Do The Work

The problem with writers.

Photo by Andreas Strandman on Unsplash

I'm working on a mammoth piece about the making of "Aldrich Kemp and the Rose of Pamir" - mammoth because I don't know that anyone has really dug in on the behind-the-scenes stuff of how audio fiction gets made, so I have decided to do just that. It's taking a while because it is, as I say, mammoth. And I'm not rushing it because it will inevitably contain spoilers that no one wants until the season has finished airing.

In the meantime, though, it occurs to me to briefly tackle a topic that has come up a lot in conversation with Hollywood execs over the past couple of weeks. It's an issue that I am characterising as "the problem with writers", although everyone I speak to in the exec community is too polite to refer to it as that.

Let's start at the beginning. Actually, let's start now and jump back. The now of it is simply this: the Golden Age of Streaming is over. I could argue for a whole separate piece about whether there was anything actually golden about the Golden Age. I guess the pay was pretty golden, for those of us lucky enough to be in development or production with the streamers over the few years up until, and sort of including, the pandemic. During that period, the streamers were paying top dollar for pretty much any idea that came across their radar; they were developing far more projects than they needed and then making movies and shows that had not been properly developed because they had a big hungry machine called the Subscription Model to feed. The machine wanted subscribers and subscribers wanted content (that word again) and content (as opposed to art or even quality material) is what they got.

There were maybe a small handful of shows made in this time that were any good, that might last the test of time and memory, that might have a cultural impact beyond their shelf-life. But barely a handful. Most of the output was dross. Entertaining dross, often, but instantly forgettable in the main.

This "Golden Age" pretty much destroyed network television and put a huge dent in theatrical distribution of movies and it decimated the DVD and Blu-Ray market. It also (and again, this is a topic for another time) lowered the bar for audio and visual quality, because even 4K streaming is not anything close to the quality of physical media.

So some tech guys and investors got very rich indeed, a lot of creatives got paid a lot of money up front (and often didn't feel the need to deliver anything outstanding because, absent the need to sell tickets or find an audience, there was little motivation to actually do a good job - better to just get the thing done and move on to the next pay check), and the audience, ultimately, lost out.

But it didn't feel like anyone was losing at the time. It felt like everyone was winning, because gold rushes and bubbles are like that. And then along came the pandemic, and things slowed down. And then there was the writer's strike, and things ground to halt.

The WGA strike was necessary for lots of very good reasons, but the timing was horrible. Not that the timing could be helped; you can only go on strike when the contract is being renegotiated. But what happened was that the studios and streamers spent the best part of a year not being able to pay writers... And they didn't miss it. It made the streamers realise how much money they had been hemorrhaging developing shows and movies that were never going to get made, and it also showed them that their subscribers appeared to be just as happy watching trashy true-crime documentaries as they were with much more expensive dramas.

And so, when the strike ended, despite having "won", a great many writers were not, in fact, back at work. Instead, they emerged, blinking, into a world that felt almost post-apocalyptic. Where were the buyers? Where were the six and seven-figure development deals?

The industry now is contracting and adapting. I would argue that the changes it is undergoing are changes for the better. I've spoken to a lot of movie execs over the last few weeks and not one of them has any interest in trying to set up a $200 million movie at a streamer; they're all talking in terms of more modestly budgeted movies that might sell tickets at an actual movie theatre. The TV people still think there is a market for drama, but it has shrunk - the ideas need to be better, the budgets need to be significantly lower. And I think we're slowly, s-l-o-w-l-y moving away from the godawful notion that everything has to be based on something else.

I think this is all healthier. The industry, in serious danger of developing type-2 diabetes, is throwing out the high-fructose corn syrup and hitting the salad bar. As an audience member, I welcome a renewed attempt to gain my attention by returning to craft and trying to tempt me back to a screen or a movie theatre with something that is actually good and, maybe, even original.

And as a writer? Well, we just have to do the work as usual. The problem, though, is that as a community we seem to have picked up some bad habits and unhelpful attitudes over the past few years...

A number of execs have told me, that seeing the end of the writers' strike looming, they braced themselves for the inevitable onslaught of spec scripts that would have been written while no one was allowed to take paid work. This is a normal phenomenon; writers hunker down and write their passion projects in these periods. It’s often a crucible of great original work. Some companies were even talking about bringing in extra readers to allow them to keep up with the tidal wave of scripts that was going to break over them.

But when the strike finally ended... Tumbleweed. Nothing. A trickle at best. Concerned execs picked up the phones to writers, asking to read whatever they had written. Some of the younger ones seemed to have misunderstood the situation; they thought that the strike meant they weren't allowed to type anything (it didn't). But a lot of writers who knew better just hadn't bothered.

What is that about? I think it speaks to a larger malaise in the writing community, and I think it is in part to do with entitlement. Leading up to the strike, and during it, there was a lot of talk about writers being exploited; studios had apparently been asking us to do lots of free work and the general feeling was that this was not OK, that we were being taken for granted and treated poorly.

