Student screenwriters have a stake in outcome of strike

BY RICHARD WALTER

In the early 1970s, while I was still a student at another film school here in town (its name escapes me), the Writers Guild went on strike. I loved it. I was merely a student and not, therefore, rudely and summarily compelled to abandon any post.

The bright side of student writing is that you can't be fired. I was reminded of this several days prior to the commencement of the present strike, when, at a meeting of the guild downtown, I was pleased to see hundreds of our own UCLA screenwriting alumni in attendance.

When the strike was officially called, I sent our current crop of Westwood tyros the following e-mail: "During the strike you may be approached by producers suggesting the strike offers splendid employment opportunities for new writers who are not yet Guild members. Nothing could be further from the truth."

I added: "To attempt to launch a career by working as a scab is an exercise in folly, a recipe for exploitation, frustration and failure. ... We recommend students respect the rules of the guild they hope one day to join."

The issues are numerous but one supersedes all others: the Internet. Film, television and the Internet are merging. Audiences increasingly engage their television shows and movies as data streams sent to their computer. Even if they're looking at an upscale 42-inch plasma screen, what they're viewing is likely downloaded from the Web.

When a writer writes a book, she makes money in the form of a royalty payment each time a copy sells. When a songwriter writes a song, she is paid for every copy of the sheet music, and every performance and recording. When a TV show is re-run, the writer is paid again in the form of a "residual."

This was not always the case. Prior to 1962 there were no residuals. The writers of the "I Love Lucy" series, which has earned billions of dollars over a half-century of re-runs, have not earned another nickel beyond the couple of thousand dollars they received for the original episode. This retro-arrangement is, alas, precisely what the producers propose for film and TV content distributed via the Internet.

The Internet is not the future. It is now. DVDs are already history. The notion of traveling to a location to rent or purchase an object that has embedded into it the complex patterns of zeros and ones that constitute today's digitized films and TV programs is as primitive as Neanderthals warming their hands around the campfire. (Netflix already distributes its product via Web downloads.)

It took 15 years of struggle to win residuals for TV; today's writers are not willing to wait that long to reap the fruit of their labor when it appears on the Internet.

Today's struggle is also far less meaningful to old fogies like me and my colleagues than it is to our students, whose careers will be directly affected by the issue. It is gratifying in the extreme to see them out on the picket line with their teachers and mentors, supporting the cause that will serve not them alone but also their eventual audiences.

Walter is a professor of screenwriting at the School of Theater, Film and Television.