Apparently, the Writer's Guild Strike will happen, and most, if not all, TV and movie production will be shut down. The reasons for the strike are primarily financial, and not unreasonable, but there is one additional demand they should make: Dignity.
When your average stoopid Hollywood blockbuster is criticized, it's often over the inanities of plot and dialogue, and the writer is duly chastised. But is it the writer's fault? If you're the fifth, or fifteenth, scribe assigned to a Bruckheimer-esque adaptation of a seventies TV show or eighties toy line, and you're dealing with twentysomething studio executives giving you notes on the nuances of your characters, are you even going to bother trying? Or will you just grind out some shit that makes these pinheads happy, and pray for the day you can work on something you care about? And if that day never arrives, and your salvage job on Manimal: The Motion Picture landed you a seven-figure payday for Strawberry Shortcake 2: The Reckoning, will you even remember you sold out your dream?
I'm looking at writing credits for recent Big Hollywood movies. Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman have become the go-to guys for Michael Bay, but they used to write for Hercules and Xena. Those were enjoyably silly shows, often with genuinely clever scripts, but who knew they'd turn out to be a career highlight?
Or consider Alvin Sargent, one of numerous credited writers on Spider-man 3. His career dates all the way back to TV shows like Route 66 and Run For Your Life. He wrote Paper Moon, for God's sake. Do you think the idiotic plot complications and ridiculous coincidences in Spider-man 3 were his doing, or the result of some minor studio functionary demanding more "character arcs" while simultaneously requesting more explosions?
This is why screenwriters need to frame their demands differently. Striking over pay won't win you many supporters here in flyover land--it's impossible to sympathize with millionaires asking for more money. But if you demand the right to never again be forced to write an unwarranted sequel or needless remake, the good wishes of the entire nation will be behind you.
