Random Musings On The Writers Guild Strike

I've been reading a lot of articles about the Writers Guild of America strike that started a week ago, partially because I'm interested, and partially because it keeps intersecting with another topic that's near and dear to my heart (eg. Brian K Vaughan, writer of the excellent Ex Machina comic book, as well as the incomparable Lost TV show, opining on the strike; an article on whether the comic industry could, should or ever would unionize; and ruminations on how the WGA strike may affect comics). So let's just say it's been getting a fair share of my mind lately (and the strike is all about fair share, after all!)

Having started off my professional career as a computer programmer, I've had many occasions to consider how life in that industry would be different if we all received residuals. In other words, imagine if we not only got paid for the initial writing of the code, but also received some fractionally small slice of all the money that was subsequently made (or saved) by its use! Think of all those lines of Cobol, Java, C, C++ or _____ that we've each sweated over during our careers, often in no less a creative fashion than that of the folks who write TV shows or movies. While at the bank, I worked on a small team that built and maintained the Common System Function libraries. Those were the ubiquitous modules that all of the product teams used in order to avoid re-inventing the wheel themselves: various and sundry date calculations, common structure setups, communication protocol implementations, and so on. On that team, we used to joke that we'd all be millionaires within a month if they simply paid us 1% of a penny every time one of our modules got executed (after all, CSF programs were being run hundreds of millions of times each day). Imagine that paycheque...

From reading about the WGA strike, it's clear that many professional writers live off of residuals. Most of them have hot and cold periods, and they get through the latter by receiving payments from what they produced during the former. That's so different than the existence that I've known (to date, anyway) that it almost seems wrong to me, at first blush. I mean, I was brought up to believe that you earn money by working, and if you're smart (and disciplined) enough with your money then you'll eventually have saved up enough to retire. In over 21 years so far, I haven't been unemployed for even a single day, meaning that (as a salaried worker) I've been earning money continually for over two straight decades. Where do these writers get off, having long periods of non-work during which they still manage to draw an income? How's that fair?

But of course it is fair, because that's the way their industry works. The product of their imagination gets used - and then re-used over and over again - to make money, and the deal is: they're entitled to a little bit of the pie anytime money's being made from their creativity. The WGA fought bitter battles in the past to win that setup, and now they're fighting once again to extend that principle into a new medium, among other things. And I'm not entirely sure from what I've read whether the producers/studios are trying to make us believe that the principle shouldn't apply to the Internet (for example), or that there's simply no money to share.

Which brings me to creative accounting. As the parent of a freshly-employed accountant, I can't be too hard on that occupation for fear of retribution from within! But it always amazes me that the answer to such seemingly straight-forward questions as "How much money did that money make?" or "How much revenue did those ads generate?" can be so easily manipulated and twisted to suit someone's purpose. Isn't it just book-keeping? Why does it end up being so full of greys? And how do people get away with telling one story to those they want to impress ("Our movie's doing boffo box office and will be one of the most profitable of the year!") and a complete contradiction to anyone with a stake in it ("Yes, I know that you're entitled to a slice of the profits, Mr Clooney, but as our books will clearly demonstrate, we're well in the red on this production...")? Where's an auditor when you really need one?

Anyway, Entertainment Weekly has a good pro-WGA article that I found interesting. Maybe you will, too.