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.

Playwriting was one of the best workshops I took while working on my MFA at Emerson. It was also the most aggravating. I was focused primarily on screenwriting, which was all tight structure and tighter dialogue and plotting everything out down to the tiniest little detail in advance. Playwriting was all about letting things flow and meander where they wanted in the hopes that they would eventually come together into something beautiful, perhaps even coherent. It was a very organic process. Scary as hell, too.

But my playwriting professor, Betsy Carpenter, must have been doing something right. Her class swept the playwriting fellowship awards at least three years in a row, with the winners (myself included) receiving full productions from the very same theater department that vastly outnumbered us in number of entries. And this was despite a deadline that was increasingly pushed back to cripple the workshop and us sacrificing most of class one week for a “field trip” to the pub next door to watch a few innings of the Red Sox/Yankees game (a trip that was both completely dry and top secret, of course.)

Betsy ended up being my graduate thesis adviser. As my thesis was a screenplay and I was working on it long distance to avoid paying another year’s rent in Boston, I was a little concerned about how things would work out. Betsy was great, in an incredibly odd way, but she was rather unpredictable too, much like playwriting itself. It was a a bit of a scary prospect.

Scarier when I didn’t hear back from from her about my preliminary draft for a few months.

When I did finally hear from her, Betsy told me that the screenplay would certainly pass the thesis defense in its current state, but she thought that I could do better. It was tepid, as she put it.

She had two words of advice. “Watch Brazil.”

So I did. And she was right. Brazil showed me exactly what was wrong with my script and exactly what I needed to do to fix it. In the end, there was very little “defense” needed for my thesis defense.

I was in Boston for two weeks to wrap up all of my thesis business. During that time, Betsy invited me to not only sit in on, but participate in two classes and three readings for her current playwriting workshop. She told me several times how great it was to have me back. It was great to be back.

I just received word from my friend Alex, a classmate and friend from the playwriting workshop, that Betsy Carpenter passed away this morning. She had been undergoing cancer treatment for several years. I don’t think I’d known that.

I hadn’t spoken to her since I finished my thesis. I kept meaning to e-mail her but I was waiting until I had some news to tell her about my play. I wish I had dropped her a note to say hello, to let her know that I did make it out to LA after all, to tell her that I have never gotten better advice crammed into two small words.

I’m debating on whether I should start querying literary agents again now or hold off for a bit. Unfortunately, I waited until after My Super Ex-Girlfriend came out and bombed. Since my screenplay Struck is in a similar genre, I’ll most likely be completely ignored at the moment. Not that querying agents isn’t almost always a total waste of time and money in the first place. But maybe I’ll have better non-luck if I wait a few months for it to blow over.

I was looking at going to Lobster Alice, a play starring Nicholas Brendon (Xander from BtVS) and Noah Wyle at The Blank theater down the street. It turns out the theater accepts play submissions, and I decided to submit Goodbye Dolly. I’ve been waiting almost two years to hear from the publisher and I’m sick of just sitting on one of the best/most successful things I’ve written to date. Besides, the play I’m currently working on is most likely going to be catered towards the improv group I’m in, so I won’t really be looking to shop that one around at first.

Writing Project Status

Brickgirl & Oscar: Plugging along well. Four strips posted, ten completed, and I don’t even know how many more scripted. Readership is still fairly low, but then again, I haven’t done a lot of promotion. I have gotten a very positive response from readers thus far. I considered increasing to two new strips a week, but going to hold off on that for now, as I don’t want to neglect all my other projects…

Chimera (TV pilot spec): First draft done, working on revisions.

Goodbye Dolly (Feature spec adaptation): First draft done. It’s craptastic, but it’s done.

Untitled Stage Play Project: Minimal progress since I started about 18 months ago, but stuff is still a brewin’ in the ole noggin.

Other writing news: Spoke with Baker’s Plays about Goodbye Dolly (the stage play version) which they’ve had for 19 months now. Seems that last year, they replaced the entire editorial staff, and the consideration for publication process had to be restarted for everything. My play has been cleared by at least one reader, though, and I should hear something back by late summer.

Had a bit of an incident with a literary manager about a month ago, but unfortunatly, it was not really legit.

Job Status

Starting next Wednesday, I’ll be working as a content writer for a search engine optimization firm. It’s not creative, persay, but it is writing. More important, it isn’t taking photos of faucets in a dingy warehouse with no windows in downtown LA where the temperature has been hitting 90 degrees in the afternoons even with two AC units running.

