Writers Guild of America—West, 7000 W. 3rd St.
Friday, January 25, 2008; 12:17pm

“Do writers have a right to strike? That would be like the police or firemen walking out. When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.” – Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 1963

Why aren’t there more people angry with the WGA?

Over there, across the street from the Grove, on this gray and wet Velázquez day. The subtle rushing whoosh of cars flitting by imperceptibly, their rubber tires against the shallow depths of watery black, glimmering in the unseen sun. The triumphant gales, the sound of an airplane or, perhaps, of a building thunderstorm, up above, in the foggy, listless sky of billowy silver celluloid.

What’s this? All of a sudden, here they come: a procession of them in eerily perfect, certainly fascistic single-file, and they don’t stop coming, they don’t stop exiting the building. Only two wear red today, the rest in black—less the skinny gay fellow with Verizon Guy glasses/haircut and a pink hoodie poking out from his otherwise tight and black Emo raiment…

“As a safety precaution, I do need you to step away from the building.” A stout, New Yorkish Napoleon doctrinaire type steps into the scene before us, blocking our view of the exodus. We’re at once brought into the mix.

It’s a routine drill, he tells us—he looks perplexed at our taking copious notes—“Are you here as part of the Guild? Are you doing business with the… Are you reporting…?” He trails off—he could be talking to anybody, after all, so he best watch what he says for more reasons than two.

A drill, he had said, the glass, says he now, can… He trails off again. And with the sound of the nearby whooshing cars crescendoing—as though they feel the building imposition of a tense scene—we have two fire trucks in the distance, two fire trucks whose trenchant howling grows far more fierce as they grow far more close to us and the WGA building that is indeed wrapped in resplendent, transfixing, reflexive glass.

The glass, yes—the building as though a futuristic Crystal Cathedral, a corporate Versailles Palace—rests in the drizzle and gray, reflecting the myriad billboards imposing on its slick boundaries: Burger King, Fair Dry Cleaners, etc.

Great timing, it turns out, as a skittish, olive-skinned muskrat of an old Asian man trundles over with a head full of wild gray hair, large spectacles guarding his parboiled yet frantic eyes, oversized pea-colored overcoat, and uncharacteristically pristine blue pants. At first, it almost seems as though he’s a transient lost in the midst of all of this… until we catch his cop shoes matching his blue pants. Ah ha.

Besides, his hidden walkie squawks, and we hear the rapid-fire conversations blasting across the airwaves—“This is Soandso from the Blackbird side…” “Looking for unaccounted people…”—more onlookers coming out to see what’s going on now. What happened? A little too cold and drizzly to have all these people, these executive-types out on the street for a routine drill or, for as “Nick,” the Asian muskrat man, claims in his deceptively broken-English: “The alarm go off underground, you know? It too wet, and the alarm go off.”

“What alarm, Nick?”

He won’t say. He grows more pensive, goes back across the street where we’re not allowed to tread, even to grab our car parked over on that side of the street. Shit, we’ll just have to wait around in the cold and let it be. As Mike Watt would say, “This ain’t no picnic.”

And why should it be? It’s the WGA, for chrissakes, and clearly someone is not very happy at these guys right now. Perhaps, he/she/they are not alone. Don’t forget, the WGA is not SAG. The WGA is the absolute toughest guild of which to be a part, and very difficult to remain apart of. To be in and stay in the WGA, you have to be quite the quitethe, and this means that a lot of very wealthy people are the ones out there right now as you read this, out there bitching and moaning that they don’t get even more money for all of their “hard work” viz. New Media and the like.

What these $100K/mo arrivistes seem to disregard is that film is not a writer’s medium. No, cinema is for actors and producers. The producers put the film together—unless they’re one of “today’s” producers, which could mean anything, could mean they happen to own the rights to the book being adapted, or less—and the actors bring in the money-spending audiences. Actors get butts in the seats, they get the DVD’s sold.

We cannot forget that the three things that make a successful film are indeed: 1) The one-sheet, 2) The trailer, 3) The star-power (ie, the actor, and the producer for having found the actor… and for having, if he is a producer in the traditional sense of the word, put together the trailer/one-sheet, if not the team that creates these media). The director may have something to contribute, as well, but these days, he’s really more of a technician, akin to the editor or a grip.

As avant-garde filmmaker Peter Greenaway has said, “If you want to tell a story, write a book.” Film is not a writer’s medium. If you want to be a writer, go into books or plays. If you want to make money, well then, become a stockbroker. Far more lucrative, and far less aggravating… from a business standpoint. For, writing screenplays must be the very easiest “job” in the History of the World. And if you don’t agree with this, then you’re simply not a writer.

It should take no longer than three weeks for you to finish a rough draft that you can show to your producer to be tweaked and worked-on by the rest of the crew. You should be grateful for getting to be one of the lucky few who can say to the IRS that you are a screenwriter. You should almost be willing to “work” for free. You’re putting together a very rough blueprint that will go through the factory line and come out three years later as a film that you may or may not recognize as your own. But, you’ve got your six-figure number, so shove off, and get back to work as soon as you return from Fire Island.

If you’re one of those who slaves over your screenplay for a year or more to then whisk yourself off to an expensive Vegas weekend with your screenwriting partner (!!) after completing the draft, then you suck at this gig. As with many things in this life, if it ain’t easy for you, then you ain’t no good at it.

Of course, if the million dollar mountebanks on the picket-lines—the intransigent old codgers, the swish swishers, the porcine Star Wars nerds—could understand these inalienable truths, perhaps they would get off their lazy asses and actually do something about what’s going on right now. They could use this time to put together all of that money of theirs and start something entirely new.

Yes, if you don’t like the way the Studios are doing things, then go start your own. If Chaplin, Fairbanks, and Pickford could do it—not much older than you reading this now, remember—almost a century ago, then why can’t you? They were rich, arrogant bastards, too, but they had talent and gumption, and a never-say-die sensibility born of actually having to figure out how to survive at a far too young age.

The Strike could very well be the first step in a force of something uniquely revolutionary, but instead, the WGA members are just going to take this time to spout out their financial privations, hold up pointless award ceremonies, and hang out at their local coffee shop where they can catch up on reading that new Nick Hornby book.

What the rest of us need to do is to stop supporting the WGA. They wouldn’t support us, after all. They had no bones about stopping their support of tens of thousands of hard-working artisans. Indeed, how much of the money spent on those insipid “Writers’ Strike 2007” shirts that glorify their orgiastic iron chokehold on the Entire Industry could have been put toward funds for those who aren’t able to strike during this particularly inclement economic season?

I wonder what kind of spiffy, eye-catching mock-up of the Nazi swastikka the graphic designer for these shirts would’ve come up with for “Holocaust 1938”?

So, please… pretty please, with beluga caviar on top: call off the vacation. Some of us gotta eat. And if you think that Vonnegut wasn’t being serious when he wrote those lines prefacing this article, just think of the great American writer Flannery Carver Billings’ veracious musing: “Just as there is always some jest in truth, so too is there always some truth in jest.”

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