Saturday, 12 January 2008
The Writer's Strike
The writer's strike continues to drag on. Let me say one thing. I am a writer and fully support the strike but on the other hand I don't like all of the demands writers want to impose upon the studios. I don't understand why a completely different strategy could be used. Rather than the studios give some type of royalties from Internet and digital formats to the writers why not just give an acceptable pay raise and also make a holding pot. OK now all of you want to know, "What is a holding pot? What is that idiot Robert talking about?" OK, let's take for example that a writer works six months of a television series and has either directly or indirectly written 22 episodes. Let's say that a writer is paid $6,000 a month for those 6 months. For the remaining six months the writer isn't paid. Time for reruns remember? OK the studios make a pot or an ''account' whereby a continuing payment is made rather than a royalty payment for the six months between stop and start of a series. This payment should be about 40 percent of their gross. If the writer pays additional funds into the pot from their monthly salary the studios contribute double that amount. Is this a great idea? Maybe not. Maybe it sucks. However, sometimes people on strike don't look well enough into alternatives and that is what I am saying. There must be an acceptable alternative that will appease all parties involved.
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I don't think that running a 'pot' like that will work well, but I do agree alternative ideas definitely need to be utilized here.
I think the key is that writers no longer 'have' to work through Hollywood as an outlet for their writing work. There are many places outside of Hollywood paying to license good content.
Writers can sell access to their content, continue to own it, gather up royalties or resell it themselves later.
At this point, it does not pay as well as Hollywoood, but the differences in pay are definitely narrowing. I think Hollywood has a very big upcoming problem with this change in dynamics. Their talent essentially has a growing outlet for their work and it does not use Hollywood channels.
Its a shift potentially as big as music from CD's to free downloads or Movies from DVD's to downloads.
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