I get this writer's block, it comes as quite a shock

The FireDogLake Editorz (esp. Dean M.) have come up with a great video supporting the striking WGA writers:

Song by Matthew Grimm, video by Dean M. and the FDL Editorz

We've set up a tool that allows you to select your favorite TV show and send an email directly to the network executive and CEO in charge, telling them to negotiate in good faith with the writers and pay them a fair wage.

You can find it here.

This is a great, easy to direct your displeasure where it truly belongs: the executives, studios, and other content owners.

Here are some points from that page:

• Sumner Redstone of CBS says, "Viacom will double its revenues this year from digital."

• Les Moonves of CBS claimed, "when five million people watch CSI on the internet, "We will get paid for it regardless... We're going to get paid no matter where you get it from." (He projected a two billion dollar profit from that show alone.)

• Disney's (ABC) Annual Report reads, "The popularity of the ABC.com player adds to the Company's considerable success in monetizing its biggest hits."

• Yet the Alliance of Television and Motion Picture Producers (AMPTP) says that the internet and new media markets are too iffy, too conjectural to give writers a fair piece of.

• These positions are contradictory, and make no sense

• When Big Media doesn't get paid, it's called "piracy." When the writers don't get paid, it's "promotion."

Sumner Redstone's Viacom is also the parent company of Paramount Studios, so he is in charge of all their film and TV output. He's the one closing Paramount's historical scoring stage I mentioned here last week. This is where, since 1929, virtually all of Paramount's sound has been recorded, including most of Bing Crosby's work, and such films as Psycho, so I certainly have no love for him.

So he's a bastard from several angles.

Just take this job and shove it, I ain't workin here no more

According to the convoluted logic of this editorial, the striking WGA writers are hypocrites because they don't hate illegal immigrants, or something:

What's the difference between an illegal immigrant on a job and a "scab" that crosses a picket line? After all, aren't people both merely seeking work where they can find it? Aren't both willing to toil at a lower wage in an effort to feed their families?

The difference – at least in the ongoing strike by the Writers Guild of America – is Hollywood liberalism and the bicoastal 213/212 area-code universes that ideologically feed it.

For what the strike by the WGA has revealed yet again is that outrage among the Los Angeles-Manhattan intelligentsia over corporate greed, unfair labor practices, stagnating wages and vanishing job security is directly related to the income and education level of those threatened.

Consider for a moment the hundreds of thousands of Californians who have been forced from jobs in construction, landscaping, auto body repair, cable installation and a host of other jobs by an alliance of employers and an ethnocentric lobby that's hungry for demographic power.

Listen, idiot, everyone, me included, whose income derives from the Hollywood entertainment industry is worried about our jobs being outsourced as productions and even music scoring are going overseas.

And the main reason for that is bloated artist salaries, producers' bottom lines, and corporate greed. By the time production has wrapped, and Tom Cruis's salary of $25mil has been paid, producers seek to cut costs by a few thousand dollars and send animation, music scoring, and many other post-production tasks to Asia and Eastern Europe. And our world, that of crafts and trades, technicians and engineers, is one of the very few that has proven resistant to the corporate drive for hiring illegals, because of one word: unions.

Yep, the dreaded communist-front unions and guilds here in Hollywood police their own membership, while attempting to keep a living wage available for members.

The right-wing outrage and toadyism present in the editorial is staggering.

Mr Writer, why don't you tell it like it is?

John Bowman, WGA negotiating committee Chairman (full disclosure: I know John)

Jonathan V. Last over at Galley Slaves has a good explanation of the WGA strike:

* Unions aren't always the greatest things in the world and often they're quite destructive and the source of tons of inefficiency. That said, they can be the provider of important protections and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.

* In this particular fight, the Writer's Guild has a pretty reasonable position: There is an emerging delivery system for content in the form of digital downloads. Under current terms, the studios classify revenues from downloads not as money derived from the airing of creative content (which would mean that it would have to be shared with the creators), but as ancillary income from the promotion of content. In other words, they classify the downloaded content as a commercial for the broadcast content, just to get around paying royalties.

We saw the ur example of this last summer when Battlestar Galactica filmed mini "webisodes" of original content to be aired on the Sci-Fi Channel's website. Sci-Fi contended that these webisodes weren't "content," per se, but were simply long, extended commercials. That had actors. And scripts. And special effects. And plot continuity that tied into the series.

* The WGA wants to reserve a portion of that revenue stream for when/if digital delivery becomes profitable. The studios insist that it isn't profitable now, and probably won't be in the future. But if they really believed that, they'd give the WGA what they want, since 5% of nothing is nothing.

* So the studios are being less than fair and honest on at least two points. From a moral perspective, then, the writers are on the side of the angels.

There's more, I recommend reading the whole thing.

And go to That's all.