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The United Auto Workers have gone on strike: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-auto-union-strike-three-detroit-three-factories-2023-09-15/
What happens if Ford and GM simply say: "okay, you're fired"? This seems to have quite a few benefits, mostly that they can get rid of union workers and remove the threat of another strike.
I'll admit that unions sortof confuse me. I didn't grow up around them and have always wondered the mechanism by which everybody gets to quit their job but then demand extra money to come back. Are the people running factory machines inside of Ford and GM (or starbucks, or a hollywood writers room) really that highly skilled?
It should be noted that Tesla is not unionized, and will not be a part of this strike. Do you guys think there is a chance that the government tries to force Tesla to stop making cars during the strike to make things more fair?
I'll be honest about my feelings towards unions: I don't get it at all, and I think I'm missing something. I do think that workers should have an adversarial relationship with their employer, but it seems to me like unions have all but destroyed the american auto industry. I think you'd be insane to not just fire anybody who joins a union on the spot. I don't get how places can "vote to unionize". Why does the employer not simply fire the people doing the organizing? Sure you can all vote to make a starbucks union, but...I just won't hire anybody in your union.
Switching costs are high, unions will generally make attempts to increase the difficulty of procuring 'scab'/temporary replacement labor and historically there was less ability to just move a factory international or procure international workers.
Do agree that the Writers' strike seems pretty fangless when it's not only a job with a fairly arbitrary marker of skill/ability to function, but it's also one that's an actual desired, targeted role for a lot of people without a real credentialist barrier to entry. Writer compensation should, logistically, have a pretty severe pareto principle.
Screenwriting is much harder than it looks. As evidence, I present all the garbage shows people love to hate. In recent years alone we’ve had incredibly high-profile properties with massive budgets that fail to include a coherent plot.
Worse, reusing quality writing is a death sentence. Prior to recorded audio and especially video, it was much safer. Today, if you want to see Shakespeare, you can watch a filmed performance, read the original text, or attend a live showing. A producer who wants to leverage that writing and credibility has to have their own spin.
Say you want to make a new TV episode. You copy a classic formula, you’re a hack. You spin an existing one, still a hack. You go original, well, you’re probably not as original as you think. If you really are, though…you’re gambling. High profile projects don’t like gambling.
The thing is, if it's so hard to write good scripts that few people can do it now, we can make do with less new media. The same is not true for jobs that produce physical goods.
I don't think that's strictly true--we can make do with less of most things. But directionally, sure, it's easier to reuse existing media than existing...sheet steel, or plastic, or something. Entertainment is a luxury.
But that's tangential to the OP, which claims the supply of writers is being artificially restricted. I was arguing that it's not particularly artificial, since most of the crop of potential good writers aren't taking the commitment to enter the market.
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There’s certainly skill involved in writing, but the barriers beyond skill are pathetically low and frankly there are millions of people trying to get in. Every 14 year old girl with a laptop is an “aspiring author” and there’s a lot of amateurs doing fan fiction (look up some fan-made Trek shows, but for acting and production values, they’re probably nearly on par with the pros at this point) it’s a skilled trade, but it’s not wizardry and not impossible to learn. What keeps people out of Hollywood is more the difficulty of getting your SAG card, not any real skills gap.
You could make this same argument about, I don’t know, carpentry. Most anyone can learn it, lots of amateurs try, and the work of the best craftsmen is quite impressive. It’s even got a bit of cultural cachet, at least among men over 30. So why aren’t those men breaking into the carpentry industry and depressing wages?
It’s not because they can’t get a carpentry guild card. It’s because the demand for artisanal carpenters is actually pretty small. Carving table legs as a hobby is fine. Quitting your day job to focus on it is stupid.
14yo fanfiction authors don’t usually end up with movie deals or even a steady job writing. Too much risk of ending up homeless in LA. Conversely, for a studio, hiring a total unknown is more risk than they’d like. What are the odds that you get something competent, vs. Empress Theresa?
