Writers’ Strike: Don’t Write for Free!

By Si Dunn

As a professional writer and editor, I spend several hours each week surfing the Web in search of interesting new paid assignments.

Unfortunately, I am sensing a growing trend. More and more Web publications and entertainment producers are putting out calls for writers willing to create articles, blogs, screenplays and TV show concepts for free, in return for “exposure” or “good recommendations” or “credits” or “a percentage of earnings from future sales” or “a cut of future advertising revenues,” to name just a few of the no-pay ploys.

In one especially egregious example, I recently saw an online advertisement for an unpaid movie project. The text went something like this: “Actors, crew and equipment are standing by, ready to shoot a movie. All we need is a great screenplay based on our idea. No pay but copy, credit and great exposure!”

Never mind that it can take up to a year of someone’s life to create and polish a screenplay. Too many people think writers can just gush out words, sentences and coherent plots on demand, like a water faucet.

Strike!

While this was being written, Hollywood’s unionized writers were on the verge of a possible strike against motion picture and television producers, networks and studios. Several issues have been at stake in their long negotiations, including how much writers are paid when their works are released on DVD or distributed on the Internet.

Actor and movie producer Alec Baldwin noted in an Oct. 30, 2007 blog posting at The Huffington Post that “[t]he studios and networks claim that their profits are eroding and blame the cost of stars' salaries and expensive marketing campaigns. One more thing the studios and networks ought to consider is how overstaffed they are themselves.”

Baldwin also pointed out that writers typically are the lowest paid, by far, of a movie or TV show’s “above-the-line” talent, well below actors and directors. Indeed, without the screenplay, there would be no movie or TV show to pay everyone’s salaries. Without a story, you simply would have a bunch of people, equipment and vehicles standing around.

Squeezing money out of writers, the low men and women on the entertainment industry’s “above-the-line” totem pole, is wrong. That is little different than imposing new taxes on the battered middle class and the poor while the rich grow richer.

Don't Give Up Your Day Job?

By some estimates, a typical professional writer earns less than $25,000 per year—a great deal less in most cases. A few (very few) screenwriters and novelists make more than a million dollars a year. Skilled technical writers and popular journalists often earn comfortable, if not spectacular, wages. The vast majority of professional writers, however, pursue writing as a second-income career. They can’t afford to give up their day jobs.

Many writers in Hollywood contend it is time to push the financial squeeze higher up, to the motion picture and television producers’ plush offices and plush benefits, to the outrageous star salaries, and to the overblown publicity campaigns that sometimes cost as much as the movies or TV shows they advertise.

Out here in the rest of the world, it is time for writers to show solidarity by saying “NO!” to the rising tide of “free” opportunities to create written works.

The people trying to get us to write for free gladly would pay someone $100 to unstop their commode or $200 to fix their car or $1,000 to paint their house. They should be willing to pay for our creative talents and labors, as well.

Don’t give away a screenplay, a novel, an article, a short story or even a poem. Make ‘em pay something, so you, too, can afford a plumber, a mechanic or a house painter when you need one.

“Freelance” should never mean “free ride.”

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