Last night, I was at a show-bizzy event up in Hollywood (tell you about it later today) and I decided to wear my Writers Guild lapel pin.
This led to a couple of folks asking me how things would turn out as we vote for a Strike Authorization. I said I was sure the Strike Authorization would pass but I really have no feel for how wide the margin will be. If it's 51%-80%…well, that won't be so good. It won't lead to the Producers making an offer sufficient to avert a work stoppage. The lower ends of that range would probably mean no strike or one that didn't last long; that would collapse quickly, especially if the Producers bettered the offer by a token amount.
A Strike Authorization of 85% or above might prompt the AMPTP to lay down an acceptable offer. Then again, it might not. People in power do not always do wise things. Management erred greatly with its "final offer" in '88 that led to that strike. Someone had badly misgauged the spirit of the guild then. I'm sure some lawyer said, "Don't worry. There's no way they'll turn this down" and then we turned it down by 90-something percent and the Producers began fighting amongst themselves, unable to budge enough off their "final offer" for months.
There's sometimes a human, often-stubborn element to these matters. We've all seen politicians say or do unwise things…and then when it becomes apparent it ain't working, they double-down rather than admit error. I remember an agent who wanted to be my agent, who was pitching me on dumping my guy and signing with him. He kept telling me how tough he was. As I've mentioned, I find people who keep telling you how tough they are to be very dangerous. They're dangerous if they really are as tough as they say and they're even more dangerous when it turns out, as it so often does, that they aren't.
He kept saying things like, "When I set a price, I have the balls to never budge from it" and "I will kick these guys in the nuts for you." He even said, "In this business, you have to make them pay good money to see your cock" and I laughed because we were in Nate n' Al's Deli and Milton Berle was across the room. I pointed and said, "I think you want to go sign him!"
Everything was a dick reference with this guy and while I didn't go with him, I know someone who did and regretted it. That person said, "It was never about making a good deal with this man. It was always about proving his schmeckel was bigger than someone else's." Which, of course, means that it probably wasn't.
So you don't know. You just don't know. You can know that you're staking out the position that will logically be better for All Concerned, even the employers. But you can't always be sure they'll see it that way or that they'll do what financially makes sense for them. They have internal conflicts about which we know little.
Photo by me, just now in my closet.
I can tell you this, though: The Writers Guild has a basic, fundamental problem. I wholeheartedly support the organization, in large part because I've written for TV with it (on live-action shows) and without it (most animation). I know how hard it is to (a) get a good deal and (b) have the employers honor it when they're only afraid of you and not you and your union. Disney on a WGA deal is a much different company than Disney on non-WGA work.
Still, we have this occasionally-visible structural defect: The Guild covers all kinds of writers. It covers folks who write movies, who write TV, who write comedy, who write drama, who write episodic, who write one-shots, who write soaps, who write game shows, etc.
When an offer comes in that's good for TV writers and bad for screenwriters, there's understandable division within our ranks. When I was mainly writing variety shows, I felt my needs were neglected because the main issues addressed at the bargaining table were all about sitcoms and/or features. There just weren't that many of us writing variety shows.
More relevant is that the WGA covers writers who have vastly different economic situations. Your top, most-in-demand writers work for way above Guild Minimums such that an increase in those minimums may not affect them much. The main issue that prompts strikes is how much, if at all, to increase said minimums.
You also have writers who are, for example, actors 95% of the time and writers the remaining 5% of the time. Or who write novels 93% of the time and Guild-covered work the other 7%. Or are really producers who've joined because they got a few writing credits. Last strike, I marched with one friend whose income plunged instantly to 0 when we went out, and one friend whose income didn't change because at that moment, it was all coming from writing comic books. And later, I marched with a writer-producer who clearly was thinking like a guy on the right-hand side of that hyphen.
Finally, you have the big divide, which is that most writers either think of themselves as someone who works constantly in TV and movies or someone who is going painfully underemployed in those areas. When the subject of "Strike!" arises, they tend to think that their group is the one that has it all on the line.
Writers who work a lot say, "We're the ones who are walking out on actual jobs, whose current projects may get scuttled, who will incur the wrath of the Producers for our stance. We're the ones who lose real dollars, whereas the guys who weren't working…well, they have other sources of income. The Producers aren't missing their services. They're walking out on jobs they never had in the first place."
At the same time, you have the writers who aren't working much…or at all. They'll tell you, "We're the ones who are suffering. The guys who work all the time…they have income from residuals. Some of them can spend the strike writing scripts at home that know they'll get paid for as soon as the strike ends. They have money in the bank to live off. I'm losing out on a job that I was about to get and I can't pay my mortgage without it."
Many of them have a spec screenplay or pilot that they believe/hope is close to a life-changing sale and that can't happen while we're on strike. Plus, they figure that when the strike ends, there'll be a flood of spec pilots and screenplays into the marketplace from the top writers, selling stuff they wrote at home during the strike. That, they expect, will freeze out their projects.
There's some truth to the thinking on both sides. There's greater truth though in the view that if one grouping of writers gets screwed, that does not augur well for any writer. I have about nineteen reasons for wanting there to not be a strike and one of them is that I don't want to have to keep giving everyone, including myself, the "we're all in this together" speech.
The first hundred or two hundred times I had to do that, I felt like Ben Franklin in 1776 saying that if we don't all hang together, we should most assuredly hang separately. After a while though, it becomes dreary and even painful to keep repeating that, especially to a friend who's terrified he may lose his house.
But in the mumble-mumble years I've been doing this — oh, why hide it? I've been a professional writer (and really nothing else) since 1969 — I've learned you have to say no a lot. If you don't, you just screw yourself. So vote Yes on the Strike Authorization and hope that almost all of us do.
I don't know if there's going to be a strike but I do know the three things that are almost always true in my line of work. One is that when they say "it's a done deal," it is not a done deal. The second is that when they say "I'll get back to you," they won't get back to you.
And the third is that if you take a bad offer today, you get a worse one next week and an even worse one the week after…and they'll just keep getting worse and worse until you absolutely have to say no. So it's much, much easier and more cost-efficient to just say no to the first bad one.