Currently, I’m not making enough from my writing career to browse ads for condos for sale with any realistic expectation that I could ever afford one. So if anyone wants to see the 2007 WGA strike end successfully for writers, it’s me.
However, like so many strikes these days, it seems the unions that kick up the most dust are also those whose employees enjoy some of the better-paying careers in America. Pro athletes, actors, writers and the like all have unions decrying the plight of millionaires who want to be billionaires. It’s hardly the “blue-collar” scam that unions started out being.
Sure, you have to land on your feet amidst a sea of aspiring talent to really call yourself a working writer, but once you’re in that elite academy, it’s not a bad gig if you can get it. Most staff writers on the average scripted drama or sitcom brings home a salary in the low six figures. Get “producer” added to the job title and it can close in on at least a cool $250,000, even for a neophyte with writes tripe, but at least it’s five-act-structure tripe.
Find some success and land your own show where you’re executive producer and, bang, you’re in for a lot more than that thanks to lucrative network/producer agreements.
That’s why it’s heartening to see producers with writer roots, like 30 Rock’s Tina Fey, joining the picket lines. Sure, if the strike resolution favors better terms for writers, she’ll be among the first to benefit, but at least she hasn’t forgotten her writer beginnings.
With my various reviews, blogging and other writing projects, I probably make a tenth of one percent of what an executive producer makes for plotting out a 22-episode season, writing a couple scripts and letting other writers do the rest of the real writing work. It’s good money for now, but it’s too bad the WGA overlooks the real money-poor writing careers in favor of Hollywood screenwriters, TV writers and news writers. There are some blue collar bloggers out here who wouldn’t mind a big, huge raise… but we can’t afford the luxury of a strike, nor is WGA remotely interested in us.
Oh well.