Personally, I have rarely felt poorly treated by Hollywood. Yes, sometimes a producer chances their arm on a free "producer pass" of a script, but that's quite rare in my experience. But there's no smoke without fire. The feelings of injustice came from somewhere, and I have no doubt there are concrete examples of execs abusing their positions and taking advantage of writers.

My contention, though, is that these stories spread around over the last few years, as they are wont to do these days, and the idea of some kind of widespread exploitation took hold amongst writers who had not necessarily experienced it first hand.

The flames were then fanned by some ill-judged and ill-mannered comments made by senior industry figures during the strike, displaying outright contempt for the people who make the things that they sell. There will always be indefensible assholes like this, they will often be in charge (and they will very often come from the tech industry), but they are not representative of the execs who actually work at the coalface of development and production, who understand the importance of writers in the process, the need to treat them fairly, and the necessity of maintaining a symbiotic working relationship - we each need the other in order to do our work.

Nonetheless, this notion that we were being treated badly seems to have spread and taken hold. And the reaction to it has been an over-correction which I think is now damaging; a lot of writers seem to have come to consider any work that is not paid to be "free", and therefore a de facto attempt at exploitation.

By way of illustration, several execs in both TV and film have told me that a lot of writers don't want to pitch any more. Pitching involves coming up with a story, structuring it, fleshing out the characters etc. It's a lot of work and the process itself can be long and torturous; you bounce ideas back and forth with execs, honing and finessing, before you get to finally deliver that pitch, often over and over again, to multiple studios or networks. It can take weeks or months, it can be draining, and it is not paid. And so it has come, in certain quarters, to be considered "free work", and therefore bad.

But now let's step out into the "real" world, where you might have a job interview for a position that is incredibly competitive. Do you just rock up to the interview empty-handed, or do you put the work in? That work is not "paid" unless you get the job. In the same way, the pitching process is not paid unless someone buys the pitch. There's no certainty of reward in either situation, but there is certainty of failure if you don't do the work.

If writers don't pitch, they don't work.

The temptation now may be to imagine some snowflake writer, just out of college, complaining about being exploited by "the man". That's a trope that is becoming all too prevalent. But in my experience, at least, it's not true. The younger writers I know and work with are incredibly motivated and energetic and, ironically, are far more likely to be exploited because of that than they are to withhold their labour. The writers who don't want to pitch tend to be older, more experienced, more embittered, more (let's just say it) entitled. "I have done X, Y and Z shows, why should I have to pitch?" Well, because everyone is auditioning all the time. You always start again at the bottom of the mountain. And it's not you who is auditioning anyway, it's your idea. And that idea is new, and, absent a streaming service desperate for content, someone really should be kicking the tyres on it.

“But it’s not fair,” goes the argument. “What about all those writers who don't need to pitch any more? The ones who are so successful that any idea they want to make gets an automatic greenlight?” Well, there's a simple answer to that too: they don't exist. It doesn't matter how successful you are, you have to pitch a new idea. Sure, the process might be easier, or at least shorter, because you're rolling with advantage, but you still have to sit down and tell someone your idea, and that is pitching.

Soderberg does it, Sorkin, Mamet, Taylor Sheridan… And they all have movies and shows they can't get made. Del Toro couldn't get "At the Mountains of Madness" done. Kubrick couldn't get a greenlight on his Napoleon movie.

Likewise, being amenable to small tweaks and changes that might only take a few hours, or going the extra mile on a draft or an outline, will impress execs, thus building your relationship with them and your reputation and helping to garner a sense of loyalty.

Of course you don't have to do those things. You can refuse to pitch, you can refuse to make minor changes because it's not in your contract. No one is forcing you, and your union will have your back. But this industry is more competitive now that it has been for at least a decade. If you're not willing to work with execs to move a project forward, someone else will be. The relationship is symbiotic or it's nothing.

I have been writing pretty much every day for the past 30 years. I write whether I'm being paid to or not. Again, and to be clear, this is not an argument for exploitation; there is a line and goodwill on either side can easily be abused. But we're grown ups; we're capable of taking a step back and assessing whether what we're being asked to do is work that should be paid for or not. We shouldn't be letting ourselves be exploited, but nor should we be getting in our own way.

The aim of this game is to get a screenplay produced and it is not, has never been, nor will ever be, easy. You’ll hear people talk about “the old days”, when they made Bonnie and Clyde, and Chinatown, and The Godfather, as if none of those movies was like rolling a giant rock uphill, like all the decisions the industry made back then made perfect sense, like it was some glorious meritocracy back in the day. It was never that and it never will be.

What it is is a fascinating place, full of interesting people, all trying to do a very difficult thing. It’s really easy to stand on the sidelines, criticising and finding fault and perceiving slights. But it’s a lot more fun if you step up, put your shoulder to the rock, and help to get it up that hill.