. I still don’t undertand why big companies gave in and paid them residuals, why not treat them like the rest of employees on earth?

I LOVE your blog, you are giving a lot of people insight into the innerworkings of a Professional Screenwriter in Hollywood. And you are helping “those Screenwriters who want to help themselves” improve their odds on making Screenwriting a career. Most of the people who blame Hollywood for their failure “gave up on themselves long ago”.

There is a natural weeding out process in Hollywood and the Film Industry in general that is very sensible and quite neccessary. You have to prove that you fit in and deserve to work in films. Hollywood doesn’t have to open the studio gates so every lazy, talentless, egomaniac mannabe can waltz in effortlessly.

If you write a Great Script, it will SELL. PERIOD. It doesn’t matter what you look like, act like or think like. Hollywood needs Writers so that everyone else can have something to work with and from.

Get over yourselves and go out and write a Great Script that is worthy of being made into a Film. OOPS, we’ve just lost more that 98% of our readers.

How come these people complain about their jobs not being rewarded like Screenwriters? If you don’t like your job and the benefits, go out and find one that does.

Writers deserve better treatment in Hollywood because without writers no one else has a JOB. Period. Save your agendas, frustrations, jealousies & personal problems for your friends not this column.

Write On.

                   Kevin Reily  Newport Beach, California
                                & Bangkok, Thailand

If the answer is, “because novelists and playwrights get them,” then you have no argument. Putting aside the obvious rejoinder — “Go become a novelist or playwright” — consider the fact that novelists and playwrights are the authors of the product that is being marketed. A novelist writes a book. The book is the product sold. A playwright writes a play. The play is the product that is offered — unabridged — to the paying public. A screenwriter produces something that no one (for the most part) buys — a screenplay. It is the blueprint of a product that is sold to the public, one that could not come to market without the logistic AND creative efforts of hundreds of other people. (Don’t muddle the issue by talking of book jacket designers and stage lighting technicians — as they say, those who can’t make such distinctions are incapable of making distinctions.) So, again, the question is, “Why should screenwriters be treated differently than cell phone engineers at Motorola?”

The answer is, they shouldn’t be. And, as diversified conglomerates like GE impose their compensation cultures on all their divisions, they won’t be. That is one reason why the WGA is destined to fail in this fight. Fortunately, those screenwriters who find the thought of equal treatment to be intolerable will have options. They can become playwrights!

At this point someone is going to say, “Well, some other writer would have written another book.” If there were no writers, there wouldn’t be publishing companies and I wouldn’t have had any of those jobs. I don’t begrudge the writers any royalties they manage to get past their advances.

Cvcobb01 says: “Stock options represent the bet a worker makes against of the real value of the work that he/she puts into a company.”

Exactly — the employee pays to exercise the options, pays alternative minimum tax on the difference between the option price and the trading price of the company’s stock, and only then is it really a bet: the employee has some wood in the game.

Many Silicon Valley types paid tens of thousands of dollars of AMT on the exercise of pre-IPO stock options only to see our employers stock price drop anywhere from 90% to 100%: those were real losses. Real losing bets made by real people with mortgages to pay.

Residuals/Royalties, on the other hand, are actually like grants of stock: there actually isn’t any bet, because the writer doesn’t have to plunk down anywhere up to 80-90% of the current value of a film’s “stock price” in order to reap the rewards of a success.

Understand that I have no beef with writers striking to get what they think they’re worth, but I think that the arguments for or against it need to be accurate as well as compelling.