Other Creative Stuff

I will be performing with an as of yet unnamed, possibly all-female improv group in coming months. I’ve always loved improv, but never considered myself to be exceptional at it. Better learn fast… we’re looking at six rehearsals before the first performance.

Hey, I’m still alive! I know it’s been a while since I posted here, but life in CA has far busier than I anticipated. And let’s face it… hardly anyone reads this thing anyway.

I rather like living in LA, as long as I focus on the fact that I’m surrounded by many creative and talented people and ignore the fact that many of them are floundering in desperation at all of the closed doors, the inability to do what they really want with their lives, the fact that they can’t afford food, etc. Luckily I’m not quite suffering from the third one myself. Currently, I’m working in photography/web design for a plumbing hardware distributor (printing orders for faucets and printing labels to mail said faucets most of the time.) It’s a job. It’ll do for now.

Writing wise… Overloaded on projects as always. Working on a screenplay adaptation of my first stage play Goodbye Dolly (finished a rather pathetic first draft of that, but have some excellent plans for the rewrite), stage play #2 that sat around dormant for a year and is now seeing some action, and what WAS formerly screenplay #2 that in the past few days became TV series pilot #1. Will probably be renamed from Project Changeling (which sounds too much like Project Runway) to Chimera (which no one can say correctly.) There are a smattering of other projects on the backburner, but I’m pretending they don’t exist at the moment, lest I give myself an aneurysm.

Hollywood is interesting. I like my neighborhood… easy to find parking compared to the surrounding areas and the Scientologists have security people standing around at all hours (I THINK that makes me feel safer, though I’m not 100% sure.) Movie tickets are hella expensive; unless it’s a big event, best to go to one of the surrounding cities and pay $8 instead of $15. I’ve been to the Arclight, Gramanns, and El Capitan in Hollywood. The latter was to see Chronicles of Narnia, and as they had all sorts of costumes, props, models, production art, etc on display, that was the ticket I most felt was worth the price.

Other randomness… In & Out Burgers are very good, though the fries caught fire in my microwave. Target is a great place to buy a new microwave. Upright Citizens Brigade has some great shows, and many of them are free. Traffic isn’t as bad as I expected. The price of food is worse than I expected. Drinks are even more expensive than food, so best to do your drinking before you go out. Having a boring job unrelated to what I want to do with my life means I’m still doing better than a lot of people out here. I’ve lost my fear of earthquakes and gained a fear of being trapped in my car for hours, unable to find a parking space.

Sometimes you just need the right person to suggest a title. My superhero satire screenplay finally has a name.

Struck.

I’ve said before that adaptation is a real art. To make a story work sucessfully in another medium is one of the hardest things I’ve encountered to date. Especially adapting your own work. That said, I have so far made some good progress on the film treatment for Goodbye Dolly. Still not sure how the second and third acts are going to work (or where the first ends) but I do feel I’ve gotten a very good grasp on the movie versions of most of the characters.

But I do have to say that Monsters Inc was NEVER NEVER NEVER meant to be a Disney on Ice show. My mom won tickets, and while the costumes were interesting, it just didn’t work. I’m surprised no one was killed skating in those things.

Sent out query letters to agencies about my script, six snail mail and one e-mail. The most nerve-wracking part was actually calling the agencies and finding out who to address the queries to (and also finding out two weren’t accepting queries at all/)

I’m not sure why I’m finding this process so nerve-wracking. It’s as though instead of just saying not interested, I’m expecting them to show up at my door, burn my script, smash my computer, and shoot me in the head execution style.

Hmm. That would make a good short story. Or a comic strip.

Pulled myself together and dug up the list of agents who accept query letters that I compiled a while back. I’ll do some more research on them and narrow down the list if need be, then hopefully send out the letters next week. I know that query letters are often a waste of time, but it is a more affordable option than contests or moving. I’ve got the script and the logline, so it’s worth a shot.

I found out my script was passed on (I don’t know exactly who passed on it, since it was my professor who was dealing with everything.) Now I’ve dealt with plenty of rejection as a writer before, but this is the first time that I don’t know what to do next. The fact is that I have no connections and am pretty much dependent on what my old prof can do for me. And with no job prospects either at the moment, it’s a scary place to be. Things would be better it I could just figure out a way to get to L.A.