On strike since May 2, the Writers Guild of America announced a tentative agreement between the union and major studios that could end the strike.  WGA East and WGA West, in a Sept. 24 statement, said: “What we have won in this contract — most particularly, everything we have gained since May 2 —

Picketing has been suspended and writers are returning to work. The rank and file will be voting on the contract from Oct. 2 to Oct. 9.

While the language was being finalized, the union asked its members to join a picket line of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. The actors represented by SAG-AFTRA are still on strike.

The new agreement reportedly addresses writers’ demands for a livable income, minimum staffing levels and guarantees their jobs will not be eliminated by artificial intelligence.

  • albigu
    72·
    1 year ago

    Are you at all familiar with American movies?

    It’d be hard not to, yeah. Hundreds of TV shows and movies per year, a lot of them glorifying the war machine, but also a lot of them about some talking dog getting lost in a big city, as well as documentaries, educational entertainment, and stuff like that. It is very simplistic to assume that their profession in their entirety or maybe even majority work at propagating imperialism, jingoism or white supremacism. In my experience with artists in general, and writers in specific, they seem to have a larger portion of them critical of those things than the broader public. The comparison to literal Nazis is simply not apt there.

    Why are you trying to paint these people as poor? Why are you focusing on these people?

    I’m focusing on them because they’re the focus of the thread and the strike. Due to the mini-room system a lot of them had to be working for 3 or 4 production at any given time just to make ends meet. Not exactly about writers, but only 2% of actors manage to make a living exclusively out of acting. The vast majority of TV and movie writers are not rich, as usual in most artistic professions (or professions in general).

    And they will continue to be low success because they don’t toe the line.

    The success of B movies doesn’t matter. They’re specifically not meant to be blockbusters, they’re just small projects that some people might enjoy, the artists might want to produce, and helps keep them alive. A lot of my favourite movies are random B movies I stumbled upon, and the purpose of art is not only to become massively rich.

    This is a cartoon from my childhood forty years ago.

    I recommend you watch it before disregarding it. It’s much better than the old one, and very different too. It’s not some great work of communist art, but it was neat.

    Tell me, how poor was the writer who wrote this She-Ra shit? Do you even know?

    Sadly I don’t have access to their bank accounts, but I can make some inference. Let’s pick Sonja Warfield who wrote 6 episodes of the first season, and is not credited for anything else that year. The listed median rate in the WGA website is $15,750 per episode, so taking that one times 6, she made $94,500 that year. AFAIK that is a significant amount even for living in Los Angeles, but keep in mind that she wrote almost half of the season, and that series was on the front screen of Netflix for like 3 months. From what I understand, writers barely got any residuals from streaming, so she wouldn’t be making much more than that.

    Now, it’s possible that she is already very rich outside of her writing earnings, but that has no bearing on whether writers are inherently rich. And, since it’s median, at least half of the writers make less than that, specially since they have way less episode-writing credits. No wonder the strike authorisation vote got over 90% approval, rich people don’t usually go on strike.

    I don’t want to be mean, but Mao’s quote of “no investigation, no right to speak” seems pretty apt here. Just because you assume something (i.e. that writers are all rich), doesn’t make it true, and I recommend you take some time to read and learn about worker movements, their plights and demands, before throwing them all under the bus.