Dave Gordon writes to ask…
I've been reading with interest your postings on the dispute between the WGA and "agents who package," and was wondering if this dispute might spill over to other workers "in the biz" who work through agents, such as actors and directors. Do you have any insight about this, or information from actor or director friends?
This will definitely impact actors and directors and perhaps others who are not going to let the WGA get a piece of packaging fees (or whatever comes of this current mud-wrestling) and not get that piece for themselves.
We have a thing in this town called Pattern Bargaining, which essentially means that when one of the three major guilds — WGA, DGA and SAG/AFTRA — gets or loses something, a corresponding get/loss is almost inevitable for the other two. If the writers get $100 more, the directors will get $100 more and the actors will get an even greater amount since any film or TV show will have many more actors than it has writers or directors. Other labor organizations may benefit as well.
There are occasional exceptions to this but they are rare. Often, the producers seek to capitalize on this by configuring what they give up so it is more meaningful to one guild than another. When Cable TV was coming in and it was apparent they'd have to make a deal to compensate writers, directors and actors for working in this new marketplace, they came up with a formula that worked for directors but did not work for writers. Then they gave it to the DGA and tried to force it on the WGA…and we had to strike to not take that bad-for-us deal. We finally won but it took an ugly strike to achieve it.
The WGA tends to be the union that most often fights these battles first, which is why we strike more often than the other two. The Directors Guild never strikes. The actors strike rarely. It was kind of inevitable that when the issue of packaging became a cause célèbre, it would be the writers who would be the first to charge into the fire. In a way, I'm proud of my guild for being so bold but we do tend to get singed more than the others.