Posts Tagged ‘writers strike’

It's official! Joss and his Mutant Enemy buddies are planning a Mutant Enemy Fan Day. Many of the ME people have been contacted and reportedly so far Jane Espenson, Doug Petrie, Amber Benson, and Adam Busch will definitely be there on the strike line picketing at FOX with Joss, and, hopefully, you. Come pick up a picket sign and march to show your support of our favoite writers. Best of all, Joss has promised that in the unlikely (but welcome) event of a concluded strike, some sort of celebration will happen anyway.

The event will be at the FOX studios (20th Century Fox Studios, 10201 W Pico Blvd, Los Angeles) , Dec. 7, from 10 am to 2 pm. More details — and a lot of woo hooing, hotel information, directions and rapid plan-making – are available here.

And, in a display of utter cosmic rightness, the Nuart Theater in West LA will have a midnight showing of "Serenity" that same night. Click here for tickets.

I'll be there myself, in my first-ever West Coast visit. Don't let that keep you from attending.

Stop by the Joss Whedon fans forum at Fans4Writers.com to get the latest news and developments.

During the writers' strike our favorite shows are running out of new episodes. Some eagerly anticipated ones may not show up this year at all. Meanwhile, episodes are being sold online with a pittance going back to the writers who thunk 'em up, or streamed online — in essence, a rerun — without paying the writers anything.

Which puts us in a dilemma. We want the writers to get their fair share, so we're willing to wait as long as it takes for that to happen. But we also want new adventures, new stories in our favorite worlds. Where do we go?

Well, there's always comics.

TFAW.com is promoting their TV- and movie-tie-in comics. Serenity, Buffy, Angel, CSI, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, Star Wars, Supernatural, The Simpsons, Alias, and many more are all there in brand new adventures. Granted, not all of the writers get paid for each one of those sold, either, but those deals were known ahead of time. And some of them do. Personally, I hope Joss gets rich from the record-breaking sales of Buffy, Angel, and Serenity. It might encourage him to write a few more…

Then there's the tie-in novels. Buy his Buffy book, for example, and Keith R.A. DeCandido gets a royalty. See how easy that is? Support a writer and go read some Buffy, Angel, Serenity, Star Trek, Star Wars, even Monk.

Me, I'm holding off on buying any epsiodes from iTunes or Amazon's Unbox, and I'm avoiding the networks' websites. Books and comics will hold me for awhile.

If you need more suggestion on ways to help writers during the strike, head to www.fans4writers.com . You'll find a lot of people there with great ideas, and the occasional visiting writer or showrunner.

You may have noticed there's a slight altercation going on between the writers of TV shows and movies (the Writers) and the association of motion picture and television producers who run the entertainment companies (the AMPTP). It's a simple misunderstanding, easily corrected: the writers feel that they should continue to receive a small percentage of the shows and movies they created as the industry moves towards putting everything online. This percentage, called a residual, is part of the deal made for each script and is the second part of the promised payment. The reasoning follows that if the show/movie is popular and gets shown a bunch of times, the studios and the writers (and the actors and directors) all benefit since their contributions all resulted in something of proven value.

The AMPTP's position is even more simply stated: No.

Since the Writers literally cannot give in on this — imagine finding out that your boss found a way to not only weasel out of paying you half of your promised income but gradually reduce your remaining income as well – they may be in for a long strike indeed.

For the AMPTP this must seem like a win-win. They have enough scripts and whomped up reality shows to fill the airtime for a while, they got to cancel a lot of development deals, they essentially get a do-over for an overall disappointing TV season, and since they own most of the big media they can make sure that their side is the one that gets presented to the viewers. Case in point: the LAPD estimated that 5,500 people showed up for the strike at FOX studios Friday. Jesse Jackson was there. Seth McFarlane was there. Rage Against the Machine played live. And celebrities and writers filled the streets. Big news for LA, yes?

Small blurb in the paper. Not mentioned until the very end of the local news, and then briefly. Most news coverage has been about how the viewers will suffer, how the other workers in the industry will suffer, and not a lot about how the writers are plain and simply being ripped off and blocked from any revenue from this new invention, the Internet.

Only you know? Funny thing. The fans are already on the Web. We've been here for years, talking and arguing and sharing. And, at times, mobilizing. Which brings me to Fans4Writers.com. Read the rest of this entry »

As early as next Monday, television – the one-eyed babysitter that has raised generations of us without ever asking for anything back, aside from all of our consumer dollars – could be under attack. Networks must act now to preserve this hallowed, lucrative media before all is lost.

The culprit? Writers. Dirty, filthy writers who have the nerve to demand more money when their shows or movies are released on DVDs or online, just because such things might be catching on a little. Imagine! Just because consumers will spend an estimated $16.4 billion on DVDs this year, and studios look to glean something like $158 million from selling movies and about $194 million from selling TV shows over the Web, suddenly everyone wants their “fair share.”

Well, let me remind these scribblers that thanks to the last royalty agreement crafted just two short decades ago, writers already receive a princely 4 cents on every $20 DVD of their work. Now they want more? The networks have already patiently explained how releasing shows online is merely promotional, so it would be like paying a writer royalties for a billboard advertising his show… if the billboard somehow displayed the entire show, uncut, with commercials.

Heedless of these economic realities, last night the Writers Guild met and decided to go on strike in the next few days. Last night, television went on hiatus.

Read the rest of this entry »