So if it's a worthwhile struggle, isn't it also worthwhile to stand up against these kinds of abuses? What's the point of a writers' union if nothing is being done? Without writers, the entire industry falls apart. Shouldn't writers be treated with respect? Or am I being hopelessly naive?

Wow. This is horrific. To what do you (or GITS readers) attribute the decline in the status of writers? Is it connected to the state of the economy and the commensurate rise in corporate power and decline in the status of labor (even knowledge workers)? Is it connected at all to the general climate of union busting (i.e., is part of the issue not the status of individual writers but the status of the WGA)? Are you seeing any talk among writers about not just how to survive these conditions individually but how to address the systemic problems collectively?

The WGA needs to take action to enforce payment with the threat of (justified) legal action, and regulate the pitching process. How about on assignment "sweepstakes," the studio compensates each writer $5k to pitch a take? The writer gets paid for his work, the studio purchases the right to use this work if they like, but they're also forced to think twice about inviting 20+ writers in.

An email I received from a working screenwriter: "Yeah, I filled that out, and yeah it meshes with my experience... But the truth is, I can never admit that publicly. You can complain to your wife, kids, the guild, but you can't complain to the industry, because if you do, you're viewed as difficult, and getting work is hard enough without being a difficult writer. Hidden truth is that 90% of screenwriters live and work a very blue collar job. It's difficult and competitive and you fight and scrape by as best you can, ups and downs, and all that. That's often the truth behind the glamour of it. But you do it because you love it, and you need it, and it beats picking up garbage every morning."

Another email I received from a working screenwriter: "Haven't had a chance to dig into the WGA study, but first impression is that it's pretty accurate. For instance, we frequently do 'preview' drafts for studio execs and producers, which are essentially free re-writes. Since we only went pro a few years ago, our experience is limited to how things are today. We haven't studied the issue well enough to suggest any structural fixes, but we think there's no doubt that these kinds of practices ultimately undermine everyone's ability to generate quality movies. As John August and Craig Mazin often talk about in their great podcast, development is the R&D of the industry. Obviously, everyone's looking for ways to do more with less. But it's in the industry's long-term interest to invest in infrastructure and attract talent. My guess is they think the talent will come regardless of the working conditions because the people who do this for a living generally grow up dreaming of making movies so when they finally start getting paid for it, it's more than just job. And that's what's ultimately being exploited. The writers' dedication to making movies above all else, even sometimes their own well-being. Think our only advice for the writers out there struggling to break in is you owe it to yourself to educate yourself about the realities of the industry you're entering. Obviously, the most important job for an up and coming writer is working to always being building their craft. But right behind that is working towards a deep and thoughtful engagement with the realities of the industry. And it is work. If you're serious about screenwriting, come to Los Angeles and spend a year working at a major agency, studio or production company. The only way to understand the whacky decision making process of the professional film industry is to get inside it."

Another email I received from a working screenwriter: "So in my opinion - even though writers can be pains in the asses who complain a lot - I think they/we are correct in this survey. I've done several unpaid steps on top of other unpaid steps recently. And I've also worked hard on a couple of pitches only for my agents to find out later, were "cattle-calls" where there were over a dozen writers the execs had listened to full pitches from. A lot of the civility has gone out of the business, and there seems to be little respect that a writer's time is what he/she has to sell. I also feel the buyers in the business are being penny wise and pound foolish. They are starving their suppliers! Low money options over script purchases, trying to save money on rewrites, etc. I understand them trying to get as much as they can for as little as they can - but they'll be in a far, far more expensive situation if they put those of us who time and time again prove ourselves, out of business. Lastly, I wonder that, since most people agree that the script is the single most important element of a project, (needed to attract filmmakers, actors, etc.) why are buyers kneecapping themselves before they've even moved into casting or preproduction?"

Those emails are so good and truthful. Thank you for posting them. Why is this the way it is now? Because it wasn't always this bad. The reason, I believe, is that "tent pole" movies cost upward of $200,000,000 to make and market as well as all the high quotes on stars and directors pay and deals. The DGA has done a fantastic job of getting the "A film By" title above the writers on the one sheet and on the front of the DVD. That's money and it's wrong unless the director wrote the movie. And what does the WGA do? They're truly not much more than a vault of scripts and antiquated contracts. Other than that they send a lot of emails asking you to go protest on behalf of unions in entirely different industries, send out screeners and collect residuals - but never does the WGA really do anything about improving the value of writers in the industry. They just don't. Weakest union in all of show business.

