“As picketing continues outside studio gates, everyone from talent agents to George Clooney has been mentioned or tried their hand at mediating between the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and executives of the TV networks and film production companies. But here’s a name that hasn’t crossed too many minds: Steve Jobs, Apple’s bearded, music-loving chief executive officer,” Ron Grover reports for BusinessWeek.
“Consider this scenario: On Jan. 15, as the writers’ walkout drags into its eighth week, Jobs will take the stage for a keynote at his annual Macworld conference. He’s expected to announce that at least two—and possibly as many as five—studios have signed up to offer their movies for download to Apple’s video iPod and Apple TV products. That will no doubt generate big headlines—everything Jobs announces at Macworld does—and could make the notion of downloading movies from the Web a hot topic after years of false starts,” Grover reports.
“In doing so, Jobs could also put a Hollywood-style klieg light on the major issue separating the writers and movie moguls: how to cut in the unions for a share of the revenue from a new market that the studios have insisted isn’t yet big enough to share,” Grover reports. “‘It could validate everything that we’ve been saying,’ says WGA Assistant Executive Director Charles Slocum. ‘If he also announces that it will be in high-definition and you can order from the TV, it will mean the creation of a whole new market.'”
“During the short-lived negotiations this December before the writers hit the picket lines, the studios offered the same 1.2% for TV shows that are streamed on the Net, though not until after they have already been online for six weeks at a fixed rate of $250,” Grover reports. “The big thing that has kept the two sides from coming together is that studio executives insist there’s no market as yet for new media and they don’t want to get caught up in making expansive deals with the unions until there is one. Indeed, in their first go-round, the studios suggested they conduct a three-year study to determine the size of the market.”
Full article here.
The studios’ are full of it. Who cares what the size of the market is today? The percentage is all that matters. If you make a buck or a billion bucks, how much is the writers’ work worth? Figure out the percentage. The bigger the market grows, they more you all make. This has nothing to do with how big the market is, what size it will be sometime in the future, three-year ruses, and blah, blah, blah. It’s all about the percentage.
Oh, yea, besides the $20 million Tom Cruise gets, upfront, I’m pretty sure he gets his 1 – 3% royalties as well.
@theloniousMac
What a stupid statement! One can see that you just consume art or culture like a peace of some sort of softice or gelly!
How many ours do you think a writer is spending on having a good book out of press? And how many cents do you think he earns from a sold book?
You don’t know the history of royalties. I do.
@ theloniousMac – This is getting away from the issues of the writers strike, but it’s kind of my doing so I’ll give the short (ha) answer.
I agree, all those traditional retirement plans would be a ticking time bomb, except that the companies that promised them were supposed to be putting money aside to cover their future obligations while the workers were still actively working. They’re only a time bomb for the companies that didn’t do it, or the ones that were taken over by corporate raiders who stripped the pension funds from the company for their own benefit.
Back to the writers strike. The true value of a show or a script isn’t known at the time of writing. It’s only known in the context of the completed work: the show as it’s seen by an audience. Despite the greatest writing possible, if a show is poorly produced or badly acted, it won’t make money. At the time of writing, no one knows if it will just click and become almost cult-like in its popularity or be a flop. So the general deal is the writer is paid a salary plus a cut of any future earnings, which the writer has little control over. The company may not offer the show on ITS, so no revenue or it may flop, so no revenue. This allows the studio to pay less for the writing up front and keeps everyone interested in the future earnings of the show. A good deal for all.
The strike is because the producers have identified a new revenue stream (the internet) that they don’t want to share with the writers. Actually, the producers are saying there is no revenue stream to share. That makes it easy. If there’s no revenue, they can agree to 100% to the writers, since 100% of nothing is nothing. Wonder why they won’t do it?
@ron – Your work can only be viewed in one place. If the writers work were only used once, there would be no future revenue stream. If the shopping center believes your work added to their revenue stream, they’ll probably call again, maybe for a second sign. Are you going to say “You already paid me once, I’ll do it for free?”
