Joel Stein is a writer for the upcoming Lifetime show “American Princess” and the author of the forthcoming book “In Defense of Elitism: Why I’m Better Than You and You’re Better Than Someone Who Didn’t Buy This Book.”
The most basic fact is that this is not a strike. No writers are going to stop working. More accurately, we’re not going to stop sitting around a room mocking each other and eating snacks until Craft Services show up with better snacks.
In a strike, union members are furious at their bosses for mistreating them, often by not providing enough snacks. Instead, we are angry at our agents, who are people we employ. So this is less than a strike and more like a mass firing. The whole thing is extra unpleasant because none of us is upset with our own agent. Writers love their agents, who tell us we’re talented, we deserve more money and we’re not fat despite all the snacking. What we don’t like are the agencies, which are groups of agents. This is much like how people love their congressional representative but hate Congress.
The main thing we don’t like about the large agencies is that they’ve been engaging in a practice called packaging. This has been going on since the 1950s, but the WGA says it has become more common in the past decade, unlike most Hollywood customs from the 1950s, which have become illegal.
Packaging is when an agency groups several clients — for instance, a producer, a writer, an actor, a best boy — and sends us out together to pitch a new television show. Then, instead of taking the usual 10 percent of our salaries, it takes a percentage of the base license fee and the show’s profits. This sounds like a really bad idea to me, because I’ve made tons of money writing network sitcoms that have never generated a dollar in profit. But apparently if you package enough random things, eventually one of them will make you an avalanche of money. This is kind of like the strategy Amazon employed, except there the winner was cloud computing and here it’s “The Big Bang Theory.”
Packaging is confusing even to people who have been packaged. So let’s compare it to something people in government understand. Imagine a lobbyist for a defense contractor got paid not as a percent of each lobby, but as a percent of an entire defense contract they lobbied a bunch of lobbies into. This is not a perfect analogy due to the fact that I don’t know what a lobbyist does.
The writers’ union is upset about packaging because if an agency is making money on a show’s profits, the agents are incentivized to keep costs down by getting lower pay for the writers on the show that they’re representing in negotiations. Or, worse, stop giving us those expensive Chuao Chocolatier bars as snacks.
But the thing that upsets writers even more is that packaging can lead to a situation in which an agency makes more on a show than the writer who created it. This is one of the many ways agents have figured out how to make more money than their clients, including starting their own production companies, buying sports leagues, going public and having more than 10 clients. Also, by understanding contracts.
I have no problem with agents making more money than us. Writers are people who went to the nation’s top universities, looked our good economic fortune in the face and said, “No, thank you.” Not once have I met a writer who said, “If I could do it all over again, I’d put on a shiny suit and a tie the exact same color as that suit, go to an office, sit in meetings about percentages and then make a bunch of phone calls about percentages.” If writers liked that stuff, we would have graduated from our Ivy League schools, become hedge-fund managers and gotten really rich, not just agent-rich.
It may seem strange to you that writers need agents, because whatever you do, which I’m pretty sure involves defense contracts, does not require one. Simply put, you are crazy to not have an agent. You know that awkward discussion where you have to negotiate your salary with a boss who might now resent you for asking for more money? Get an agent! Want to hire someone but need to make sure they’re not a psycho? Call an agent! That may not sound like it’s worth 10 percent, but imagine if you could have called an agent to ask that question when you hired your kitchen contractor.
So we writers are sad that we had to e-sign a letter recently that was provided by our union that will be sent to our agents telling them, “I can no longer be represented by you for my covered writing services.”
But we are furious enough about packaging that we refused to write that sentence well.
This fight is likely to go on for a long time unless some powerful, respected producer offers to mediate. I think a combination of Jeffrey Katzenberg, Brian Grazer and Kathleen Kennedy would work. If they all agree to do it, I’m asking for a packaging fee.
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