Hollywood unions and the digital revolution
Hallelujah, Hallelujah. Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" and Stephen Colbert's "The Colbert Report" return to the air tonight. It's just in the nick of time, too, because primary season is now fully under way, and I need their parody skills if I'm going to endure several more months of policy air-filled balloons that seem to pop out of every orifice of a politician's body this time of year. Yes, that image will stick in your head for the rest of the day.
They will, of course, be operating under less than ideal conditions on account of the ongoing Writer Guild of America (WGA) strike, about which I wrote last week. As I noted then, I think there is some merit in the WGA's stance on things, given that it would be nuts for writers to forego a cut of revenue derived from digital download of media, a portion of the market which is likely to balloon in the coming years (I seem to have a balloon fixation today).
On the other hand, my natural contrarian nature starts pushing out spines when I hear stories about the WGA ordering late-night talk show hosts, a group facing collapsing viewer levels due to the length of the strike, not to write their own opening monologues. It's fair enough that they can't rely on other WGA members to write their dialogues, but they can't write dialogues that they deliver themselves?
Personally, if my guild was telling me this, I would say "screw the guild" as they clearly don't have my interests at heart. I, however, don't have to tiptoe around the touchy sensibilities of an industry that lives in a union-created straitjacket, all the while declaring in a booming voice how much I LOVE the straitjacket and support EVERYTHING that straitjacket represents (point in case: Conan O'Brien's declaration of support for the WGA at the start of every show, a declaration he has repeated every day since his show recommenced production last Wednesday).
ZDNet readers are probably asking "what in the hell does this have to do with the technology industry?" Well, I'm glad you asked that.
A subject I have often discussed in this blog and in articles which preceded it is the way digital technology is reshaping the media production industry. Digital technology dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for producers of media content. Sound and video editing can now be done from a reasonably powerful desktop computer, and digital technology has driven the cost of hardware down to levels where "amateurs" have a surprising amount of power at their fingerprints.
Amateurs have benefited most from the cost savings, and the surge in content created by them on popular Internet sites such as YouTube is the result. Professionals benefit somewhat from the cost savings derived from digital technology, though the effect is less pronounced because they - in league with the studios - have created a guild system that locks up most of the professionals in a tight centrally-controlled contract structure that keeps costs high.
The Union / Guild system that typifies hollywood is a system designed to keep the media barrier to entry VERY high. It suits the guild members as it helps to create more jobs that pay better in the absence of the system.
I don't think that is a subject for debate. Back when I was doing camera operation work (weekends only, admittedly, and just for fun), I remember a discussion in a trade magazine regarding rules that forbade Directors of Photography (DPs) from doing camera operation work. It occurred to me then that that would have meant Stanley Kubrick did a Bad Thing™, in that he tended to do a lot of his own DP and camera operation.
It only makes sense to allow people like Stanley Kubrick to arrange their set however they damn well please. Sense has no horse in this race, however. The reason for such rules is work padding, which puts the unions that demand such restrictions in the same category as the famous unionized painters in New York city schools who had two categories of painter - one who painted below 6ft, and another who painted above 6ft, with penalties for deviation from the model.
Oddly enough, it suits the studios just fine, too. A Talkbacker to my previous post on the subject who works in the film industry noted that studios aren't trying to overturn the union / guild system. Of course they aren't. The union / guild system creates costs that virtually ensures that studios are the only entities around that can afford to pay them. They lock up all the professionals into an exclusive pool (union members are mostly restricted to working on union-only sets) that limits access by smaller, less-well funded production studios as a not-so-accidental byproduct, thus limiting competition and ensuring that big studios all but own the box office.
I am not saying that people who work as crews, actors, and writers aren't entitled to fair compensation for their work. What I am questioning, however, is whether unions built around the realities of 50 years ago are the best way to achieve that.
Why is Hollywood so convinced that unions are necessary to maintain basic work standards? I work in an industry that is at least as technically sophisticated as film production - software development. That industry is for the large part NOT unionized.
In contrast to Hollywood, I have to negotiate a contract on ad hoc basis. I also have a lot of flexibility. I can work for big companies who have great benefits and good salaries. Or, I can work for small startups that have lower salaries and less than stellar benefits, but that give me a share of the company should my hard work pan out and the company gains legs and enters profitability.
That model creates a LOT of variety, one where new companies are created and destroyed on a regular basis. Jobs are not usually that hard to find in the technology industry. In contrast, the jobs that do exist in the film industry are predominantly controlled by big studios, who are the only ones who can afford to adhere to union rules. How many more jobs might exist if smaller companies with the power to negotiate new kinds of contracts could have equal access the pool of professionals now mostly controlled by big studios?
There is safety in variety. Another Talkbacker last week noted that he made more money as a freelancer, even though he missed the benefits that came with union sets. I made more money as a freelancer, too. As for insurance and benefits, I either bought my own (using the extra cash from my freelance job to buy it) or bought it through one of the contractor benefit conglomerates which exist to serve the needs of people such as myself who required benefits as independent contractors.
Bottom line: there's a great deal of irony in a WGA that declares that the central issue of the current strike is revenue from Internet sales. Media aimed at Internet delivery is a lot more accessible to "amateurs" than anything that was produced for traditional channels. Further, there is a high likelihood that content designed for the Internet won't stay there, as more companies try IPTV or aim to stream video from the Internet through new Set-Top Boxes (Netflix is going that route). That means that there will be a lot more competition in future, and most of it will come from non-union sources.
Professionals have advantages, to be sure, as they can achieve production qualities that it would be difficult for amateurs to match. The industry, however, needs to be more flexible than a centrally-planned guild system is capable of managing. Industry-wide contract negotiations that are traditional in the current film industry merely serve to keep the professionals in the back pocket of the big studios, who are themselves leftovers from a time when media was the exclusive domain of giant, well-funded companies.
The real problem is not that the WGA is failing to extract the 2.5% it wants from sales of Internet media. The problem is an industry structure that still believes that the only way to achieve that is through a single industry-wide contract negotiated under threat of a gun.