@Tom – The writers don’t get to set their own rates. They get paid in accordance with their contract. The income to producers from syndication (and internet) sales for a TV show are frequently greater than the original run.
Plus, I’d bet your work only applies to one thing, a poster for a concert, or a particular ad campaign, with little continuing value, except as art, of course. If you produced a piece for continuous sale for its intrinsic artistic value and aren’t getting a royalty, that’s a bad deal. Of course, how original is it if “next ad schmuck” can do just as good of a job.
How about we give them nothing for their first day of work, and then tomorrow, twice as much as that, and so on! :p
Predrag:
FYI, Tom Cruise and other “A-List” Hollywood stars get a flat fee AND a percentage of receipts PER FILM. Also, there are very few writers – neither in the film nor the music business (where I work) – who “work for hire”; that practice went out in the early 80’s. The majority of WGA writers are freelancers who do not work explicitly for the studios, rather for the production companies (sometimes individuals) who pitch the shows to the studios, in which case they have every right to demand a bigger cut of royalties from digital receipts, which is what they are striking about. The studios know that digital distribution is about to become a lot larger than it is now, and they don’t want to give up that money. They are using the same reasoning that allowed the music industry to get away with not having to pay artists for ringtones (the biggest racket in the industry), and that’s not fair.
TheloniusMac’s comments are simply based on a lack of understanding of how the situation works. Don’t be too harsh on him
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Right Wing “Objectivist” kindergardeners seem not to even recognize when they’re distorting rational debate to meet their preconceived conclusions. They wind up in circular arguments or defeating themselves unless they can actually define all the terms a priori. Rand’s fiction works because she can do just that… because it’s fiction. Her characters’ philosophy works for the the same reason that Micheal Valentine’s equally silly philosophy does: because an author shaped the world around it to make it so. Do you guys think you’ve got a Heisenberg compensator in your basements, too?
The WGA is engaging the free market here. They are doing exactly what you suggest; they’re saying “We’re not working for you under those terms: agree to better ones or no scripts for you.” The fact that they are doing TOGETHER is they only leverage they have. Organized labor, while flawed, is the best tool our society has yet devised to work together in such situations.
Someone mentioned that we no longer need unions because now we’ve got labor laws… but why is that? Because of the Labor Movement. And wouldn’t all the so called “Objective” thinkers do away with those protections, too? Once again, they’d end up shooting themselves in the foot because even Roark winds up validated by a court: i.e. the evil government that can’t do anything right. That’s right, the same entity that keeps you safe from environmental and food toxins, not to mention terrorists and invasions and burglars, assures that your meds work, and built the road you got to work on. And the guys who invented the internet and the frickin computer in the first place.
Remember them? The ones that just take your money and never produce anything?
Thank you, MDN, for the take. As a writer, you know I side with the “little guy” in these negotiations, rather than corporate bean counters trying to squeeze every cent from their product.
Hopefully this will shed a little more light on what’s going on in H-wood right now.
Forwarded the thread to a friend of mine, a graduate of the London School of Economics. His comment:
>>Libertarians really seem not to get the idea of collective bargaining at all, though, and it is perhaps the greatest single indicator of how hypocritical and (arguably) self-serving is their ideology. The fact is that assuming a free market, negotiations between actors are effectively unrestricted, meaning that if I want to form an association of workers and re-negotiate a contract on our collective benefit, I should have the freedom to do so. The union-busting nonsense promulgated by those on the right is therefore the worst possible implementation of government regulation, because it “distorts” the market in favor of an inequitable, rather than equitable, outcome.
All of that goes beside the point in any case, of course. Anyone who doesn’t understand that railroads, postal services, telecommunications networks, energy extraction, processing, and delivery systems, environmental health and safety, and several kinds of industry-transforming research are empirically impossible without the kinds of centralized direction and policy intervention necessary to overcome the market disincentive to produce public goods doesn’t really know *anything* about market economics to begin with.<<
@Nathan, a graduate of the London School of Economics.
Typical claptrap from a UK socialist. I left there to get away from them. Best move I ever made.
