Sonray wrote:Burn wrote:Some may get paid a lump sum but most would opt for a % of the revenue generated.
If you were hired to write a script for a movie that may or may not be a financial success, would you opt to be paid $5000 or a % of the revenue generated?
I'm sure you'd be kicking yourself if you opted for $5000 and the movie raked in $800 million ...
And contrary to what you obviously believe, it's not a case of just sitting on their arses and typing. There's research, meetings, writers block and who knows what else to deal with. And really, "hard work" does not necessarily involve physical labour. Writing is a mental thing and mental labour can be pretty bloody strenuous. Trust me, I work with numbers all day long "sitting on my arse and typing at a computer" and I still go home at the end of the day pretty bloody knackered.
I have no sympathy for people who go home knackered even though all they have done all day is sit and type. My wife used to do that, but she is a different situation because she was mentally ill at the time and shouldnt have even been working.
Try working your guts out as a builder in the searing heat all day, lifting boulders and building houses with your bare hands just to scrape together enough to put food on your table, then get back to me about
hard work.
Ok, here's the problem I have with that.
Just because writing is not
physically draining, doesn't mean it's not
hard work.
I have been writing for years, everything from essays to short stories (which will officially be published in a few months! yay!), and I can tell you, sitting in front of a screen and trying to create a story from scratch can be just as exhausting (my masters thesis in Canadian Literature will prove that once I start writing it in a few years).
In fact, scientific studies have shown that the mental exhaustion after a day of intellectual work is about equal to the physical exhaustion after a day of physical work.
I agree with this writer's strike 100%. These people create the foundation on which just about every tv show ad movie is built. It's like writing a novel and having your royalty checks go to other people. It's not right. Hollywood has taken advantage of the writer's guild, and it's time they realised that these professionals can't be bossed around.
People who say "you should just suck it up, and if you don't like it get another job" obviously have no idea how unions actually work, or why they exist in the first place.
Believe me, all I do is sit and type all day, and I come home knackered too. No, I don't build buildings for a living, but I do a job that is exhausting in a whole different kind of way. Try telling to some of the world's most famous writers, who spend years writing and researching books, that all they do is "sit and type all day".
No, I couldn't build a building if you asked me to. But then again, you probably couldn't write something nearly as good as Marquez's
One Hundred Years of Solitude or Steinbeck's
Grapes of Wrath.
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