Why We’re On Strike

We negotiated this formula for DVDs back in 1988, and I think most members of the guild agree that in terms of desired do-overs, it ranks with President Bush's decision to award L. Paul Bremer the Presidential Medal of Freedom. We had been asked by the studios to take a smaller share than we wanted because the video market was new and uncertain and our doing so would help grow the industry. (It sure did. That sector of the industry has boomed, helping many studios coast through bad years on the strength of their video libraries.) To redress what most writers feel was a bad deal, we have asked in this negotiation for 4 more cents per DVD—requiring only the sale of 750 DVDs to fill our gas tanks.

But there is a much bigger issue at stake, because it concerns where the future—and a good deal of the present—is: the Internet. The studios can now sell you a movie, or an episode of a TV series, or a whole series of series, right over your computer. Not only is it convenient for you, it has dramatically reduced the studios' costs: they need not make a videotape, with its plastics and tape and spools and boxes. They need not print and package a DVD, with their team of overzealous shrink-wrappers that make your average DVD harder to get into than Princeton. They have no shipping costs, no storage costs, only the movie or TV show that already exists.

With their costs substantially reduced, this would be the right time to correct the old imbalance of the DVD rate and give writers a share more fairly in line with the level of our contribution. But the studios are not looking to find a more equitable residual rate—it seems they are hoping that the new media will allow them to do away with the idea of residuals altogether.

Right now, if you go online and watch a streaming version of a TV show, the company that owns that property is getting paid by the advertisers whose commercials appear at the top of it. Just like TV, but with one difference: the writers are paid no residual, not even the four cents. The companies say they don't need to pay us for this: it's "promotional." By that I suppose they mean that it promotes the size of their earnings from smaller to larger.

The companies keep saying, "We don't know yet what the new media is." But the concept is very old: movies and TV shows will appear on a screen of some sort (TV, computer, iPod, phone) and people will pay to watch them, either through a direct downloading fee or by watching ads. The companies will make money doing it; otherwise they will not do it. If the companies really thought there was no money to be made in "new media," they'd give us a percentage of it. (Anyone who doubts the companies' faith in the money-making opportunities of the Internet should go to YouTube and look at "Voices of Uncertainty," a pricelessly droll exposure of the way the moguls say one thing to their stockholders and another to us.)

Some friends have asked me, "You'll still have your residuals from TV—isn't the Internet just extra?" But that's the sleight of hand at work here: because of the Internet, networks rerun shows far less often than they used to and put them on the Internet instead, where they can be streamed and bought. There is no contract or definition yet of how we should be paid for that.