So. The strike is officially over, and I am back to unwilling unemployment as the show I was writing for was cancelled while I was out on the picket line. I have a brand new excuse not to post, though: I’m moving. And I’m going to India next week. So.
Picking up where I left off – jurisdiction. Mindful of our reality and animation troubles, the WGA knew that negotiating jurisdiction in “New Media” was a must. Initially, this is not something that the corporations wanted to give us. Even granting – hypothetically –their theory that reality and animation are in some way ancillary to scripted television and movies, writing for new media clearly wouldn’t fall in that category. In the end, we did get pretty decent jurisdiction.
Of course there are caveats. In order to fall under WGA jurisdiction, a new media project must satisfy a few conditions, and it is these conditions that may be of interest to Pickle readers, not from a legal perspective but rather a “where is TV headed?” perspective. A made for new media project (i.e., we’re not talking about re-showing/streaming an episode of “House” on fox.com, but rather a brand new program) falls under WGA jurisdiction if it meets any of the following criteria:
1) It’s written by a “professional” writer – defined as someone with any kind of writing credit, for any size screen or even the page, whatever that is
2) It’s a derivative of a property already under WGA jurisdiction (i.e. an online-only spinoff of Heroes, or Air Bud)
3) It meets a budget threshold of either $15k/minute, $300k/episode, or $500k/series order
Not too bad. At least we know that WGA members, all “professionals,” get covered. But what these conditions point to is where the corporations think much of their new media is going to come from: cheap, original content made by first timers. The traditional development process (pitch to script to pilot to series) is speculative and full of expensive WGA minimum payments. “Developing” a hit YouTube video into a TV show bypasses both those problems. Does this mean that these companies’ programming will become a wild west of user generated content? Probably not – for one, media companies are premised on the idea that they know how to program, that they have an expertise (Obviously, I have doubts on the existence of this expertise – for anyone, not just easy-to-pick-on TV execs). For two, they probably don’t want to directly compete with the YouTubes of the world. Media corporations’ models are based on reproducibility whereas YouTube is more about venue than content.
This new method of generating ideas for content may crowd out more traditional pilots (although there will always be $12 million pilots like Lost, spectacles that can’t be made cheaply and by first timers), and it would seem that there is a lot of water coming through this hole. The WGA has tried to mitigate that in a couple ways. First, there’s a “guild shop” provision in the deal. This means once you write your first new media project for a media corporation, you then join the Guild. Second, there is a provision for “separated rights” which spells out the control a writer would have over a new media project that then becomes a TV show or feature film.
2 comments:
Re. the "guild shop" provision, is this the WGA's contractual answer to a typical "union shop" security provision, where a non-union worker can get their foot in the door (and the union and employer tf avoid discriminatory hiring practices), but has 30-60 days to join the union before facing discipline (i.e., constructive discharge)?
Also, expanding jurisdiction to include any "professional" writer seems pretty ballsy of the WGA (how does this differ from the last contract?). In so loosely defining the term, the WGA will certainly grow its membership (and significantly, its dues and density). On the other hand, your example of YouTube points to a glaring (and I assume, intentional, at least for the producers?) loophole in the provision: that first-timers will not be covered when developing a show via a YouTube-like medium.
At the end of the day, I suppose the “guild shop” provision will serve as a catch-all by mandating union membership for green writers upon completion of their initial media project, but then that just leads me to ask how "media corporation" is defined (did the producers agree to an equally squishy definition here as with “professional” writer, or did they seek to more narrowly define it so as to concede as few new members as possible to the WGA)?
Lastly, in terms of the “separated rights” provision, how much creative control does a writer retain over his/her work once it morphs from paper to production? Was this a point of contention during negotiations?
Yes, that's exactly how the guild shop protection works.
The "professional" standard doesn't really have an analogue in the previous contract; all this new media stuff is literally unprecedented. I think it's only seemingly ballsy, because the loophole you reference is considerable.
This agreement only applies to signatories of the WGA deal (most media corporations are), so "media corporations" doesn't require a definition. There is always the danger of a new player popping up that doesn't want to become a signatory. An example of this is Fremantle, the company that makes American Idol. By not signing, they don't get access to the Guild's pool of writers, but a company like Fremantle claims not to need writers.
Separated rights refer to the remaining rights the author still has after conveying the copyright to the producer. If a writer's creation is re-purposed then the writer generally gets compensated. For example, the creators of "Cheers" got compensated for the use of the character Frasier on "Frasier." This deal does give us separated rights on made for new media programs. However, I'm not sure if a project has to first fall under jurisdiction in order to have those protections. My suspicion is no - so let's say a green writer creates a program that is then re-purposed to be a megahit on TV or film. That writer may not be protected for that deal, even if the creation of it eventually made him become a guild member (via the guild shop provision). One possible protection against this is that the budget condition for jurisdiction can work retroactively, since you don't always know the budget in advance. This may not be of too much help, though, based on what we know about the YouTube aesthetic so far - the most popular ideas are the simplest ones.
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