The Dotted Logline

As someone who hopes/plans to be a member of the WGA one day, I’ve been following the negotiations and the strike very closely. And the reaction of the public, which has certainly been mixed. There are plenty of wonderful articles and blogs out there about the issues (United Hollywood is a great place to start), but I thought I’d toss my hat into the ring as well.

There’s a misconception floating around that Hollywood writers all pull in six figure salaries. That seems to be one of the main arguments from people opposed to the strike, but there’s a significant flaw in the logic there; if this were the case, why would the writers put all those big bucks on indefinite hold to essentially nickel and dime the studios?

The fact is that being a working writer doesn’t always mean that you’re working. TV shows get canceled. Freelancers struggle to find gigs. Feature film projects get trapped in development hell. According to WGA reports, 46% of the current guild members in 2005 were considered unemployed. And that’s exactly why residuals are important.

If people don’t have a problem with a novelist or musician earning royalties while working on a new book or recording a new album, why are they so angry at screenwriters for needing residuals while they’re working to get their next project going? Just because television and film are collaborative arts designed to be palatable to the public doesn’t mean that the writing is any less strenuous or valuable. Those nickels and dimes the writers are fighting for can mean the difference between paying the bills and starving. Maybe not for the writers whose names you know, but those big earners are a very small minority.

And that’s the other big misconception about the strike. Writers aren’t fighting for more money. They’re fighting to keep their income from dropping off in the future. Already, there have been shows like Lost that have streamed episodes online as opposed to airing reruns on broadcast television. Writers (and actors) receive residuals for the latter but not for the former, even though both include the entire episode and paid advertisements.

The Internet is the direction the industry is going, and writers don’t want to make the same mistake they did with videotape/DVD: accepting a reduced residual rate (0.3%) on a new, unproven technology. DVD residuals, of course, are the other negotiation sticking point that has received a lot of attention in the media. And although new media is the biggest issue, the numbers related to DVD residuals are pretty painful.

* In 2006, WGA members received $56.6 million in DVD and VHS residuals. The same year, Tom Freston received a $60 million severance package when he resigned as chief of Viacom. That means that a single individual was paid $3.4 million more for leaving his job than 10,000 writers earned for the sale of their work. Figures taken from the L.A. Times.

* Pretty much anyone can go to Amazon.com and sign up for an Associate account to earn referral fees starting at 4%. That means any schmuck (and I include myself here) who can cut and paste a bit of text to a website or blog can earn more than 13 times the amount the actual screenwriter receives for the sale of a DVD. Members can now earn referrals on digital downloads, for which screenwriters currently receive nothing.

The problem is that concerns like respecting the contributions of workers and their ability to put food on the table don’t really factor into the corporate equation. It’s a numbers game, and the important thing is that bigger numbers are better than smaller numbers. Workers are human resources. It’s the age-old problem of the people with the money having a completely different world view than the people who do the work, and it’s exactly why unions and strikes are still relevant.

I wasn’t old enough to really care about the 1988 WGA strike and don’t really know what public opinion was like back then. However, it’s clear that technology has changed things in the last nineteen years. Thanks to the Internet, today’s audience has access to the screenwriters. Writers post to fan sites and forums. They write in personal blogs and show blogs. They connect to fans through MySpace and LiveJournal. They have fans now, fans who will follow them from project to project, who know their names. Fans who care. Fans who are angry (and if anyone is good at being angry, it’s fans.) And fans with a mission are a force to be reckoned with, especially when they get organized.

The first day of the strike, Joss Whedon devotees from the fan site Whedonesque delivered pizzas to the writers picketing Universal, including one with anchovies for Jane Espenson (yes, screenwriters have fans who are devoted enough to care about their favorite pizza topping.) Similar food deliveries from other fandom groups followed. By day four, a website had been launched to coordinate a wide range of fan efforts. It remains to be seen just how big an impact the fans’ actions will have on the strike. In all honesty, I hope negotiations resume before we’re given the opportunity to find out.

And on a personal not, since I’ve been asked this several times, I will not be scabbing. I honestly never even considered it. I have far too much respect for my fellow writers and for my own work. I have no respect for anyone who would scab knowing that it could prolong this strike and cause further hardship for thousands of people aside from the writers themselves. I want to break into the industry by honest means and have an actual career doing what I love. And I want to be paid fairly, which is exactly what the writers of today are fighting for. I can never thank them enough for what they’re doing.

