The Writer's Strike: Severing The Gordian Knot

This morning's Wall Street Journal featured an article concerning the current strike by the screenwriter's union.

As three of the Journal's reporters explained,

"As the entertainment industry enters the digital age, the writers and the studios are battling over a key question: how writers should be compensated when studios distribute their work in digital forms, such as streaming and downloads. Digital media are expected to provide an increasing share of Hollywood's revenue in coming years.

Last week's talks, however, bogged down over side issues that included the union's attempts to organize reality-TV and animation writers and its effort to remove a clause from its current contract preventing it from joining strikes by other Hollywood unions.

Barring the emergence of a new mediator who can ride to the rescue, Hollywood is starting to come to terms with the idea that the walkout could drag on well into 2008. The TV networks are feeling the most heat; without writers, they have been forced to shut down many of their productions in the past month. Now, they have just a handful of their most successful shows left in the can.

Lev L. Spiro, who directs episodes and pilots of TV series such as Showtime's "Weeds" and ABC's "Ugly Betty," sent a letter to the leadership of the directors' union last week arguing that starting talks would be a public-relations disaster for the directors and would prolong the writers' strike. The letter circulated among writers and directors.

"We are all, to state the obvious, sister guilds of artists and craftsmen, engaged in collective bargaining with corporate behemoths whose primary raison d'etre is to make profit," Mr. Spiro wrote. "I suggest to you that it would be shortsighted to act exclusively in our own self-interest at this time." "

Reading this last passage brought me up short. Mr. Spiro depicts 'corporate behemoths' as the enemy with which writers, directors, et. al., must fight for shares of profits from the new distribution channels spawned by digitalization of media.

Yet, now, more than ever, the reason for these unions may be withering away.

A few weeks ago, I watched my first episode of a popular television series, NBC's "30 Rock," on my laptop. Having missed the scheduled network run of the episode, I viewed it from the NBC site, for free. There were some commercials, as on network television, but I honestly could not tell you who the sponsor was.

But, why did I need to go to NBC's website?

In this day, with production and distribution costs so low, why aren't good writers simply parsing out equity in their script projects to directors and craftspeople, renting equipment, and distributing directly through their own websites? Using Paypal and advertising to collect revenues?

I wrote a simpler piece on this topic last March. Prior to that, I believe I wrote another, with more detail, in the same vein as this post.

Rather than see themselves as 'artists and craftsmen' arrayed against 'The Corporate Media Man,' why don't screenwriters see themselves as private creators of value who can hire whom they please to bring their creations to digital fruition?

The simple tool of a contract among the various artisans, craftsmen, et. al., provide each screenwriter with the power and freedom to demand terms commensurate with his/her prospects, in the eyes of his/her peers and colleagues.

Surely a cameraman or director will judge, Larry David's projects as having a higher expected value, and lower risk, than, someone new, without an established reputation.

If anything, this recent strike might actually, finally, separate the 'real' screenwriters, the ones whose work sees production, from the hundreds of union members who never actually see their work produced.

Screenwriting is probably now at the cusp of being the high-value-added driver of video content it could not be when large studios controlled the expensive, few elements of production and distribution.

Rather than wrangle endlessly over one-time terms for future profit sharing with producers and distributors of their work, why don't the better screenwriters simply begin assembling funding and teams of colleagues to produce their own work?

Right now?

Technology has a way of radically altering prior work relationships. Railroad brakemen disappeared with the arrival of George Westinghouse's air brakes. Physical gas and electric meter-readers are nearly extinct. As are many gasoline pump-jockeys.

Should this most radical of innovations in video content, the development of equipment, editing software, and distribution for digital video content, not alter the balance of power in the entertainment industry?

Rather than settle for haggling over terms with some large corporations, why don't the screenwriters stage their own Exodus from the Egypt of the entertainment 'behemoths,' and simply strike out on their own as businessmen and businesswomen, owning and controlling the production and distribution of their own scripts?

Perhaps this is one strike that won't end, but also won't end the provision of high-quality video entertainment. It may just end the virtual monopoly of such entertainment by the three networks and the movie studios.