Why aren't lawsuits and investigations forthcoming?

Another email I received from a working screenwriter: "My perspective on the problem is that the source of the issue, as in all things, lies in the distribution of power. Power in screenwriting traditionally comes from two places: having something someone wants to buy or having the money to buy it. The latter is shrinking faster than the former, for a variety of reasons, which is what I believe leads to poor working conditions. Various mergers have reduced the number of buyers in the marketplace without increasing the number of films being made, reducing the total number of opportunities that exist. Of the meaningful buyers who're left, most aren't really studios anymore so much as they're the volatile asset in some larger corporations company portfolio. As the internet and digital sell-through has basically wrecked all the ways the companies know to get a second bite at the apple, theatrical box office no longer works as a viable loss leader in the guise of advertising. And yet the massive bureaucratic machinery of the studio system hasn't yet figured out how to shrink to compensate. The result is that the old model of making your sure bets upon your tentpole movies as a means of covering the risk on everything else you do (and hoping that the sleepers find a way to make your real profits) doesn't work anymore. Execs are running scared, and politicking the studio process of keeping their jobs has trumped all other concerns. All movies must be hits, panicked people declare, and yet nobody knows what a hit is other than it better be based upon a pre-branded IP. Unless that's totally wrong and we're making too many bad movies based upon less than triple-A IP's. Unless that's wrong, too. So everybody on the buying side is hedging their bets, because everybody is scared. To pull the trigger on something that doesn't turn out to be perfect risks instant death, so they don't want to do it. So suddenly there are a million little efforts being made all over the place to try and hedge and avoid risk. Which means free drafts, treatments that might as well be screenplays minus dialogue, hearing takes from throngs of writers, and any and all things they can do to try and gather as much information as possible to buttress against the possible future argument that somebody has screwed up and actually placed a bad bet. So yeah, it sucks. But what are writers to do? What is the WGA to do? Power only comes from leverage, and quite frankly we have none. With so few buyers (who, by the way, collude), writers quite frankly have nowhere else to go. The WGA report from a few weeks ago declared that something like 1500 writers got paid a dime to write in features last year. I can count the meaningful buyers left on my hands. So what we're dealing with is a scenario analogous to thousands of eligible bachelors desperately trying to woo the only ten girls left on the planet. And that means they can treat us more or less however they want to, and there's nothing we can do about it but choose to comply and become doormats or abandon the profession. Ever tried to pay a reasonable price for a hotdog at a ballpark? It's the same situation."

As someone who's spent literally thousands of hours doing work for dozens of startups with the promise of equity, I sympathize completely. But I should point out that there's a neutron bomb option here which is to call these people out: have the WGA create a "black list" of the most egregious executives and producers (and the studios/production companies they work for). There's no need for a strike. Just allow agents, managers, writers or whomever to anonymously name names and post the list of offenders on the WGA website. Issue a press release every month or so ranking them from worst to best and bomb them with bad publicity. Moreover, if buyers are colluding, then that's a violation of the Sherman Act, in which case the WGA has standing to sue on behalf of its members. Sue to open up the studios' books and they'll settle faster than the Flash.

Scott: the LAT link at the top of the article is broken, fyi.

Thanks and fixed!

As someone at the very bottom of the scale, I don't have much to contribute. But I will say that this doesn't much surprise me. When you have amateur producers/directors seeking "professional, hard-working screenwriters" offering "no/low/deferred payment" at the very bottom of the ladder, I don't expect that to change much at the very top. What is confusing is how eager and readily people in the business are to waste people's time. Execs, producers, directors always bang on about how precious their time is and how little they have of it. Why is it any different for the writer? Writers are people too. We have bills to pay, houses to keep and families to support. There are no magical food fairies that fly in through the window and supply us with glitter-dusted bread. The biggest issue I have is when even if you stick to your principles and refuse to work for free, someone else will always come in and undercut you. While working for free is, in my opinion, a necessity when you're starting out, especially when no one involved is taking a wage, higher up this is unacceptable.

Don't blame the paymasters - they will always try to get something for nothing. Blame the guys who broke rank. Once one writer works for nothing, all writers have to work for nothing.

