John Campea has an interest to read but boringly named movie site called “the movie blog”. He might not know a lot about naming websites but he’s good at coming up with conversations starters.
Recently he’s created some controversy by coming out against the writers strike. Not only did he not display the “we support the writers” banner on his blog, he actually whipped up a anti writers guild banner with a big red cross-out over the writers guild, like he is to writers guilds what the ghostbusters are to ghosts.

I’m not putting up my own writers guild banner because that would imply that someone asked my opinion or gave a fuck what I think. But the point is that John is completely wrong on this.

1. John compares the writers asking for a cut on the finished to a carpenter asking for a cut every time someone sits in a chair they made. That’s cute but it’s an invalid analogy. Every business has a unique business model, and you can’t compare carpenters to writers.

2. Almost the entirety of John’s argument is that he disagrees with the residual system. That’s fine but it has nothing to do with the specifics of the strike, residuals are the way the movie business model work. If you don’t agree you’re entitled to your opinion, you might even have a good point, but that’s irrelevant to this particular strike.
This is the system they have and the writers are just looking to make their living within that system. And if the residual system were really so terrible the studio could just offer the writers a pay increase and be done with it. Frankly it’s a weird complaint from John. Since he’s not employed by the Hollywood machine what does he care about the specifics of how the revenue is distributed.

3. The writers aren’t just asking for more residuals, their point is that there are whole new avenues of revenue that didn’t exist at the time of their last negotiation. DVD sales, downloads, streaming; all these new media don’t just add to the revenue coming in, they cut into the old streams of revenue. Imagine if instead of a raise the studios gave the writers a cut of the profits from theatrical releases. Now suppose the studio’s decided the next day tat theatrical releases where a waste of time and they were going to premiere their new movies on TV. The writers would be justified in wanting to renegotiate in that particular case.

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