This past weekend, I watched Children Of Men, one of the most powerful films I’ve seen in a long time. I also caught up on a number of Series 2 Doctor Who eps that I had missed when they aired on Sci-Fi. Despite the vast difference in tone, I found there to be an interesting resonance between the two.  And not just because of the British-ness.

The pre-apocalyptic world of Children Of Men is an example of my favorite type of speculative fiction: a high concept “what if” used as a springboard to explore human nature. What if there were no more children born to the human race? What if the last generation of humanity knew they were the last? The answer isn’t pretty. Governments and nations collapsed. Today’s Bagdad spread to every corner of the Earth. Denial, despair, death. And perhaps most frightening of all, as seen in Clive Owen’s Theo early in the film, utter apathy. It’s a good day when you don’t die. But what good is escaping the bomb when there’s nothing else left for you, for anyone? What’s the use of crying over the murder of a young man when, alive or dead, he is just the symbol of the end?

How does this dark, gritty tale relate to the continuation of a campy sci-fi TV series that features an alien ship permanently “disguised” as an outdated police call box, a terrifying alien menace that looks like a sex toy add-on, and the ultimate all-purpose sonic-powered tool good for obtaining pocket money or committing genocide? Quite simply, the new Who asks the same what if. What if you were the last?

In contrast to the old series, the current Doctor (or Doctors–we’ve already seen the Ninth and the Tenth incarnations of the character) is the lone survivor of an ancient, wise, and powerful alien race, a restless wander whose gleefully carefree mask conceals a loneliness that stretches to the farthest reaches of time and space. It’s a good day when everyone lives, but it can never erase the knowledge that countless numbers, evil or not, intended or not, have already died at your hands. What good is the power of a lonely god when it means that your mistakes have catastrophic consequences for whole races, whole planets? What good is time travel when all it does is show you an infinite variety of quiet, perfectly mundane lives, the one thing you can never have?

“And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love.” But for human and alien alike, even the most beautiful of intangible concepts need to be embodied in something real to be more than just words. A pregnant womb contains more than the seed of survival. A Companion is more than someone to sightsee with. Whether it is an infant or a shop girl, watching someone take her first steps into a larger world that you know to be both beautiful and terrifying, realizing that you have the chance to see it all as new again through their eyes, accepting that you have a duty to guide them and protect them, that is what allows both Theo and the Doctor to go on and strive for more than simple survival. Protecting something smaller than ourselves, granting it the opportunity to blossom into something bigger than we can ever be, finding out that faith, hope, and love are still alive and well in the universe: that is the true adventure. Trigger-happy terrorists, corrupt cat nun nurses, bloody war zones, and emotionless cyborgs are just proof that wallowing selfish desires, convincing ourselves it is all for the greater good, only leads to stagnation at best, complete disaster more often. The beauty of the universe lies outside of ourselves.

So what if you were the last? What if it were the end? The answer is simple. Find a beginning.

I just got back from a screening of Slither, a fantastically funny horror film starring Firefly/Serenity’s Nathan Fillion. I wasn’t really familiar with James Gunn (the writer/director), but I’m definitely a fan now.

The movie had, in my opinion, perhaps the best balance of comedy and horror I’ve seen in a movie, though it definitely tipped towards the comedy side of the fence. The dialogue was great (almost too good for such a campy film) and everyone’s timing was just dead on. I had been warned about the gore factor beforehand but I didn’t think it was really that bad. In fact, I went in hungry, and left craving steak and marzipan (don’t ask.)

There was also a great little Q&A afterwards with James, Nathan, and Michael Rooker (the heroine’s husband turned alien cannibal squid flesh katamari thingie.) It was very informative. Apparently Gunn’s cat gets a “little girl being molested” look when it has to go to the vet, Nathan spent most of the film doing nothing and does a great impression of a 1920′s film director, and Michael got to manipulate a prosthetic alien vagina with his foot (when the prosthetics weren’t causing him pain… Ouch).

Slither made me think of Shaun Of The Dead, though I felt that overall, it worked better. The latter tried to cram too many genres in, and I found the pathos of Shaun’s mother and best friend dying to be rather depressing. Slither is much more upbeat. When cute little girls convulse horribly and die, it’s funny! Plus, hive-mind alien zombies are so much cooler than regular old boring brain-eating zombies. I never got the zombie thing myself.

