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Strike

Writers need actors

July 13, 2008 Film Industry, Strike, Television

A few readers have asked whether I’ll weigh in on the SAG situation. I won’t, except to relate an interesting conversation I had with a TV showrunner a month or two ago.

He said his casting people were having a hard time finding actors of a certain age, especially minorities, for episodic parts. These are the “day players” — roles in which an actor might have a scene or two in a given episode, never to return. Shows like Law & Order or C.S.I. require a bunch of these: witnesses, specialists, etc. The nanny who discovers her employer impaled on an icicle — that’s a day player.

Day players aren’t extras. There is actual acting required. Casting directors will bring in a few candidates to read for the part, and the producers/director will pick. A good day player can really elevate a scene. A bad day player is a disaster. 1

In Los Angeles or New York, if you’re trying to cast a day player in their 20s (say, a car wash attendant), it’s easy. You’ve got thousands of people to choose from. Even if you need a specific characteristic — say, Russian-speaking — you’re going to have great candidates.

But what if you need an intimidating Chinese woman in her 60’s? Or a really, really old man you can believe is from Nigeria?

Well, you hope they’re out there. And increasingly, they’re not. (At least, according to this showrunner, and two others who concurred.)

So what’s going on?

At the risk of getting Freakonomics, it appears there’s a point at which it’s not economically viable to remain a day player.

Consider the career arc of an actor. In one’s 20s, almost anyone can afford to be an actor, by waiting tables or doing other piecemeal work in order to buy ramen and pay for headshots. At some point in one’s 30s, that lifestyle becomes less possible. Actors get married, have kids, or have other responsibilities that require a more steady paycheck. Which means getting a traditional job. At a certain point, you find many actors have become plumbers or teachers or dog trainers just to keep their kids in school and family in health insurance. 2

Luckily, there are some actors who are able to remain actors because they book just enough jobs each year. They’re not making much — probably scale — but it’s enough to keep them working in their craft. These actors have a sense of how many days of work they need to book in order to stay solvent.

So consider our Chinese woman in her 60’s. If she works a certain number of days each year, it makes sense to continue acting and living in Los Angeles. If not, she might as well move to Tucson, where it’s cheaper and closer to her grandkids.

The showrunner told me that the studios are increasingly insisting that producers shoot out day player roles in fewer days, in order to save money. Episode-by-episode, this makes sense; why spend more than you have to? But in pinching pennies, the system may be squeezing out the actors it needs. And you really notice it in groups in which you didn’t have a lot of actors to choose from in the first place, such as minorities. If you write a role for a woman in her 60’s, and race doesn’t matter, you can cast anyone, including the Chinese woman. But if you write a role for a bossy Chinese grandmother, you really need that actress in town and available.

If you look at any one actor getting economically forced out of the craft, oh well. Sad story, but Hollywood’s full of ’em. But when you apply that loss across a swath of your talent pool, suddenly it’s impossible to find that African man in his 80’s you need for your episode. So you’re stuck rewriting it for a white guy, or a younger guy. The product suffers, and TV gets a little more white and boring.

I bring up this anecdote because it’s the kind of issue you really wish the industry was addressing in their ongoing negotiations with the actors’ unions, but they’re not. Instead, we get a three-way shoving match.

Anticipating the first dozen comments on this thread:

  • Please don’t send your Chinese grandmother’s headshot. I’m sure she’s a terrific actress, but the example above was purely illustrative.
  • I’m not claiming this situation is causing a lack of diversity in television, but it makes it harder to combat. As writers, we can create rich, multi-ethnic worlds. But if we can’t find actors for those roles, it’s all for naught.
  • Obviously, the same economic pressures apply to plain old white actors as well. But there are more of them to begin with, so you don’t notice their absence as quickly or as acutely.
  • You don’t notice the problem as much in features because there’s so much more time to do casting, and (generally) more money.
  • I don’t have a solution to the situation, but it’s almost certainly not DVD residuals. Bumping up scale minimums will help, but only to a degree.
  • We can’t conflate raw numbers with talent. When a showrunner and her casting directors are pulling out their hair because they can’t find a Pacific Islander for a part, it’s not because there are no actors in that category. There may simply be none with the chops to pull it off. Doubt me if you want, but 95% of Americans could not convincingly say four lines of dialogue on Law & Order. It’s tougher than it looks.
  1. One anecdote: We shot my first show mostly at stages in Toronto. We quickly learned to check any dialogue to be spoken by a Canadian day player to avoid the ooo problem, and beyond that, we found most of our day players to be terrific. Except for one. She had two lines of dialogue with Mark-Paul Gosselaar, and no force on heaven or Earth could get her to say them properly. It turned out she was drunk. Because she was nervous. Because she had a crush on Mark-Paul Gosselaar. The truth was charming, but she was recast on the spot. ↩
  2. Obviously, you could substitute “screenwriter” for actor in this thought experiment. But it’s not a perfect analogy. For instance, an actor can’t work on spec. ↩

Uggh

April 20, 2008 Strike

On Friday afternoon, WGAw President Patric Verrone and WGAE President Michael Winship sent out an email to members that embarrassed themselves and both organizations. In it, they slammed the “puny few” who bailed on the WGA to take fi-core status, thus allowing them to write for pay during the strike. They provided a link to the list of names — seven in the East, 21 in the West.

The email felt like it had been stuck in the Out box for several months, and had suddenly and unexpectedly been sent to membership. Some readers have speculated that the timing was somehow related to the SAG negotiation, but I can’t fathom how it was supposed to help. It was badly conceived and badly executed.

