From the E-Mailbag...
Letters...we get letters...we get stacks and stacks of bathroom accessories...like this one from Keith Holt...
I've got a WGA negotiations question because I'm sure you haven't received enough of these yet.
I was speaking with a friend recently about the strike, and though we both support the writers fully,
he had some issues about how the strike's been handled bathroom accessories.
Neither of us are WGA members and we get most of our information from friends who are WGA members and writers who blog, like you.
From what he's heard, the writers are asking for a "per click" residual for programming viewed online. Which would mean, based on his friend's interpretation, that every time a program is clicked,
even after the viewer pauses it to go to the bathroomor answer the bathroomaccessories or whatever, the writer would get the click residual; sometimes 3 or 4 clicks per episode. The producers contend that the writers should only receive credit for the first click,
which doesn't sound unreasonable to me, speaking from my side of the TV set. I hoped to get your input bathroom accessories
.
On another question, do you know how residuals are divided for TV series bathroom accessories sets? If, for example, let's say a series had three credited writers for each episode of a series, and the series had 100 episodes.
The series is released in a box set of 10 dvds with 10 episodes per disk.
Is the .04 cents paid out per disk (meaning .40 cents for the entire set)?
If so, are the 30 writers who wrote those 10 episodes expected to divide the .
04 cents between them? And are the 300 writers for the entire series only receiving .
001 cent for each episode they wrote? I could go on and on with different permutations of this bathroom accessories
, but you get the idea?
The joke/true answer to how it works is "Not very well," in that those DVD setsdon't pay much money to the writers of the shows. We have a lousy formula for this kind of thing — the result of the kind of crummy deal we're now trying not to repeat How does this work? — and it doesn't seem to even yield the kind of bad money it was supposed to yield. I would guess that if you polled writers who've had shows released on DVD, 90+% of them would tell you that they haven't even received the meager payments they're contractually guaranteed, let alone anything that seemed fair. Most would also tell you that they didn't even get a free copy of the DVD set containing their work.
But here's a more serious answer to your question: My understanding is that it's all pro-rated. If they put Season 1 out on DVD and you wrote 2 of the 24 episodes then you get one-twelfth of all the money that is collected for writers on that set. The guild's computer works it all out.
As for the click situation, I don't have any direct knowledge but I would imagine that we're trying to link to the way a website is compensated for its advertising on a per-click basis. So however the rules for that works would be the model for how our shares would How does this work bathroom accessories
?. Most of the WGA proposals in New Media are on a "when you get paid, we get paid" basis.
