Kevin Boury writes to ask…
Why is it that people keep telling me that the writers in the WGA are all overpaid, pampered and ungrateful individuals who should be thankful for the high wages and great working conditions that they have? What's the real story?
The real story is that those people don't know the real story.
The first thing to point out is that "the writers in the WGA" do not all work and that they sometimes go long stretches without pay, writing things that do not sell for a many years or at all. I know the job may look sparkling from afar, and I'm not about to suggest it's a bad one. Obviously, I pick my profession willingly and enjoy it. But the screenwriter who's wiping his butt with currency is the rare exception. Each year, the WGA knocks hundreds of members off its Active roster because even though at one point they had jobs that earned them membership, it's been a long time since they got one of those jobs or grossed even a modest amount in their profession.
If you read the stats, you'll discover that the average screenwriter makes something like $5,000 a year, which wouldn't qualify as "overpaid" in anyone's book. But the situation is really worse than that because there are people who get a million or three per screenplay. And when you have a couple of those guys around, it means there are an awful lot of people making less than $5K for it to average out the way it does.
As for the ones who do work often…
Overpaid? That's a relative term. We make a vital contribution to a very profitable industry and in the grand scheme of that industry, our pay is a teensy fraction. Or to look at it another way, there are people who have a lot less to do with the success of a TV show or a movie than its writers but who make a lot more money off it. When our wages are cut — and every WGA strike of my career has in one way or another been about wanting to cut our wages — the money we'd lose would not go to widows and orphans. Really, the Producers are not out to correct some horrendous financial injustice by slashing our incomes. They just want to pay less for something, the same way they'd pay less for light bulbs and film and Evian water if they could. (And by the way, I don't think any of the folks who pay us think we're all overpaid, perhaps because if anyone's overpaid, it's them.)
Pampered? Obviously, some of us don't think so. For whatever it's worth, I've never had a writing job where I felt particularly pampered, and that includes the good jobs. Someone please explain to me how I've been pampered because it sounds wonderful and I'd hate to think that was happening and I didn't know it.
Ungrateful? To whom should we be particularly grateful? To the studios that are now trying to cut our compensation and get out of funding the health plan to which they long ago agreed? We get hired because we provide a service that someone needs and they pay us for it. I don't see why we should be any more grateful to them for hiring us than they should be to us for delivering the work.
I don't mean to cry poverty here…just misrepresentation of the norm. Some writers do receive staggering sums of cash. This is generally because they contribute to something that makes even more staggering sums of cash. No one is expecting you to feel sorry for them but don't pretend we're all in that tax bracket. Besides, very little of the current contract dispute pertains to them, at least on a monetary level. The contract is all about setting minimums and the really rich writers didn't get that way working for minimums.
I can explain this better with the actors. The average actor is not Leonardo DiCaprio, considering which of his $15 million dollar offers he'll take next. The average actor is more like Herman Krellman, waiting tables at night and hustling to get auditions by day, hoping to land a two line part on some show every so often. Next year, when the Screen Actors Guild contract is up for renewal and the Producers try to lower costs there, they'll point to Leonardo and say, "Look how overpaid these actors are!" And then they'll (a) push for contract terms that will not significantly affect Mr. DiCaprio's income but will lower Herman's pay the next time he gets a job…and (b) offer Leonardo $25 million for his next movie.