(no subject)

[ksmith]

One of the books on my Amazon wishlist is Schmucks with Underwoods: Conversations with America's Classic Screenwriters. The title, according to the blurb, was Jack L Warner's term for the "chumps who cranked out scripts on his lot."

I don't know why writers have never received any respect. I remember reading about life on the set of the 80s nighttime soap Dynasty, where assistants for Joan Collins and Linda Evans examined the scripts and one camp raised a stink if the other actress had more lines of dialogue. It became less about story and more about balancing divas. Words became a way of keeping score.

Would have loved to see Collins and Evans try improv.

Very much with the writers on this--do I need to say that? Because if the studios didn't believe that online content was valuable, they wouldn't argue so vehemently that it isn't.

Read this if you want to know more. Thanks to Doris Egan for taking the time to write it.

Comments

[cabri729.livejournal.com]

Yay writers! Don't write until it's right!

Things have changed so much. Last strike, I knew vaguely there were writers and they didn't get paid as much as they were worth, but I couldn't have dredged up a writer's name if you had a knife to my throat. Nowadays it's completely different.

Besides the obviousness of the internet, it's partly due to the the rise of the showrunner. I can give you the name of the showrunner for all of the genre shows I watch and some of the non-genre ones. In a way they've taken on a lot of responsibility that used to be handled by the independent production houses. I was reading this article by Marshall Herskovitz (http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-oe-herskovitz7nov07,1,6072340.story) at the LA times and I was shocked to discover that there are no independent production companies anymore. While Herskovitz is a lot less happy with this season than I am (I consider Life one of my favorite shows ever -- so far), the mediocre Bionic Woman is a textbook example of corporate interference in production. Hopefully now that its staff has stabilized, the show itself will improve.

Considering the current climate, Buffy may well go down in history as the last show to successfully jump ship from one broadcast network to another. (Unless I'm missing one, but the only one I remember is Sabrina and I think that was the year before Buffy.)

(Sorry for the length, all I was going to write was the first line and then evil robots from Mars disguised as TV writers blasted me with logorrhea-inducing mindwaves. O.O )

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I can't help but think that the outcome of this strike is going to affect all web content providers, whether they write scripts, books, comics, or cereal box copy.