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Over at TAP Online we've got two pieces on the Writers Guild of America strike. Harold Meyerson and Kate Sheppard sat down with Patric Verrone, president of the West Coast branch of the Guild and Alan Rosenberg, president of the Screen Actors Guild:
TAP: There seem to be some pretty serious differences here between the unions and the studio executives.Patric Verrone: What we're talking about is incremental compared to what our members have gotten historically. We're talking about new media, applications of residual formulas that existed in old media and simply getting the work in non-traditional platforms covered in the same way it's been covered in television and feature films for 50 and 75 years, respectively. At one point, television was new media. ...Alan Rosenberg: Our failure to achieve improvement to residuals has caused a real crisis for the middle class in all the entertainment guilds. We really believe we can't afford to believe [the studios] again. They'll never come back and revisit those formulas. So waiting for 20 or 30 years to start reforming on new media is something we can't entertain. The press has been portraying this as a strike about wealthy writers getting richer. The average salary in the Writer's Guild is $60,000 a year, and that's factoring in all the people who are making millions of dollars for screenplays. So the real average is even lower than that, and it's even lower for actors. We keep saying we won't be fooled again.And in a separate article, Meyerson explains the fuss over new media.--The Editors