I was also reminded of Monster by Christopher Pike (I had every book by Christopher Pike as a kid) due to slight similarities in the plot (small town flesh eating alien possession.) That book always made me crave steak too.

It was only fairly recently that I finally saw Alien. I hadn’t seen any of the sequels (except for AvP, which I actually saw first.) However my out-of-town neighbor “lent” me her Alien Quadrilogy DVD box set this weekend, so I was able to finally catch up on the series. My thoughts…

Aliens: Very very very cool. Gotta love a pissed-off maternal woman who is willing to fight a pissed-off maternal horrific monster with some taped-together guns and the missing link between a forklift and a mecha suit.

Alien 3: They killed Newt right off the bat, which ruined some of the coolness of the previous movie. And the leadworks trap was really confusing; I felt like I needed a map. But overall, I thought it was interesting.

Alien: Resurrection: I knew the movie wasn’t terribly great, but I was surprised how not terribly great I found Joss Whedon’s script to be. It was interesting to see how some characters paralleled the Firefly/Serenity crew… The violence-loving jackasses who end up as comic relief via clueless and/or blunt commentary (Johner & Jayne), the stoic and reliable military-type with impeccable aim (Christie & Zoe), and the eerie, more than human female with the tangled hair, the blank stare, and the ability to kick massive amounts of ass (Ripley & River.) Personally, I’m all for recycling great ideas, especially if the new work is much stronger than the old (as in this case.)

Dead Man’s Chest is The Empire Strikes Back. With a kraken. Unfortunately, the kraken isn’t nearly as impressive as the one in Tamora Pierce’s Wild Magic, which was much larger and sentient.

Overall, the movie wasn’t as tight as the original and I wished it hadn’t leaned so hard on rehashed jokes. I did enjoy it overall, especially when it went deeper into character chemistry that was only hinted at in the original. Great cliffhanger ending, too. Looking forward to the third one, which should be completely insane. Hopefully in a good way.

I may not be the biggest Superman fan around (I routinely refer to him as a putz), but I really wanted to be blown away by Superman Returns. Bryan Singer did such a fantastic job with the X-Men movies, Kevin Spacey was an amazing choice for Lex Luthor, Brandon Routh really looks the part, the effects look amazing… well, everyone has seen the commercials by now.

And while all those things held true, the movie just didn’t shine. Even for a comic book movie, there were some unbearably large plot holes that could have been patched with minimal effort. The movie felt too long. Did we really need a half hour of closeups of shocked Parker Posey (who looks far more like Lois Lane than Kate Bosworth) to clue us into the fact that she just might follow in the long, proud tradition of the defecting henchwench? I don’t remember Bryan Singer treating his audience like they needed everything spelled out in his other films. I wonder if the fault lies in the fact that this was a movie based around a single protagonist, while many of his others (The Usual Suspect and the X-Men films) were ensemble pieces with much more to focus on.

Kevin Spacey really stole the show. You could see his Lex Luthor working Very Bad Things out in his head, but he still played it straight. James Marsden made the classic odd man out character both likeable and functional (and you have to feel bad for him, competing against first Wolverine and now Superman for the girl.) I don’t feel like I can comment on Brandon Routh fairly at this point, as I would just end up comparing him to Christopher Reeve. Suffice it to say, I found him to be a fairly fitting choice, and I liked that the contacts and heavy makeup gave him a subtle too-perfect, non-human look.

Overall, not a bad movie, but when you find the retro opening credits to be the most exciting part, it’s not a great movie, either.

Tonight I pulled out my Batman Begins DVD. Now THAT is a great movie. Although oddly enough, I find myself wanting to see a crime movie featuring Lex Luthor and Kaiser Soze…

Last night was the LA screening for Can’t Stop The Serenity. This was only the third time I’ve seen Serenity, but it was definitely the best. The first time, opening day, was the same day I moved to LA, and I had been awake for well over 24 hours straight. The second time was at home on DVD, which always involves me multitasking, and thus “listening” more often then “watching.” This time I was really able to connect with it. And of course, being in a theater full of fans who laughed, cheered, and were deadly silent at the right points was as fun as always.