People would probably risk homelessness for carpentry if there were highly paid star carpenters.
There totally should be highly paid star carpenters.
Technically the biggest celebrity in human history is a star carpenter!
Sure Harrison Ford is well known but I think you overstate it.
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Yeah, I notice that it did kind of happen in the past – Thomas Chippendale was a household name. However that was at a time when furniture was a huge status symbol among a small number of people among whom wealth was highly concentrated (more than today).
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What, do you think you can put a bunch of fanfic writers with the highest number of likes in a writers room and they will write Succession? It IS wizardry (at least in a similar way to other developable skills such as being a professional athlete or musician).
The vast majority of writers put in a room are producing quality a lot closer to 14 year old fanfic than they are to Succession.
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I think ‘writing something usable as a script’ is not equal to ‘writing a good story’ and the former takes a lengthy apprenticeship to figure out the how to’s, and isn’t really transferable from other kinds of writing.
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What, do you think you can put a bunch of highly credentialed, well-regarded writers in a writers room and they will write Succession? I'm not sure what the secret sauce is in well-written shows such as that and Better Call Saul, but it doesn't seem to be specific to the screenwriters themselves. There have just been too many bad TV shows to easily chalk it all up to conflicts between artistic quality and commercial success.
Touché, there are indeed a tonne of stars that need to align to produce a good show. But I think that without seasoned professional writers, it would take really quite a long time for a new breed to develop well enough to deliver even the patchy consistency of quality we currently see.
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It’s a high level of skill sure, but I don’t think it’s nearly as unattainable as people assume. It takes years of practice, it takes a bit of talent, but it’s a craft like most others. It’s just that most people don’t put in the hours required or learn the proper techniques.
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I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or not, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifty_Shades_of_Grey_(film)?useskin=vector
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifty_Shades_of_Grey?useskin=vector#Background_and_publication
50 Shades of gray was twilight fanfiction that become a very popular bookseries, followed by several financially successful movies.
While these things are in a different category than Succession or other prestige TV shows, I don't think the writers are striking to make the scripts better.
I am a sweet summer child but I actually do believe they partly are striking to make the shows better. If you end up with small teams having to write shows fast (the way it's been going), you lose the large writer's rooms and space for development that enable young writers to practice and get good. I don't believe long prestige TV seasons get made with the typical British model (in which one or two writers typically take on all writing duties for a series). Quality has already got worse in the streaming age, sometimes I think a lot worse.
Re the Twilight example, obvs there are some fanfic writers who became high grossing professionals, people have to start somewhere. I don't think that gives us many clues about how to actually use the talent of fanfic and other amateur writers appropriately though.
I am talking about how to engineer a replacement talent pool from amateur writers relatively quickly if, say, the strike didn't end.
E. L. James doesn't just happen to have some old fanfic on her resume from way back when she started her writing career; Fifty Shades of Grey is LITERALLY a Twilight fanfic called Master of the Universe with the names changed.
Master of the Universe:
Fifty Shades of Grey:
I definitely notice the best-written fanfic regularly beat the pants off of the average professional TV show. In a sane world, they would be allowed to sell their products on the bookshelves directly with a mandatory royalty fee paid to the copyright holder. In our world, best bet is either to rewrite their existing work into original properties, if possible, or hire them to write something new, if not.
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The fact there's no credentialist barrier to entry to writing for the screen means there are a million and seven aspiring writers for every job and the vast majority are awful. But you can't prove they're awful, it's kinda subjective. All you really have to go on is the respect/admiration of producers and other creative people, and their previous credits. These relationships and credits are very difficult to obtain and so they select strongly (whether for exactly the most talented people, I highly doubt, but they do select). Sidestepping that edifice of relationships and trust and trying to start again with writers who are willing to scab (i.e. those new writers who don't care about the very relationships that matter most, with other writers, show runners, actors etc) would be truly hard and expensive. You'd have to invest a lot without knowing who'd do a good job, building whole new systems of trust, and that would require a lot of failure along the way.
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