Anyone who pays attention to the Oscar ceremonies approaching next month might be disappointed, as Golden Globe followers were this weekend. The ceremony, a major event for the entertainment industry and, therefore, for American culture, is now on the chopping block to be the next victim of the writers’ strike.
At issue in the strike action is “digital residuals,” among a few other things, which essentially means the writers want a meager 2.5 percent of the revenue generated from their work that’s put on the Internet. Currently, the corporations that primarily profit argue the Internet market for film and television shows is unproved, and unlikely to generate much money. This is a re-hashing of the argument from the previous writers’ strike, which dealt with video tape sales. During that strike, writers insisted videocassette tapes would one day be a major means by which their movies reach the viewing public. We all know now that the writers were wrong and no one watches movies on video. I’m guessing the Internet won’t go anywhere either.
More seriously, writers tend to be, well, underappreciated in the entertainment industry. The striking Writers Guild of America might even call this an understatement, and with good reason. Most people familiar with television or cinema can easily name at least two dozen famous actors and actresses, if not more. Some especially savvy viewers can probably also list off a few of their favorite directors. It is very rare that you find, among even the most avid trivia mavens, someone who can name anymore than maybe two or three writers. I know I can’t.
Actors and actresses are often famous celebrities, all over the world, for having once spoken the words of a great writer. And having done it convincingly and with sufficient passion that we, perhaps for only a moment, believed they actually were their character, which is otherwise simply a figment of the writer’s imagination. Some people even go so far as to get mad at certain actors for departing from their traditional roles, assuming the actor themselves “changed,” betrayed us, and became a new type of person, when really they started playing the roles dreamed up by another, different writer.
It’s not uncommon for people to know more about a character than its creator, and I’m sure more people have heard of Superman than his creators, Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel.
While there are a handful of exceptions where actors ad lib and improvise lines, for the most part, all of our favorite lines from American television and cinema, lines we often repeat to friends, re-use to express our own thoughts, re-tell to make others laugh, were written by guild writers. And we have no idea who they are. Often, we even credit the actor with the lines they said, for they’re who we see saying them. We never see the writer say them, or even write them. We’ll say, “It’s like Johnny Depp said in that one movie…” And we’ll mean, of course, that it’s like what Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio wrote in that one movie.
This is an interesting problem. It isn’t to say actors are any less valuable as artists – in fact, many of them are incredibly creative individuals who work hard, and without them great movies could not exist. Their interpretation of the words gives them emotion, makes them memorable, and breathes life into the writer’s literature. It’s just odd we know virtually nothing about the people responsible for most of the ideas communicated through film media. In fact, we really only notice the writers when they’re not there or when they do something wrong, when lines are cheesy or movie plots don’t make sense, when adaptations of books don’t live up to our expectations, or when their strike makes it so we can’t watch new episodes of our favorite shows. And yet, none of the characters, stories, or clever lines we become attached to ever existed to us before the writer confronted and conquered the blank page, bringing their thoughts into our lives.
The funny thing about this strike is that the writers don’t even want much recognition for their work, although, given the vast energy that goes into creative thought, I’m sure they’d appreciate it. They simply want 2.5 percent of whatever from whatever. And while we’re not movie executives and have no personal power to give them their 2.5 percent, I will suggest we can do one thing in light of this strike: Get on the Internet, search for the title of our favorite movie, and find out the name of the people who wrote it. Those who feel especially empowered might also find the names of a few of their other movies, and maybe even watch them.
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