I ended up winning TWO raffle prizes… a SoCalBrowncoats postcard signed by Joss Whedon (sort of a random thing for him to sign, which I find amusing) and a Firefly soundtrack signed by the composer (his “signature” is print rather than cursive, which I also find a little amusing because all my handwriting is printed, though I do sign my name in cursive.) I think that autographs aren’t as cool when they aren’t personal/obtained in person (though the items I won do have some nice memories to go along with them.) There were two movie props and a pass to Flanvention II raffled off, as well as some smaller items.

Can’t Stop The Serenity is estimated to have raised over $38k so far for Equality Now, and many screenings haven’t submitted final totals yet. I’m still amazed by the whole thing. Can you imagine a better birthday present than a demonstration of how you have inspired so many people to try to make a positive difference in the world? Better than chocolate (but not by much.)

The Browncoats are quite a contrast to the Harry Potter fandom “biography” that a friend linked me to today. Quite a long read, but a really interesting look at what happens when a manipulative and apparently rather disturbed individual takes advantage of the volatility in a fandom, using it to propel herself the heights of popularity by creating a number of “sockpuppet” identities to both attack and support her in the various dramas she instigates over the course of several years.

Of course, the fact that any fandom would have subgroups that dislike or even despise each other based entirely on what “ships” each group favors disturbs me just a bit. I’ve never been a shipper myself (Bruce/Selina 4EVA!) because I am willing to accept almost any relationship that is well conceived and explained, canon or not. (Conversely, poorly justified relationships, canon or not, annoy me. Anakin/Padme anyone?) I don’t read a lot of fanfiction anymore (pretty much only fics that friends point out to me as “must reads”) but it always amused me to read fics with conflicting ships in a row.

So what’s the point of this rather long, rambling post? Simply put: as a writer, I would prefer to inspire people to join together and fight the good fight in the real world, rather than tear each other apart over an imaginary one.

One of the cool things about living in Hollywood is that you can go see a movie (say, X-Men: The Last Stand) at a well-known theater (say, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre) on opening night, and find out that the director was at the same showing. Of course, not knowing what Brett Ratner looks like, I couldn’t pick him out of the group he was in. But still, pretty cool.

As for the movie itself, I think it might be the first time that I wanted more action and less story in a movie. Because really, the story part was quite depressing. Although hearing Juggernaut say “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!” did a lot to cheer me up.

I’ve seen many a positive reaction to a trailer in movie theaters, but nothing quite like the frenzy during the preview of Snakes On A Plane. Wackiness all around.

I finally saw American Psycho last night, which has been on my must-watch list since I discovered what a fantastic actor Christian Bale was. I must say, he blew me away far more than he did in Batman Begins. As a character, Patrick Bateman was all over the map and Bale was just spot on throughout.

As for the rest of the movie, I thought it was hysterical. Not really in a laugh out loud way, but I found myself laughing out loud anyway. The business card pissing contest, Bateman’s music diatribes, the almost date with Jean, and so much more.

One thing that really struck me was that every time Bateman went through his morning routine, he was wearing a different kind of underwear. In a society where “boxers or briefs?” holds an absurd amount of meaning, what better way to showcase a character’s indecision about who he really is and how he fits into his world by having him alternate between the two, and boxer briefs, and silk boxers?

Of course, I noticed this strictly as a party interested in the artistic choices made in the film. I was not staring at Christian Bale’s ass. Much.

How appropriate that the fist day I get to LA, I go see a movie. I was determined to see Serenity on opening night and luckily a friend was going with a big group and was willing to give me a ride.

I have to say the Arclight is easily the most gorgeous movie theater I’ve ever seen. More of a theatre than a theater. It’s located around Sunset and Vine and has its own gift shop and bar. Very hoity toity.

As for the movie, I think I need to see it again before I can form a definitive opinion. I avoided as many spoilers as possible, so I wasn’t expecting Serenity to have as noticeable a time gap from the end of Firefly as it did. The movie was heavier on the sci-fi and lighter on the western than the TV show, which I found a bit disappointing (though it makes sense when trying to appeal to the mass moviegoing public.) And lets just say that at least one of the deaths is quite painful for fans of the show.

The one thing I can say definitively is that River kicks ass. In fact, River kicks an astonishing amount of ass. River could probably tear Buffy into tiny pieces and look delicate and graceful while doing so. The DVD purchase price will be worth it just for the fight scenes.