Re: Writers Guild of America Strike
Posted by MoiraMacTaggert on 2007/12/30 18:19:52
I'll say up front, I'm a supporter of the WGA. In fact, I'm one of the rabble rousing, fund-raising, boycott-encouraging supporters of the WGA.
And I didn't do that lightly. Frankly, I come from a very anti-union background, myself, but I researched the heck out of this because I got an inkling from the Internet that they news wasn't telling us everything.
The AMPTP (that's the American Motion Picture and Television Producers to those of you less acronym-friendly, or "the other side" if we're looking at this from a WGA standpoing) is putting out some figures that are pretty darn laughable, really. This "More than Surgeons! More that Pilots! Astronomical salaries!" line is really just a crock.
When you take an average, you add together the salaries of every writer out there. So. Take the salary of someone like Steven Spielberg. George Lucas. And add that into the salary of twenty schlub writers that step in periodically into television shows. Spielberg and Lucas are hyphenates--they direct and produce their shows too. Plus, if their names are on it, it's going to make millions.
Their inclusion into that number sure makes the average go up, though, doesn't it?
The MEAN average of a Writer's Guild writer? A measley $5,000 a year. They get paid a project price. Re-writes, editing, touching up, revisions. . . a project can take several years. So the nice shiney $68,000 figure attached to a project that takes eight years to ever see the screen, with the writer working on it the entire time (this is a movie script scenario, and I can back it up if you'd like), becomes $8,500 yearly salary. I made more jockeying a register.
Not every writer is a Spielberg, Lucas, Jackson. Hell, not every writer is a Smith, Whedon or Fey. Most of them aren't, and 48% of them at any given time are getting paid entirely off of their residuals from other projects. They're not asking a huge amount. So while it's unfortunate our favorite shows are off the air, I'm willing to wait and read my comics until they get a fair deal.
And I didn't do that lightly. Frankly, I come from a very anti-union background, myself, but I researched the heck out of this because I got an inkling from the Internet that they news wasn't telling us everything.
The AMPTP (that's the American Motion Picture and Television Producers to those of you less acronym-friendly, or "the other side" if we're looking at this from a WGA standpoing) is putting out some figures that are pretty darn laughable, really. This "More than Surgeons! More that Pilots! Astronomical salaries!" line is really just a crock.
When you take an average, you add together the salaries of every writer out there. So. Take the salary of someone like Steven Spielberg. George Lucas. And add that into the salary of twenty schlub writers that step in periodically into television shows. Spielberg and Lucas are hyphenates--they direct and produce their shows too. Plus, if their names are on it, it's going to make millions.
Their inclusion into that number sure makes the average go up, though, doesn't it?
The MEAN average of a Writer's Guild writer? A measley $5,000 a year. They get paid a project price. Re-writes, editing, touching up, revisions. . . a project can take several years. So the nice shiney $68,000 figure attached to a project that takes eight years to ever see the screen, with the writer working on it the entire time (this is a movie script scenario, and I can back it up if you'd like), becomes $8,500 yearly salary. I made more jockeying a register.
Not every writer is a Spielberg, Lucas, Jackson. Hell, not every writer is a Smith, Whedon or Fey. Most of them aren't, and 48% of them at any given time are getting paid entirely off of their residuals from other projects. They're not asking a huge amount. So while it's unfortunate our favorite shows are off the air, I'm willing to wait and read my comics until they get a fair deal.
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