I Stand With The Wga - Tumblr Posts
sometimes i forget how fucking much i hate rich people and capitalism but then the writers & actors strike happened
Imagine actually being so evil that you'd rather make sure your writers suffer financially instead of just paying them the pay they deserve. Hell truly has some seats reserved already, holy shit.
This is important. Support the Strike. The Writers are in need of our support.
I was on a plane this weekend, and I was chatting with the woman sitting next to me about an upcoming writer’s strike. “Do you really think you’re mistreated?” she asked me.
That’s not the issue at stake here. Let me tell you a little something about “minirooms.”
Minirooms are a way of television writing that is becoming more common. Basically, the studio will hire a small group of writers, 3-6 or so, and employ them for just a few weeks. In those few weeks (six weeks seem to be common), they have to hurriedly figure out as much about the show as they can – characters, plots, outlines for episodes. Then at the end of the six weeks, all the writers are fired except for the showrunner, who has to write the entire series themselves based on the outlines.
This is not a widespread practice, but it has become more common over the past couple of years. Studios like it because instead of paying for a full room for the full length of the show, they just pay a handful of writers for a fraction of the show. It’s not a huge problem now, but the WGA only gets the chance to make rules every three years – if we let this go for another three years and it becomes the norm? That would be DEVASTATING for the tv writing profession.
Do I feel like I’m mistreated? No. I LOVE my job! But in a world of minirooms, there is no place for someone like me – a mid-level writer who makes a decent living working on someone else’s show (I’d like to be a showrunner someday, but for now I feel like I still have a lot to learn, and my husband and I are trying to start a family so I like not being support rather than the leader for now). In a miniroom, there are only two levels – the handful of glorified idea people who are already scrambling to find their next show because you can’t make a decent living off of one six-week job (and since there are fewer people per room, there are fewer jobs overall, even at the six-week amount), and the overworked, stressed as fuck showrunner who is going to have to write the entire thing themselves. Besides being bad for me making a living, I also just think it’s plain bad for television as an art form – what I like about TV is how adaptable it is, how a whole group of people come together to tell a story better than what any of them could do on their own. Plus the showrunner can’t do their best work under all of that pressure, episode after episode, back to back. Minirooms just…fucking suck.
The WGA is proposing two things to fix this – a rule that writers have to be employed for the entire show, and a rule tying the number of writers in the room to the number of episodes you have per season. I don’t think it’s unreasonable. It’s the way shows have run since the advent of television. It’s only in the last couple of years that this has become a new thing. It’s exploitative. It squeezes out everyone except showrunners and people who have the financial means to work only a few months a year. It makes television worse. And that is the issue in this strike that means everything to me, and that is why I voted yes on the strike authorization vote.
Imagine actually being so evil that you'd rather make sure your writers suffer financially instead of just paying them the pay they deserve. Hell truly has some seats reserved already, holy shit.
I want the writer’s strike to last until they get everything they demand and more. I want the SAG strike to last until AI is entirely forbidden across the board in the entire industry. I want CGI artists to unionize and strike. I want animators to strike. I want composers and directors and designers and VAs and techies and producers and stage hands and game devs and programmers and recording artists to strike.
I want every aspect of the entertainment industry brought to a grinding halt for months or even years to take it from the corps and put it back in the hands of the artists.
Personally I'd rather see the entire Hollywood movie industry fall apart than the strike fail. Movies won't stop being made, they will just stop being sponsored by worker abuse, and if that means no more millions of dollars worth epics then so be it idc
EDIT: OK this is gaining way too much attention while being vague and hyperbolic and ranty so let's make one thing clear - I am NOT lauding projects which don't adhere to union requirements, this is about the fact that big studios pretend like they are the only ones who can give you entertainment and if they can't make projects, you'll be sad and bored forever, and also that the only worthwhile pieces of media are projects worth an ungodly amount of money. This is obviously a lie, since there have been studios that agreed to work under new union requirements, and that's what I mean by "movies won't stop being made" - there will always always always be projects, big and small, that won't ignore what unions have to say. And in a dreamlike hypothetical future where big Hollywood industry falls apart, other smaller and more manageable studios will rise to take their place, and they'll have a cautionary tale on what will happen to them if they try to push it again.
"oh no what will I do without my favorite shows?" "how am I supposed to function without new content immediately all the time?" ""the writers are being so selfish what about MY show?" "what about MY mental health and MY comfort characters?"
This. Isn't. About. YOU.
your childish and insatiable desire for more content and bigger content all the time is a captialist need that has been bred into you and is borderline addictive behavior. didnt any of you ever read the lorax? its not JUST about trees and industrialization but mental and creative industry too. it's a story about a mindset; biggering and biggering.
grow up and read a book. i bet you wont even finish the odyssey before the strike is over. and i bet you wont be so thrilled about the idea of AI after reading Frankenstein.
Imagine actually being so evil that you'd rather make sure your writers suffer financially instead of just paying them the pay they deserve. Hell truly has some seats reserved already, holy shit.
After finding out that AI has supposedly been taking data on how to write better from gdocs and other online documents apps I am going to write exclusively on my typewriter, the backs of old papers, or my own goddam skin. Elsewise I invite every to bomb the sites with omegaverse fanfiction and watch the big execs shit themselves when they see what their ai is churning out.
Picture a cake. Even if you don't really like cake, just picture your favorite flavor of cake. Now, picture your favorite frosting. Pretend it's the most amazing frosting in the world. You absolutely love it. When you put your favorite cake flavor together with the most impeccable arrangement of the frosting, it's the best cake in the entire world. But here's the thing. The frosting, no matter how amazing and delicious, is always going to be lacking something without the cake. The cake is the backbone of the confection. If the cake is terrible, dry, and disgusting, the frosting is going to suffer because of this. If the cake is made with crappy ingredients and hastily slopped together because of a time crunch, it's not going to be a good cake. And maybe that's not the baker's fault, but the people telling the bakers to cut costs and bake faster. And maybe the people in charge are trying to use more and more machines so that the cake is mass-produced...but not nearly as good as the phenomenal cake that the baker could make with the proper ingredients and time.
Now replace the word cake with the word script.
The writers are the backbone of a show or movie. No matter how good the acting, CGI, special effects, music, etc. are, it's going to be not as good because of the lack of a good script.
The writers are quite literally the reason that these big movie corporations are able to make money. And, as an actor myself, I can say firsthand that crappy scripts are the worst to act with, because it's hard to connect with the characters and phrases when it's just not flowing properly or has depth.
Don't replace writers with AI. Don't pay your writers minimum wage.
They are the reason that TV shows and movies are good.
Actors, CGI artists, composers, set designers, costume designers, we are the frosting. We build off what the writers have made.
Appreciate writers.
HECK YEAAAAAH
[image ID: the Destiel news announcement meme. the above screenshot shows Castiel saying "I love you" and the below screenshot shows Dean saying "The Writers Guild of America has reached a tentative deal with the studios." end ID]
GUYS