I agree with SJ’s last comments; indeed, what seems to happen in such strikes is that the class gap that separates movie industry professionals gets exposed a little, and the rulers of that class simply try to elevate their own status a little more. The premise of your introduction – that we should take for granted that Novelists and Song Writers get residuals, therefore Screenwriters in the Entertainment Industry should also get them, is probably true, but not “certainly” true. Why? Because Entertainment fundamentally exercises the principle of “Work For Hireâ€? – for those who don’t know, it means: “We pay you, and you never see your work again…â€? This may be atrocious, despicable, even, but it is common practice through and through in film: Artists, Designers, Musicians, and countless other “creatorsâ€? are subjected to this indignity and have no Class-based opportunity to complain about it. Novelists write books – their work is standalone…No significant creative window dressing takes place in novels, beyond the Cover Art ( But let’s allow artists to rot in their own hell for a minute… ) Song Writing is also a different ball game – the standards of the music industry are in place for their own reasons – The real problem in talking about film in this sound-bite reality is that most people understand very little about what happens on films and who does what ( This is why film criticism usually confines itself to discussing plot points and performance – those are the only things people can talk about without embarrassing themselves and displaying their utter lack of immense technical knowledge required to speak about film intelligently… ) I am not saying that Royalties for Actors and Writers in film and TV are not justified conveniences – they probably are – but I am simply saying, as the case has been made already in other comments, that the de facto assumption that Writers are the sad Beasts of Burden of the film business is insulting to the hordes of unsung Industry Workers ( Some greatly creative in their contributions – some of these contributions as essential to the film’s success as — say — the 8th re-write was…) who are now out of work in Hollywood. The truth is that The WGA and SAG are by far the only unions that count enough members to be able to make noise, and that is why only actors and writers can strike. When they do, however, you cannot usually count on them to mention the thousands of “little insignificant folksâ€? that they put out of work and could not care less about. I once heard and Star and a Writer talk about how they’d mistakenly entered an Art Department on a big film, and were stunned to discover the little elves that were painstakingly creating all the creatures and sets – Both apparently did not even know that this went on… keep that story in mind next time you feel sorry for the people who are lucky enough to stand on a picket line. I guess it is important to remind everyone that no issue is as simple as the “victimsâ€? paint it, and ultimately, Hollywood and its people are all perversely hypocritical in their claims, as they race for the top. For fun, here is where the Royalties Argument gets tricky even among the writers themselves: A writer is brought in on a film to do rewrites -– typically this writer will make a point of tweaking every other word already in the script from his predecessor precisely in order to be able to claim a larger contribution to the new version than was even asked of him – he does so in order to get a larger share of Royalties to himself, thus attempting to deprive the previous writer of his royalties (and credit) – this usually ends up in arbitration. I wonder if they discuss this among themselves at the picket lines…

Informative piece, and I do have sympathy for the WGA and their residual predicament, yet, my problem with this whole situation is that writers appear to get preferential support and treatment when such a situation looms. I see no such support for say… concept designers and artists who, now more than ever, are flagrantly abused regarding their work and third-party usage of their work. Concept designers and storyboard artist’s output are the life-support for tie-in toys, video games, books and DVD’s, but what rights do these artists get? Sure you can blame their own union – who are an embarrassment to the members they are supposed to support – but shouldn’t the residual matter be one shared by the entire entertainment industry and not by one selective – albeit important – branch? I suspect that writers, because they trade in a highly intellectualised profession, live under the subdued belief that they inherently possess a superior status in the world of creativity – they may never admit to it, but still, have little regard for…say…musicians who score films, designers who give Darth Vader his appearance, or cinematographers who make stars glow in the Hollywood glitter…What of it, then? As for the Gaffer Brigade, they do not get residuals because technical knowledge eludes most everyone who casually looks at the movie world – Gaffers, after all, paint the light that gives Nicole Kidman that “Bigger than Life, godly, movie lustreâ€? is that not as important as a clever quip? Isn’t the reality that Hollywood is simply abusive, and that secretly, writers just wish they could play racquetball in the same club as the Zanucks? Come this Christmas when many writer’s families will be playing their Beowolf game or watching how Harry Potter was designed how many will be thinking “we should be picketing for these guysâ€?. Don’t you feel that the writer’s current action should be looking outside of their own personal box and making a statement for everyone? I mean we’re all in this together right? Or is that “rightsâ€??

SJ