connor sheri shaw

listen to me complain about techbros and talk about esoteric youtube video essaying

i'm broke! i'm busy! i'm uninsured! i'm a lot of things right now!

but most of all, i'm live on Twitch with my fiancé Austin to talk about it all

if you didn't hear, the writer's guild of america east and west banded together to ask the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers for living wages, and were told, in so many words, "no"

AMPTP, who represent Amazon, Disney, Netflix, Warner's Discovery Home Brother's Box Office, etc etc, had this to say:

“Our goal is, and continues to be, to reach a fair and reasonable agreement.
An agreement is only possible if the Guild is committed to turning its focus
to serious bargaining by engaging in full discussions of the issues with the
companies and searching for reasonable compromises.”
-Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers

so, apparently the writer's guild had unreasonable demands, given that "reasonability" seems to be the main claim against giving them what they want and ending the strike before it started. so what exactly is it they're demanding?

generally speaking, you'll hear "better pay" and "streaming" as two key points, so let's see some examples of what writers are dealing with right now:

“I have friends who believe, ‘Oh, Alex worked on The Bear, Alex is rich now.
Alex can buy a car.’ And you know, I’m not. I’m broke. [When] I won the
WGA Award for The Bear for Outstanding Comedy Series, I had a negative
bank account. My suit was bought by my family and friends, and my bowtie
was bought on credit. All that glitters is not gold.”
-Alex O'Keefe to A.V. Club

why is this? is this because of streaming? partially, yes- let's talk about

Residuals

you know how you get hired for a job and paid for doing it? well, when it comes to creative works which will continue on and permeate culture, such as media creation, it's entirely fair for their continued purchase and profitability to benefit the writers, editors, actors, film crew etc.

it'd obviously be stupid if Netflix only paid the writers relative to TV broadcasting standards instead of on-demand streaming standards, right? i mean, one is a much more individualistic transaction- the movie airs on TV and residuals are paid

except, that's exactly what's happening until writers sue for what they're owed

“Netflix argued the WGA should accept a substandard formula the
company negotiated with DGA and SAG-AFTRA. After a hearing,
however, an arbitrator determined differently: that the license fee
should have been greater than the gross budget of the film.”
-WGAW Memo

the math(s) used to determine how to convert viewership and box office into payments is often very difficult to understand, which works to the advantage of big companies claiming they're paying you 'industry standard rates' while taking the difference for themselves. thankfully, the WGA has a residuals survival guide which, with any luck, will need some heavy revision after this strike

although...

This exact thing happened 15 years ago.

streaming isn't brand new- getting media for cheap online has been possible since you could get media online. back in 2006, Lost showrunner and writer Damon Lindelof had a realization of the obvious problem with the residuals model in the face of the internet:

"People were downloading Lost and paying $1.99 an episode. I didn’t
quite make the leap to, ‘I don’t get compensated for this at all.'"
-Damon Lindelof

it's almost as if media giants aren't all that interested in paying a living wage when they could be making more money, and as inflation increases and mediums shift they're happy to keep using precedent as an excuse.

this has always been a problem. companies have to be sued to force them to adjust for inflation.

or, you know, they'll just pivot to unscripted reality TV instead

prepare for netflix, apple, hulu etc to see a sudden shift to game shows, un/loosely scripted series, unvaulting of old media and, god forbid, "AI" generated material

And no, AI cannot replace screenwriters.

i've already explained why. but that's secondary to the fact that it's a big scary thing that hollywood can use to threaten screenwriters; if you don't work for us, we'll just get a machine to do it instead

so if you're a writer who's on strike reading this: hello! thank you for valuing yourself and your fellow writers as much as you do! also, please don't worry about AI taking your job. no matter how convinced the company that owes you money is that screenwriting can be passed off to a machine, it really, honestly, can't

it will just keep recycling the same shows and IPs over and over, mixing and matching existing media with "reimaginings" of old stories and...

...

shit that's what they're already doing, huh?

in a sense hollywood could actually replace writers with LLMs trained on old media- and then the output would suck so bad we'd all watch whatever the laid off writers banded together to make for cheap instead, if the screenwriting industry works anything like the games industry

maybe, actually, the fact that we all have to sucker up to these assholes to get media with a budget and international legitimacy made is, itself, the problem, huh? anyways.

There are truly so many additional issues writers face.

and thankfully, i do not need to enumerate them here. not sure if they have any professional writers in the WGA, whatever that acronym stands for, but their outlined proposal sheet is pretty damn concise. and, get this: reasonable

if you happen to live in LA or NYC, you can show up and show your support, or at least spot 'em some coffee and cigarettes

come hang out and listen to me talk about the world