All I need to know about the writer’s strike…
The single best assessment I’ve seen of the current writer’s strike is Rob Long’s weekly commentary on KCRW, Martini Shot. He had this to say a few weeks ago.
The truth is, the web — that thing that brings us email and MySpace and cats playing the piano on YouTube
— has a kind of WalMart effect on the entertainment choices offered to
the audience: there’s a lot more to choose from, most of it’s pretty
awful, and all of it is going to be a lot cheaper. When you combine the
digitization of content with unlimited bandwidth, what you get is a
cheaper, more efficient system. And Brentwood was not built on cheap,
or efficient. This town — and all of us who work here — all of us,
writers, agents, actors, lawyers, studio executives, all of us here in
the second grade classroom called Hollywood — have a stake in
preserving this great big slushy inefficient mess of a system, that
makes pilots that never get aired, buys scripts that never get
produced, makes movies that no one sees, produces series that get
cancelled.
I feel like we’re all hanging out in the hardware store on Main
Street, bickering, while they’re building the SuperWalMart out where
the interstate meets the state highway. To the writers — to my
colleague — I say, the web is going to force us to radically alter our
expectations about residuals. We will probably end up getting less.
That’s what market efficiencies do. Let’s figure out how to adjust to
that.
To the studios, I say make a deal. Swallow it, and make a deal.
You may think you can kill the WGA, and you probably can, but it’ll be
the first part of a murder-suicide pact, and if you don’t believe me,
call up somebody in the record business. If you can find one. The web’s
been visiting with them, too. Those kids on YouTube and Facebook aren’t
going to make you rich; your box office is dwindling; your ratings are
dropping; Guitar Hero is not fattening Sumner Redstone’s wallet.
We’re all in the second grade together. Let’s stop throwing up on each other.
That’s pretty damn smart.