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Coffee House => Coffee House Boards => CH / Entertainment => Topic started by: anakirob on January 06, 2008, 11:42:44 PM
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Somehow I only heard about the American screenwriters strike today, despite having started some time ago. Anyway can someone give me answers to the following questions.
1. What are the writers striking for? Is it just for more pay, or do they want other things like more prominence in credits?
2.
Under the WGA rules, Leno and O'Brien aren't allowed to write items for the show that would normally have been written by their writing staffs. So what does that mean? Will Leno and O'Brien wing it? Ad lib a monologue?
How will anyone be able to know if the monologue is pre-written or ad-lib?
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right now writers get about 4 cents per DVD sold. they want another 4 cents.
yeah, you saw right......the scumbag businessmen don't want to part with 4 CENTS........
I'm with the writers on this.
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Essentially there are two different types of royalties in this context, mechanical royalties and performance rights/royalties. One being the development of dvds, cds, videos, and the other being broadcasts on television or radio.
Because the owners of the show have all or most of the mechanical royalties, they can release and re-release boxed sets and season collections of programs on optical media for an exceptional amount of profit (dvd manufacturing is incredibly inexpensive, and boxed sets of popular shows usually start out around $100US). Most film composers for example, don't receive mechanical royalties on their work, which means that they receive little to often nothing on DVD's sold with their music on it.
Studios only pay out royalties if there is a stipulation in the contract that requires them to do so (which makes sense, these are business people after all). So, essentially, studios are making a small fortune on royalties from television shows, and they are able to release the show once in season by season form, then turn around and release a special edition boxed set of the entire thing, and then maybe do another run of it later, and the writers receive little to nothing for it...Writers, naturally are incensed about this because they're the ones who created the show (Note: Studios have a different definition of "created", I'm using the term very liberally).
It's essentially a license to print money for studios...except for when they are dumb enough to release things nobody wants, but that's why things like "Good Times" come out as boxed sets that start at $20-$25 and quickly drop down to $10 for a clearance sale, instead of being $100 to begin with.
Regardless, even this isn't much of a gamble because DVD authoring and production is so incredibly inexpensive now that the infrastructure has been in place for mass production for so long.
The situation in many ways is a lot more complicated than this, but that's the basic idea.
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How will anyone be able to know if the monologue is pre-written or ad-lib?
Typically these things aren't memorized...there's a lot of scripting that goes into those programs essentially my guess would be that if Jay isn't using any cards or a teleprompter he's fine no matter how he prepares his material.
Then again, I'm not a WGA member and could be way off about this.
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this is serious enough where the Golden Globe awards have been officially canceled.
what with no actors showing up - insolidarity with writers - they are officially playing hardball!
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cecilia wrote:
right now writers get about 4 cents per DVD sold. they want another 4 cents.
yeah, you saw right......the scumbag businessmen don't want to part with 4 CENTS........
I'm with the writers on this.
not to mention they don't get paid for internet broadcasts.
the studios call it "promotion" so no pay to the writers.
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jkirk wrote:
not to mention they don't get paid for internet broadcasts.
the studios call it "promotion" so no pay to the writers.
And yet, at the same time, they are both putting ads on "promotional" videos on the net, as well as having lawsuits against people that copy these "promotional" videos, claiming it infringes on their profits. ...not to mention of course that they're telling the writers that there's no profit in online distribution for anyone, and at the same time telling the shareholders that there's a huge profit to be made in online distribution.
In a nutshell; the studios claim that online video is both very profitable and not profitable at all, depending on who is asking them.