Actually he’s a venture capitalist. Now that your ad hominem has been dealt with, would you care to actually make an argument?
Not everyone who believes that capitol is just a tool, one of many that humans have developed, is a socialist.
the right wing is defined by people with one answer. To the religious fundamentalists, all answers are God. To the economic fundamentalists, the answer to everything is deregulation and tax cuts, until every endeavor except profit by any means is gutted. I wonder why that is… my best guess is that they just don’t like anyone telling them what to do and don’t like paying taxes, and they never grew up enough to realize that that’s part of playing a productive role in a society. When the economy is booming they say tax cuts to give taxpayers what they’ve earned! When the economy is slumping they say tax cuts to stimulate enterprise! Get some perspective. And some values that can’t be expressed on a balance sheet.
Since this discussion has completely moved past any Apple news….
In any case, a contract protects both sides of the negotiation. Once the writer’s stike is resolved, the writers know their wage and the studios know their writing costs. Nothing too complicated.
BTW, I do side with the writers here even though I am usually anti-union. The studios are playing games with the contract definitions.
Back on topic, why would Steve piss off the studios when he’s courting them for iTunes?
And just for fun, in case anyone’s still reading:
“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me..
and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country…
Corporations have been enthroned…
an era of corruption in high places will follow…
and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people…
until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands…
and the republic is destroyed.”
— Abraham Lincoln
Sorry~ decided to check that quote (as I should have done BEFORE posting) and it’s a fake.
Lincoln was a strong supporter of labor, though, stating:
“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
in an 1861 speech (att. historian Merrill Peterson in “Lincoln in American Memory”, via Snopes)
That’s what I get for having reckless fun and not checking sources.
Abraham Lincoln was an idiot AND a thief, what’s your point?
If he had not been shot, he would be known as one of the worst prez ever (Clinton a close second)
>Back on topic, why would Steve piss off the studios when he’s courting them for iTunes?
This is the key point, to discuss the actual article, and why Steve won’t/can’t use his influence on the writers’ strike. Besides, if Master Negotiator Steve hasn’t been able to move the movie studios to get their stuff on iTunes (something that would make them $$$), how’s he supposed to get them to give up money to the writers?
Yes Steve will end the writers strike…
In the near future, the writer/producer hybrid will produce and own what they write and delivery the finished show direct to the people. They will edit on Final Cut Pro, finish and grade in Apple’s Color, composite in motion 4, and score/audio post in logic studio. Then with one click publishing they will upload their content to itunes HD and Apple will take it from there. (For a fee)
At first people will buy the major studio films but soon word will get out that a smart indie can be just as good and sometimes better then the recycled hollywood templet. Near the end, the studios will loose control of the channels and be limited to just another content provider.
Apple will help define many new roles as they road map the future on the entertainment interface.
Sure are a lot of non-creative types pontificating about matters far beyond their comprehension (i.e. “Ron”)
“writers are just like everybody else” Yeah right, Ron, ya f’n moron.
“Do you think the woman who accidentally invented the adhesive on yellow stickies is continuing to be paid by 3M?”
theloniousMoron: The man who invented the adhesive is still being paid by 3M. A simple google would clue you.
Being stupid is your only excuse.
People should look at the history of the Three Stooges, they died broke, because they had no rights to much of the work they created.
HMMM couldn’t be that they did not plan or manage their own money could it? Why is this the studios fault? It is called PERSONAL ACCOUNTABILITY.
What scares me most about this tread is all you people with this sense of entitlement.
theloniousMac is right, if you want the royalties, you should OWN the content. When you are employed by someone and your job is to write, create graphics, write software, etc. You have been paid regardless of what the creation is, it is not yours. You were on company time, being paid to create, now it is the companies product. You should be happy if it is successful, the company prospers and your reputation grows. Use this to negotiate a raise or go to another firm that will pay you more based on prior success.
“I don’t think a gaffer’s strike would have brought the TV studios to their knees.”
No, but it does mean someone is in for a shock.