All the rebuttals I could find to it were straw-man attacks and ad hominem smearing, so I figured that means it's probably fairly accurate.
The only valid counter-argument (I could find) to the math was pointing out that $20 is the total retail sale on a movie, and that the studio only makes 50% to 70% of that, the rest going to the retailer.
That said, if every DVD sold for $20 (at retail) results in 4 cents going to the writers, that means... (does some math) ... the thing that's being sold was your idea in the first place, and you get 1/5th of 1 percent.
Worldwide sales of DVDs have been less than 20 BILLION per year. Feels funny saying "less". It still sounds like a ton. 1/5th of 1 percent of 20 billion is 40 million. (And if the studio is making just 60% of 20 billion, well that's 12 billion that the studio brings in, aka 300 times the screenwriter's share).
$40 million sounds pretty good. I'd like a share of 40 million. But so would the 12,000 members of the screenwriter's guild. If they all took even shares of that (they don't, as it's based on how many DVDs they contributed to, and how many copies of those DVDs sold, but we'll pretend it's even distribution since more precise data isn't readily available) it would be about $3,333 per writer per year. What they're proposing is roughly doubling that, to between $6,000 and $7,000 in residuals a year per writer.
According to the US Department of Labor the average yearly salary of such a writer is $50,000 in the TV and Radio industries, and $95,000 in the Movie industry. So while it's a 100% increase in residuals, it's only a 3% to 6% raise in overall wages. That doesn't sound terribly greedy to me.
And, as the video said, at any given time, roughly 48% of the guild is unemployed / between jobs. This kinda works both ways. On one hand it means they're probably realistically getting a more than 7% raise out of the change to residuals structure if it goes through, more like 10 to 13%. On the other hand it points out that those average yearly income figures could be optimistically high since they are calculated (again, according to the US Dept of Labor)...
by multiplying the hourly mean wage by a "year-round, full-time" hours figure of 2,080 hoursSo, while we like to tell ourselves that this is "rich people whining" and that they already make several hundreds of thousands of dollars a year so they don't deserve any more, they're not really THAT far above us. I think.
And what better pinnacle of success do we have in our culture than "dude, like millions of people watch my show and thousands bought my DVD!"? Short of reverting to barter or a flat communist wage system, shouldn't successful creative people be making above average wages? I'd rather pay an artist than a CEO.
So I say "good for them". I wish them success in their strike because every penny in the pockets of a writer is one less penny in the pockets of Rupert Murdoch.
4 comments:
Damn straight.
Give them thier money! It is not unreasonable for them to want a piece of the pie, or in this case a few crumbs, from the billions made off of their work.
I agree and disagree with all this. And have posted many opinions in many places about what I think. Honestly I don't really give a rats ass. However, if the writers feel so put upon (and I am not sure they are) there is this thing called the internet and they should look into it.
Many people are archiving self made fame on this fancy internet thing. With the talent of the writers and a few friends they can have 100% of the profits. They can do something like this online series called "Sanctuary".
Not to support the studios, because I hate everything they do, but they do "make it all happen". They do the promotion, take the risk, and get the product in peoples hands. The writer, well, just writes. Often they are not even creating anything just converting someone else's work. Let's say from a book to a screen play.
I could care less either, however if the studios they write for are collecting royalties off of their work they are entitiled to some also. Just like the actors get "residuals" from replays of their works. The writers have the right to withhold their work until an agreement is reached.
While Sanctuary is cool idea I doubt most of the TV writers posses the production skills to produce their own online series and I doubt even if it were succesful they'd match their current incomes. After all, the strike is about economics.
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