There's no lawsuits because everyone is afraid. Afraid to ruin future opportunities that may or may not come. As one lawyer said to me "If you don't want to work in this town for ten years then sue. If you want to work again don't sue" But if you do some homework you'll find out that suing is how many people got where they are. Sumner Redstone wouldn't own Paramount if he didn't sue. That's a fact. Writers need to have their day. Since most studio movies are just branded entertainment with built in audiences we should argue that the director is not as important as the DGA will have you believe. (unless he's the writer of the movie) The whole system is in disarray and you should avoid it if possible. There is a new and better way emerging. A way that totally bypasses Hollywood. The studios know this and really can't do much about it. Even their powerful lobby lost it's battle and won't win it for a very long time. Piracy kills their system and quite frankly they deserve it. Why do you think they pay so much money for scripts and advertise it in the trades? It's a trap for aspiring writers who dream of that big payday and some glamour. If studios are willing to pay big money for movies they never produce then writers should man up and start trying to make and release their own movies. Don't sell them the big idea and never forget that they have NO IDEAS. Make the movies Hollywood is incapable of making because of their business model and then don't sell it to them for distribution (which is also a lopsided bad deal) Self distribute instead. There are more screens in churches then there are in movie theaters. That's how The Passion made so much money. If you could get your movie made but only make a small amount of money for the script - but were entitled to a much bigger portion of the backend would that appeal to you? We need to set a new precedent outside the system so that when they come looking for new material they are going to have to make deals with writers that are competitive with the totally indie ones. Everyone is scared. Everyone is barely hanging on. And they all need YOU. Don't let them take advantage of us anymore. Anytime we can extract $40-$60 million in box office from the studios we win. It only takes two hands to unravel the carpet so get to unravelling! I am!

Michael M...you're a good writer. What do you propose to do to unravel the magic carpet? Seems daunting, and sounds like the Iron Law of Oligarchy. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Another email from a working screenwriter: "I also took the WGA survey. The results match my experience in the last couple of years. I'm a new working writer, so I've never known anything different, and I still think it's terrible. The industry is prioritizing short-term savings (getting a couple of free passes out of a writer, holding fishing expedition/bakeoff pitches, trying to minimize paid development, etc) apparently without realizing that these approaches are ultimately going to drive the next generation of professionals out of the business. I can say that for myself, as someone who's only been working for two years, I am looking around and thinking hard about if I want to keep doing this. So much about this job is really challenging and frankly unpleasant that it MUST be worth it financially - you must be able to work somewhat consistently and support a middle-class family lifestyle - or people just won't do it. (If I'm expected to write for free, I'm going to write novels, where I can die on my principles and nobody will tell me the main character needs to be more universal and relatable.) The megacorps who control the industry don't understand the career progression of young writers. It takes so much work for so long to get decent, and then even more work and more time to get great. If you can't make it possible for the new working writer, the one who just sold something, to live here and raise a family and save for retirement, he or she just isn't going to stick around long enough to become the next [insert favorite A-list writer here]. People can't and they won't. Maybe the business looks at this problem and thinks "Well, there will always be a new crop of hopefuls, who cares!" but that's just wrong. Sure, there will always be a new crop of new writers who will work hard for free for you. But you know what there won't be? A new crop of really good, really professional writers who have 3-5 years on the farm team of screenwriting, who understand the system, who can nail a draft on time, who can get along with asshole producers, who can consistently generate great material for your movie machine. There is a whole young middle class of writers, right now, wondering what the hell they're going to do. The industry is eviscerating its own future workforce to save a dime today. Or maybe the business doesn't think about this at all, because everybody on the executive side is terrified all the time and can't think beyond next week. Of course, as I grimly think as I leave another notes meeting with another producer who's trying to get more free work out of me, they are terrified _while drawing a salary_. Unlike the writer, who apparently can work for free forever. (???) As an aside, something I wish the survey had addressed is the boom in "spec" screenplays. So much of what sells now is not really a spec. It's an unpaid assignment someone developed over many months with a producer and/or director and then eventually sold. (Those numbers, of course, do not reflect the many, many writers who spent months doing exactly this kind of thing only to hear a big fat dial tone.) These fake specs are the new reality, I do it myself, and it's so brutal right now you can't reasonably blame anyone for doing it. But those are jobs that even a few years ago would have been paid assignments. Someone would have gone out with the project as a pitch, or the producer would have had development money to hire someone to adapt the book, whatever. That system is broken and gone. It's an arms race to the bottom now. From the outside I think it's easy to look at this stuff and think that writers are being fussy, we get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. Or that we should just all stand firm and refuse to do free work and refuse to write fake specs. But that is so deceptive. I know you've addressed this on your blog, but a quarter off the top of, say, a 200k option (many things aren't actually sales), and multiple unpaid projects between the infustions of money... well, screenwriters are not living it up the way so many people think they are. I wish people could be honest about this. But like another comment says above, screenwriters are expected to maintain some kind of "Too arty for filthy lucre" thing. Like we don't have rent to pay. But we do, and we aren't rich, and so people just don't have the money in the bank to unilaterally hold the line and tell people "fuck you, pay me". I hope things improve. But I don't know if they will. Thanks for hosting this conversation. My hope is that as more people like you and the August/Mazin podcast talk about these things, there will be some kind of trickledown to the brains of studio people and they will realize what they're doing to their labor force."

