"Two Americas, Two Hollywoods"
LAST, JONATHAN V.
Two Americas, Two Hollywoods For once, the Democrats are confl icted about a labor dispute. BY JONATHAN V. LAST The Hollywood writers’ strike has placed the Democratic frontrunners in...
...By contrast, an actor or director can receive residual payouts anywhere between $20 million and $70 million for a single picture...
...This prevents writers from getting any share at all of the profi ts...
...Last year, that amounted to $3 billion in after-release payouts...
...Paramount Pictures chairman and CEO Brad Grey has given the maximum to Clinton (as well as to Dodd, McCain, and Giuliani, which makes him a reactionary by Hollywood standards...
...The answer is that the writers’ strike puts Democrats in a tight spot...
...Oren Aviv, president of Disney’s fi lm production, maxed out to Clinton alone...
...At DreamWorks, David Geffen gave to Obama and Edwards, while Jeffrey Katzenberg gave to those two, plus Hillary...
...in TV, networks must pay at least $20,956 for a 22-minute sitcom script and $30,823 for a 44-minute show...
...BY JONATHAN V. LAST The Hollywood writers’ strike has placed the Democratic frontrunners in something of a bind, forcing them to choose between unions and the entertainment industry executives who are some of their most important big-money contributors...
...Why such tepid support for the most signifi cant union action likely before November 2008...
...Barack Obama went furthest in his own short statement...
...The Guild’s demand is a test of whether corporate media corporations [oops] are going to give writers a fair share of the wealth their work creates or continue concentrating profi ts in the hands of their executives...
...At Warner Brothers, both the president and the chairman gave to Hillary and Obama, with the president, Alan Horn, also throwing money at Edwards...
...The studios sell advertising within these streams, but have wiggled around having to share this revenue with writers by labeling the streams “promotions” rather than “broadcasts...
...The strike was called on November 5. Within hours, the three top Democratic hopefuls released statements of support...
...After staying quiet for almost two weeks, Edwards attended a rally for the WGA at the NBC picket lines in Burbank last Friday...
...Profits from computer downloads of movies and TV shows are the most contentious issue...
...New Line’s CEO, Bob Shaye, maxed out his contributions to all three...
...That may partly explain the candidates’ reticence to stump for the Writers Guild the way they might have stumped for, say, the UAW...
...Their main point of confl ict with the Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Producers (which bargains on behalf of the movie and TV studios) was the royalties associated with downstream revenue...
...In fi lm, writers are guaranteed a minimum of $106,000 for a screenplay...
...as did her vice chairman, Yair Landau...
...TV shows are often canceled—writers rely on residuals to give them some income stability...
...From this river of cash, writers received only $121 million...
...The Writers Guild strike is, at heart, an attempt by writers to claim a small sliver of these two pies...
...But if the Democratic notion of “two Americas” is cloying, there are, without question, two Hollywoods...
...John Edwards went a bit further, contributing three sentences to the cause...
...It then urged the parties to resume bargaining...
...Their position is not unreasonable...
...And the Democrats are, for the most part, keeping quiet about it...
...So tight that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s offi ce will only say that she has no plans to say anything whatsoever about the strike...
...Sony’s film division chairman, Amy Pascal, gave the max to Obama, Jonathan V. Last is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...On the other hand, the management in Hollywood has given Clinton, Obama, and to a lesser extent, Edwards, barrels of money...
...Alternatively, studios allow viewers to stream TV shows (not movies, yet) from their websites...
...But the final irony is that the writers’ strike presents an actual instance of giant income disparity and economic unfairness...
...I stand with the writers,” he declared...
...The Sony Corporation’s chairman, Howard Stringer, has also maxed out his contributions to Clinton...
...The responses of Senators Clinton, Obama, and Edwards have been revealing...
...It wasn’t, perhaps, everything the Writers Guild might have hoped for, but it was better than the union got from Chris Dodd, Joe Biden, or Dennis Kucinich—none of whom as of Friday, November 16, had pronounced on the strike...
...in these cases the writers get a negligible portion of the take (a third of a cent for every dollar of profi t...
...The studios and networks report that the average working writer makes $200,000 a year...
...When asked whether any further demonstration of support for the strike was planned, the Clinton campaign simply re-emailed its original statement of quasi-solidarity...
...Another explanation may be that the writers are part of the overclass in the Democrats’ vision of the “two Americas...
...The two unions that make up the Writers Guild of America voted overwhelmingly (by over 90 percent of their 12,000 members) to authorize a walkout on October 18...
...And in the alternative universe of Hollywood, the writers really are the downtrodden...
...Currently, content is distributed on the Internet in two ways: Some movies and TV shows are purchased and downloaded through services such as iTunes or Amazon Unbox...
...Bill Richardson issued the most substantive, and thoughtful, support of the lot...
...Hillary Clinton’s two-sentence statement said, “I support the Writers Guild’s pursuit of a fair contract that pays them for their work in all mediums...
...The entire situation is richly ironic: Democrats, corrupted by big-corporate money, barely standing by a union composed of liberal, upper-middleclass scribblers...
...A strike has long been in the offing...
...And Hollywood certainly isn’t averse to giving out residuals...
...After their brief statements, Clinton and Obama fell silent...
...Because Hollywood writing is rarely steady—movie projects take a long time to complete, but then are fi nished...
...There are more examples—many, many more—and when you look down the list you see that nearly every powerful executive in the industry, from Peter Chernin and Kevin Reilly at Fox to Robert Wright at NBC/Universal to Nancy Reiss Tellem at CBS, has been giving to one or more of the big three Democrats...
...In practice, those numbers are usually doubled since the writer gets a large payoff for the fi rst rerun...
...In the entertainment industry, writing is a sometime thing, with about half of Writers Guild members unemployed at any given time...
...the average worker in Los Angeles County makes $52,572...
...Viacom’s Sumner Redstone and the Weinstein Company’s Harvey Weinstein gave exclusively to Clinton...
...Characteristically, he noted his own long history of strike support: “As someone who has walked picket lines with workers all across America and as a strong believer in collective bargaining, I hope that both sides are able to quickly reach a just settlement...
...A recent study of the fi lm industry by Global Media Intelligence suggested that studios give away as much as 25 percent of a fi lm’s profits in residual payments...
...Richard Cook, chairman of Walt Disney Studios, gave to both Clinton and Obama...
...When asked the same question, the Obama campaign did not respond...
...Clinton was scheduled to make a campaign stop in Los Angeles last Saturday but as of Friday had no public plans to do any events in support of the union...
...On the one hand, you would expect Democrats to rally to the side of any union, particularly a Hollywood union—particularly a Hollywood union with a legitimate gripe against giant corporate media conglomerates...
Vol. 13 • November 2007 • No. 11