There are two issues involved, and it’s best to look at them separately.

The first is the decision to list the names. It apparently came about by a vote of the board(s) during the strike. I’m not privy to what the discussion entailed, but I have to assume the memory of the Hollywood blacklist came up as a significant argument against releasing the names. It’s a painful and dark mark in screenwriter history, and not easily forgotten.

The best rationale I can think of for naming names would be to end speculation and mythologizing about how many writers walked out on the WGA during the strike: it was in fact a very small number, consisting almost entirely of daytime serial writers. There was no great insurrection or profiteering by writers for film or traditional television.

I think there is a discussion worth having — whether making those names public helps or hurts the writers, the Guild and the industry. I can’t fault strong opinions on either side.

The second issue is the email itself, and that’s the real flashpoint of this debacle.

[T]his handful of members who went financial core, resigning from the union yet continuing to receive the benefits of a union contract, must be held at arm’s length by the rest of us and judged accountable for what they are — strikebreakers whose actions placed everything for which we fought so hard at risk. […]

Without concern for their colleagues, they turned their backs and tossed the burden of collective action onto the rest of us, taking jobs, reducing our leverage and damaging the guilds for their own advantage.

Clearly, de-mythologizing was not the goal here. If anything, it’s a call to unsheath swords once again, this time to fight enemies among us. As the archives will show, I supported the strike strongly, both in miles walked and moments blogged. But guys? It’s over. And trying to reignite the flames of guild fury over 28 names is ridiculous. It makes the guild look as crazy as the AMPTP tried to portray us.

Over the past two days, I’ve heard the term “tone-deaf” a few times in reference to the email. But I think that’s too soft a criticism. A tone-deaf singer at least has some idea what the melody is supposed to be — he can hear it in his head, even if it sounds like cat disembowelment to us.

This email, however, is the wrong song at the wrong time. It’s Sussudio at a funeral. It feels like it came from a parallel universe in which the strike was still happening and Spock had a beard.

If there’s any silver lining, it’s this: If you were ever going to blunder, now is the time. For the first moment in quite a while, nothing’s at stake. The WGA is not in war mode — at least, it shouldn’t be. A frank discussion of how the guild conducts itself, publicly and privately, should be embraced. And emails like this should be the first topic of discussion.

Post-strike update

February 26, 2008 Projects, Shazam, Strike, The Remnants

Last night I went out for beers with my picketing team from the Van Ness gate. I hadn’t spoken with any of them since the end of the strike, so it was nice to catch up, and see them in clothes not specifically chosen for walking in the cold.

Remarkably, it was the first conversation I’d had about the strike in over a week. After three months of talking (and blogging) about nothing other than the AMPTP, the NegComm and picketing schedules, it’s surprising how completely the strike has vanished off the radar.

With the official contract ratification results due today, it feels like a good time to take stock of where various projects have ended up in a post-strike universe.

The web series

We’re finishing editing on the web pilot I shot at the start of the month. Once it’s done, the financiers will go off and look for distribution and advertising partners. If we can find the right combination, we’ll aim to shoot a block of episodes this summer.

Shazam!

I spent the weekend barricaded at the Disney Grand Californian working on the next draft of Shazam! I’d gotten the studio and producer notes just before the strike, so this was my first chance to address them. It was great having a three-month break from the script, because it meant I could look at it with fresh eyes.

There are some web reports out of WonderCon about a possible title change to something longer and more Harry Potter-ish. Nothing’s decided yet. Obviously, one of the challenges with the property is that an audience will automatically assume that the hero’s name is Shazam, when it’s not.1

Dreamworks project

When the strike began, I was halfway through the first draft of an unannounced project for Dreamworks, with a major star and director involved. Without being too specific, Something Happened unrelated to the strike which made it very unlikely that our movie could (or should) get made. So one of the first conversations I had after the strike was with the producer and director to figure out whether or not to proceed. After about 15 phone calls, many involving agents and executives, the decision was made to kill the project.

It was the right choice. While it’s hard to walk away from 55 pages, finishing the next 55 while almost certain that they could never be filmed would be even more dispiriting. As I write this, it’s not clear whether I’ll segue into a different project for the studio, or just write them a check for the money they’ve already paid me. Either way, I feel better getting to work on a script that is much likelier to become a movie.

Heroes: Origins

My hunch is that this spin-off series will stay in the deep-freeze for a while, maybe never to be thawed out. Tim Kring has said in interviews that the priority is getting next season’s plotline (“Villains”) ready for launch, as it should be. If Origins is resurrected at some point, I’d be happy to direct my episode.

  1. Shazam is the wizard who bestows his powers; the guy in the cape is Captain Marvel. For legal reasons, the movie can’t be called Captain Marvel. ↩

Back to work

February 12, 2008 Strike

The vote passed, with 92.5% of members calling to end the strike. Tomorrow, it’s back to the word factory.

Voting today was my last chance to see some of the WGA staffers I’ve gotten to know during the strike. Some were hired on just to manage specific areas (like picketing), and will be laid off in the next few weeks. I had the chance to thank a big group of them for their tireless work at a meeting two weeks ago, but for the folks I missed: thanks. Your devotion to a fight that won’t directly benefit you was remarkable. I’m sure there is a political campaign out there eager for your expertise.

The extra two days have been something of a blessing, allowing for a gentle re-entry to industry madness. There haven’t been any studio folks on my phone sheet yet, but there were several crucial what’s-still-standing conversations with agent and producer-types. I have no idea what movie I’ll be writing tomorrow afternoon. It’s a strange but exciting time.

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