Blogus Groundhogus

The last writers’ strike was in 1988, and I had been a screenwriter for about fifteen minutes. Welcome to the team – now, act natural and do nothing.

I had sold my first screenplay, which is to say it had been “optioned.” They didn’t actually “buy” the script; they got the exclusive right to buy it should they ever actually begin to film the movie, which they know is always a long shot. In addition to the option, however, they had hired me as an employee to rewrite my own script – standard contract procedure - and this is what they needed me for. And this service I could not provide. The producers called me frantically the day before the strike. “You haven’t joined the Writer’s Guild yet, have you?” they pleaded hopefully.

But I had.

Going from being basically an unemployed screenwriter to being a working screenwriter on strike didn’t feel very different. I was living in Chicago at the time, not L.A., and there was no picket line for me to walk. It was a little bewildering to have my accelerating future tugged out from under me so abruptly, but I loved having the street cred. I was a working Hollywood screenwriter. I had no clue what that meant because I wasn’t really working, but I liked it. And I liked being a part of a Union.

As an independent writer in Chicago I had tried to form associations with others of my kind. I wanted to better understand things like group insurance and tax deductions. One group meeting I had attended (Tim Kazurinsky was there! Hi, Tim) featured a tax attorney who advised us that as writers we drew on our own lives and experiences for material, so everything we did was tax deductible. Everything. Our lives and our work were one thing. He admitted that, IRS-wise speaking, this was an aggressive position to take, but in terms of summing up what it means to be a writer – or any kind of artist, for that matter – he was dead on.

Writers like their independence, depend on it in most ways. But we need each other, too. We need to know that there are others who understand what we go through, who validate our sanity. But, most of all, we need each other to keep from being walked all over. Writers in Hollywood are outwardly appreciated by almost everybody, and inwardly resented by most of those people. After all, everyone knows how to “write.” We’ve all been doing it since first grade. Writers are somehow seen as the obstruction between the producers and their hit movie, a necessary evil, and sometimes, an evil imposed on them by a power-hungry union.

Thanks to our ability to collectively bargain, we writers have been given, not fortunes, but the possibility of normal middle-class lives. Like actors, who were once no more than glorified beggars, screenwriters have the possibility of a security that really does help promote consistent output and creative risk-taking. If you look at both sides of this strike’s divide, it is not the Guild that is being power hungry; it is not the Guild that is being greedy.

In 1988 Louise was taking her spring semester of architecture school in Rome. Once it was clear that the strike was going to last longer than a week or two, I chose to do my picketing on Piazza Navona and the Campo di Fiori. Best strike I’d ever been in. This latest strike, almost twenty years later, I once again find myself living in a place other than Los Angeles, and even though Santa Fe isn’t Rome it’s not half bad. Don’t get me wrong: I have stuff to sell – I can’t pay my bills unless I sell it - and would hope this will be over soon. But I also hate being walked on and pushed around. I need food but I also need dignity. By offering an unconscionably small piece of the pie to screenwriters, the studios reveal their blindness to the resentment they create, and to the destructive quality that resentment introduces to the necessary community collaboration that is movie-making.

And, therefore, my friends, I do support the Guild and I support the strike.

Filed under: Uncategorized by danny