Thanks for running these emails, Scott, I think it would be great to draw more attention to this issue if you ran them as a new post. Still waiting for a response from the WGA...

Wow. This makes for pretty grim reading. I have to admit to being discouraged by this WGA report. If things are really that bad, I would rather stay where I am (in Ireland, on the dole as there is simply no work, but in a house that I own and without any bills or debts to pay) than live in penury in LA. I would dearly love to hear from writers who have had good experiences and who have been paid. Without writers, Hollywood has nothing. And if it's so easy to do the damn job, why aren't these execs and producers by-passing the writer and doing it themselves?

Lyida, I had a great run in Hollywood for 15 years, at times having as many as four projects stacked up. I relocated largely for family reason and to work at a start-up production company with a longtime friend. You can make good money as a screenwriter and guess what? You get paid to write! You live, sleep, and breathe movies, which if you love is awesome. You get to work with creative people on creative projects. You get to go to premieres, hang out on studio lots, become friends with lots of writers, and L.A. can be an incredible place to live, one of the most interesting cities in the world. It's just really competitive and there are cycles in the business, like this one, where there are some significant stress points on the writing community. Personally I think things are going to change for the better with respect to some of the issues addressed in the survey and a large one that didn't come up: employment. I don't think the studios can sustain this insane bifurcated business model where they roll the dice of so much of their operating budgets on $100M and $200M movies. Even with the growth of the international market which apparently is more willing to 'forgive' Hollywood for movies that don't turn out too well [as long as they are big on visuals], there is a weariness creeping in with consumers. My guess is the studios will return to a more balanced approach to movies, a slate with movies in lots of budget ranges which will translate into more movies being produced in order to generate sufficient revenues. And who knows: Between the major Hollywood studios on one side and Pixar on the other, representing an entirely different business model where they are quality first, story first, there may be some multi-zillionaire who hits somewhere in the middle. Perhaps they go after Baby Boomers. Maybe they make overall deals with proven, quality writers. They make a slate of 4-6 movies per year in the $15M range, adult dramas, adult comedies featuring some of the fantastic actors who are undervalued with Hollywood's obsession with CGI and special effects. Maybe that succeeds. Maybe that spawns others to try similar ventures. And if they treat writers right, maybe more writers want to work for them, a viable option compared to what's happening now. Think of it as the Costco approach as opposed to the Wal-Mart model. And then there's the whole DIY model which is working itself out, the only thing lacking right now is a solid way to market those type of indie movies. So yes, it is tough in some respects to work in Hollywood. But it's also an amazing place to be. And screenwriting is an incredible and thrilling profession for someone who loves to write, loves movies, and loves stories.

Balance will come because we've already seen, over the last two years or so, a number of raunchy, low to medium budget comedies become string box office hits. Movies such as Bridesmaids, Horrible Bosses, Bad Teacher, Ted, Magic Mike, Hangover 1, 2 & 3, etc... We're also seeing that trend cross over to the low to medium budget action/thriller & SF movie genres (Hunger Games, District 9, Kick Ass, Chronicle, etc...). At some point, execs are going to realize once more that having a ticket with many sets of numbers not only gives you a better chance to win the lottery but also to win a pretty decent second prize.

Thanks for that Scott.